Accelerating Leadership Development: An evidence-based perspective

Leadership development has become one of the top priorities for organizations today. However, despite the popularity and multiplication of leadership development programs being offered, more research is still needed to examine these developmental efforts. This dissertation first unpacks the notion of program effectiveness and broad

Influencing diversity beliefs through a personal testimonial, promotion-focused approach

Although researchers have highlighted the importance of diversity beliefs (i.e., team members' perceived value of diversity) for the elaboration of information in teams, little attention has been paid to whether and how diversity beliefs can be shaped. Drawing on theory and research on team diversity beliefs, we propose that diversity beliefs are more effectively influenced by interventions using a promotion (compared with a prevention) focus toward diversity and personal testimonial (compared with factual) knowledge. Results from an experiment conducted with 175 teams revealed that both a promotion focus and personal testimonial knowledge independently contributed to more positive diversity beliefs and consequently increased team elaboration of task-relevant information as well as integration of different perspectives. Our results reveal key factors that can influence diversity beliefs and underscore the pivotal role of diversity beliefs in improving the extent to which team members elaborate information and integrate diverse perspectives

Beyond Developing Leaders::Toward a Multi-Narrative Understanding of the Value of Leadership Development Programs

Leadership development programs in organizations are often criticized for lacking demonstrated effectiveness, yet they continue to garner popularity and further investment. In this study, we examine alternative rationales and criteria people use to justify leadership development programs, going well beyond the espoused goal of developing more effective leaders. We build on prior literature on leadership development that has pointed to the need to develop a broader view of the value and uses of leadership development programs. We conducted two qualitative studies: (a) a focus group pilot study with business school leadership center directors, and (b) a main study with in-depth interviews with stakeholders involved with leadership development across eight organizations. Our analysis identified four narratives (i.e., empiricist, believer, cynic, and pragmatist), each of which suggests distinct understandings of the function of leadership development in organizations. We discuss how these findings highlight the diversity in logic that justifies the use of various forms of leadership development, thus contributing to the current thinking on how leadership development programs can be designed to meet the needs and expectations of different stakeholders in organizations

Walking our evidence-based talk: The case of leadership development in business schools

Academics have lamented that practitioners do not always adopt scientific evidence in practice, yet while academics preach evidence-based management (EBM), they do not always practice it. This paper extends prior literature on difficulties to engage in EBM with insights from behavioral integrity (i.e., the study of what makes individuals and collectives walk their talk). We focus on leader development, widely used but often critiqued for lacking evidence. Analyzing 60 interviews with academic directors of leadership centers at top business schools, we find that the selection of programs does not always align with scientific recommendations nor do schools always engage in high-quality program evaluation. Respondents further indicated a wide variety of challenges that help explain the disconnect between business schools claiming A but practicing B. Behavioral Integrity theory would argue these difficulties are rooted in the lack of an individually owned and collectively endorsed identity, an identity of an evidence-based leader developer (EBLD). A closer inspection of our data confirmed that the lack of a clear and salient EBLD identity makes it difficult for academics to walk their evidence-based leader development talk. We discuss how these findings can help facilitate more evidence-based leader development in an academic context