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In a world of continuous volatility, complexity and uncertainty, the need for enhanced leadership has gained significant attention. Leadership development efforts continue to scale up but fail to produce the desired leaders. This calls for fundamental changes in the way leadership development happens.

Knowing this very well, it is ironic that organisations remain limited in their ability to develop leadership talent. Leadership models may be inadequate to prepare our leaders for the future. Effective leadership development frameworks need to take a contextual view and evolve sustainable and competitively integrated solutions to today’s leadership challenges.

This chapter explores the changing paradigms related to leadership development and highlights how contextual enablers will help practitioners better select and develop leaders.

This chapter examines the integration of curricular and extracurricular approaches to learning.

The study is performed through a case study examination of leader development programs at the United States Naval Academy.

The Naval Academy’s organizational and pedagogical approaches are grounded in the science of experiential learning and seek to integrate classroom instruction with the myriad leadership opportunities that are inherent in the design and function of the institution. Highlighting the example of the Class of 1977 Gettysburg Leadership Encounter, we show the impact on leadership development of explicitly linking curricular and extracurricular programs, and describe various tools that have proved effective reinforcing those linkages.

Students involved in this and other experiential programs and activities are better able to transfer the knowledge acquired in the classroom to the practical experience of leading their peers, and they lead with more confidence and better effectiveness. We conclude that this kind of integration has the potential not only to benefit the individuals involved but also to generate data on learning and development which could then be leveraged to enhance leader development through evidence-based analysis, feedback, and basic research.

One of the top domestic issues of concern to Americans is access to high-quality and affordable health care, and there is a growing concern about how institutions struggling to survive within this trillion-dollar industry will increase their effectiveness in the future. This chapter outlines a process of leadership development using an action learning approach in one Midwestern health care system over a period of three years. The process addresses both the development of the individual leader as well as the collective leadership capacity in an effort to sustain organizational learning and effectiveness over time. A model is presented that covers four phases or Four C's of development, which includes movement from individual Competency development, to the development of social capital through the enhancement of Connections and Creation of shared understanding, ultimately expanding Capacity for change within the organization. We also address other factors that must be taken into consideration that will either enhance or impede the concentric movement such as culture, sponsor support, and alignment of systems and structures.

Organization development is focused on implementing a planned process of positive humanistic change in organizations through the use of social science theory, action research, and data-based feedback methods. The role of personality in that change process, however, has historically been ignored or relegated to a limited set of interventions. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a conceptual overview of the linkages between personality and OD, discuss the current state of personality in the field including key trends in talent management, and offer a new multi-level framework for conceptualizing applications of personality for different types of OD efforts. The chapter concludes with implications for research and practice.

In the light of the financial crisis and the radically changed conditions in the market place, international leadership development is facing new demands. The Danish-based International Leadership Institute Mannaz has researched the new conditions in collaboration with the Institute of Executive Development in the United States.

The research, conducted in 2008 and 2009, combines, in an innovative way, quantitative and qualitative inputs, from both current and future perspectives, from some 111 senior Corporate Executives, Heads of Human Resources and of Learning and Organisational Development in large international corporations headquartered in Europe and the United States; together with the thoughts of some 50 experienced practitioners involved in executive coaching as well as in designing, developing and facilitating leadership development programmes. Also we include a section summarising the key findings from recently published research from other leadership development surveys. Conclusions reveal that the crisis has propelled a long-awaited decline of the traditional classroom-based educational approach to leadership development. Instead, effective leadership development is suggested to build on experiential learning approaches rooted in real life, real time and allowing for more immediate impact and providing for considerably higher relevance and motivation. Coaching, leaders teaching leaders, stretch assignments, action learning, peer networking, customer insights and selective use of technology are seen as important contributors to the leadership development process going forward.

The process of global leadership development remains a challenging theoretical problem in the field of global leadership. To help address this issue, we develop a theoretically grounded process model of global leadership competency development that addresses the dynamics involved in the adoption and enhancement of intercultural competencies associated with global leadership. We do this by integrating theoretical constructs associated with competency development from the adult learning and development, cognitive-behavior therapy, global leadership development, leadership development, organizational development, and social learning theory literatures. The resulting model includes testable propositions – a critical feature that existing global leadership development process models currently lack. Our chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of the model for future research and practice.

Persistent change has placed considerable pressure on organizations to keep up or fade into obscurity. Firms that remain viable, or even thrive, are staffed with decision-makers who capably steer organizations toward opportunities and away from threats. Accordingly, leadership development has never been more critical. In this chapter, the authors propose that leader development is an inherently dyadic process initiated to communicate formal and informal expectations. The authors focus on the informal component, in the form of organizational politics, as an element of leadership that is critical to employee and company success. The authors advocate that superiors represent the most salient information source for leader development, especially as it relates to political dynamics embedded in work systems. The authors discuss research associated with our conceptualization of dyadic political leader development (DPLD). Specifically, the authors develop DPLD by exploring its conceptual underpinnings as they relate to sensemaking, identity, and social learning theories. Once established, the authors provide a refined discussion of the construct, illustrating its scholarly mechanisms that better explain leader development processes and outcomes. The authors then expand research in the areas of political skill, political will, political knowledge, and political phronesis by embedding our conceptualization of DPLD into a political leadership model. The authors conclude by discussing methodological issues and avenues of future research stemming from the development of DPLD.

Academic and practitioner attention to the constructs of authentic leadership and work engagement and their implications for organizations has grown dramatically over the past decade. Consideration of the implications of these constructs for high-performance human resource practices (HPHRP) is limited, however. In this monograph, we present a conceptual model that integrates authentic leadership/followership theory with theory and research on HPHRP. Then, we apply this model to systematically consider the implications of skill-enhancing, motivation-enhancing, and opportunity-enhancing HR practices in combination with authentic leadership for authentic followership, follower work engagement, and follower performance. We contend that authentic leadership, through various influences processes, promotes HPHRP, and vice versa, to help foster enhanced work engagement. By cultivating greater work engagement, individuals are motivated to bring their best, most authentic selves to the workplace and are more likely to achieve higher levels of both well-being and performance.