International Journal of Organizational Leadership

This study aims to introduce Leadership Development Assessment Center (LDAC) as a systematic approach for training and developing leadership behavioral competencies of organizational leaders. The four crucial elements of LDAC including needs assessment, design, implementation, and evaluating the effectiveness are presented and discussed. A literature review was performed to identify, define, and classify the theoretical concepts and implementation processes of LDAC. Three databases of Science Direct, PubMed, and Google Scholar were used to collect data over the past two decades. LDAC flexibly explores the real needs of leaders in their current position, contributes to the content of training programs based on the needs, and provides tractable and visible measures to assess and develop the leadership behavioral competencies in leaders. Although LDAC is a costly and time-consuming model that requires more studies to justify its wide application, the advantages of LDAC can urge organizational developers to apply it. As an advantage, LDAC provides the main foundation to assess and develop leadership behavioral competencies through applying a more feasible and systematic procedure that fosters behaviorally competent leaders.

The current research study seeks to explore leaders’ processes of identity making within a higher education context as well as identify salient features of a higher education context that can best support leadership development. It is framed with the premise that cultivating one’s professional identity as a leader is a developmental process that is integrally connected to the sociocultural context. Different organizational contexts vary in terms of the nature and scope of what they can offer leaders as they shape their professional identities. The participants were seven higher education administrators, ranging from assistant deans to deans, from four public midwestern universities. A grounded theory methodological approach was used through individual interviews with each participant to explore the following two research questions: 1) What are the core elements that higher education leaders consider to be central to their senses of leadership identity? and 2) What do higher education leaders believe are the qualities of an organizational context that stimulate and support identity work and professional development related to leadership? The study’s findings revealed that supporting and advocating for others, keeping core values and identity at the center of one’s work, and embracing vulnerability were key themes in the interviews. Implications for the professional development and training of leaders in higher education are discussed.

In today’s fast-paced business world, where there is a need to develop divergent thinking and a wider range of skills, organizations seek original ways to be successful. Accordingly, leadership development has seen several uncommon approaches. Equine-assisted learning programs which involve innovative, underutilized, and motivating techniques and strategies, provide a dynamic process of building and developing leadership skills through horse-human interactions. In this paper, after the history of horse-human relationships and interactions are examined, a literature review is conducted on developing research and using equine-assisted leadership development programs. Although the extant research shows that equine-assisted leadership development programs promote skills critical to being an influential leader, the present paper provides an insight into equine-assisted experiential learning on leadership development, provides an overview on what happens in a typical equine-assisted experiential learning session, and suggests practical implications for researchers and organizations.

Increasingly, leadership development programs are being challenged to produce robust
evidence of their impact on leadership competencies of participants in South Africa. If used
properly, portfolio assessment of one`s own leadership development journey has the potential
to depict not just learning achievement, but also leadership growth and development. A
multinational corporation in South Africa outsourced to a business school a program to
develop leadership of selected 15 high-performing employees who were in transition to junior
management. To the end of this study, qualitative research was conducted to get a complex
and detailed understanding of how these participants perceived and self-assessed their own
development of a self-selected set of leadership competencies over a period of time using
portfolios. As the number was small, all the 15 personal and professional development
portfolios were collected and analyzed using open coding and constant comparison techniques to induce themes. Evidence in the portfolios showed that while emergent junior talents were able to identify specifically the leadership competencies they were developing, they actually had difficulties to capture strong, relevant, and dynamic pathways of how their leadership competencies evolved and developed over time. More importantly, evidence in the portfolio revealed that the internal reward system was less supportive as it valued individual
achievement of own performance target even at the expense of supporting others to develop
their leadership. The lack of support from mentors and colleagues stifled leadership
development of participants. This paper argues that it is vitally important that an organizations
own systems are integrated and coherent enough not to inadvertently impede leadership
development efforts.