Community colleges need a tool capable of auditing current leadership and managerial practices. An audit of leadership and managerial practices can provide a constructive, objective, and measurable assessment of the organization's current practices. After reviewing the Mental Measurement Yearbook, no comprehensive instrument developed to audit the community college's leadership and managerial practices was found. Consequently, the L-MAQ was an instrument that could meet the unmet need of auditing leadership and managerial practices in the community college so that areas needing improvement can be targeted for professional development. The purpose of this study was to prepare the L-MAQ for use and to estimate the reliability and validity of the L-MAQ for community colleges. To accomplish the stated purpose of this study, the following questions were addressed. How reliable is the L-MAQ in auditing the presence of desirable leadership and managerial practices of administrative units within the community college? Can construct validity be demonstrated for the L-MAQ? Is the L-MAQ useful in auditing leadership and managerial practices of the various administrative units within the community college?

Four community colleges participated in the study (two from the Southern accrediting region and two from the North Central accrediting region) for a total of 122 responses and a response rate of 19%. The L-MAQ demonstrated very reliable subscales; in fact, all subscales scored above a value of 0.850. Estimates of construct validity were derived for the L-MAQ through principal component analysis. When the researcher performed principal component analysis, the original 103 statements on the L-MAQ were reduced to 14-factors. This means that the researcher would not need to include all 103 statements on the L-MAQ since many of the statements within each subscale measured the same concept. The results of the analysis showed that a small number of factors explained most of the variance while the rest of the factors explained a relatively small percent of the variance. For the sample surveyed for this study, a majority of the respondents agreed that the L-MAQ was useful in auditing leadership and managerial skills. Over two-thirds of the respondents agreed that the L-MAQ was a useful instrument for auditing managerial and leadership skills.