Effect of Learning Goal Orientation on Leadership Development (original) (raw)
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Best-selling authors, consultants, and leadership researchers agree that confidence is integral to leader success (Chemers, Watson, & May, 2000). Popular leadership books such as Larina Kase's (2008) The Confident Leader and Bobb Biehl's (1989) Increasing Your Leadership Confidence highlight interest in the topic and imply that confidence can be learned. Ninety percent of TrainingIndustry.com's "Top 20 Companies for Leadership Training" mention increased confidence as an outcome of leader development. Likewise, in academia, theorists argue that increased leader efficacy is one of the core outcomes of leader development training (Day & Sin, 2011; Lester, Hannah, Harms, Vogelgesang, & Avolio, 2011) because efficacy provides the foundation for all other aspects of agency and is an essential component of leader emergence and effectiveness (Bandura, 2007; Murphy, 1992; Smith & Foti, 1998). Unlike other types of training that focus more heavily on the acquisition of specific skills or knowledge, leader development is primarily concerned with increasing leader self-awareness, identity, and efficacy. It is generally assumed that sending leaders to development will result in increased leader efficacy because training provides individuals with the opportunity to acquire skills and achieve success (Bandura, 1986, 1997). However, there is wide variation in the extent to which individuals benefit from leader development and many individuals are worse off following a developmental experience than they were before the experience (Day & Sin, 2011). The current study addresses this paradox of when and why some individuals benefit from leader development, while others seem to suffer declines in their leader efficacy following a developmental experience. Theoretical work on readiness for leader development suggests that having a mastery goal orientation may determine whether one benefits from a development interven
Are We Making Progress? Assessing Goal-Directed Behaviors in Leadership Development Programs
Frontiers in Psychology
Leadership development programs increasingly help participants engage in their career transitions. Therefore, these programs lead participants to establish not only development goals, which usually involve the improvement of a specific leadership competency, but also goals that relate to career advancement or to achieving a more general life aspiration. Assessing goal attainment, as a measure of program impact, may take years as goals vary greatly in terms of nature, timeframe, and domain. The purpose of this study was to overcome this challenge by providing a measure of goal progress as a necessary antecedent of goal attainment, and which we operationalize through a general scale of goal-directed behaviors. Subject-matter experts assessed the content validity of the measure. Factor analysis, using three samples, revealed four dimensions identified as Sharing Information, Seeking Information, Revising the Plan, and Enacting the Plan. This new scale allows data collection as early as a few months after setting the goals, which can provide practitioners with an earlier indication of program impact and facilitate future academic studies in this field.
Leadership development: The current state and future expectations
Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 2008
This article discusses the common themes in this special issue of Consulting Psychology Journal on "Leadership Development" and summarizes some of the current issues in leadership development. A particular focus is on using an integrated model or framework to guide leadership development efforts. Emphasis is also placed on assessment of leadership development programs. Finally, expectations for future research and practice are discussed.
Path-goal leadership theory: The long and winding road
The Leadership Quarterly, 1996
Over 20 years have passed since Robert J. House published his classic article, "A Path-Goal Theory of Leader Effectiveness" in Administrative Science Quarterly (197 1). Based on the work of Georgopolous, Mahoney, and Jones (1957) and the doctoral dissertation and earlier work of Evans (1968, 1970), House's path-goal conceptualization of leadership used Vroom's (1964) expectancy theory of motivation to identify the effects of leader behavior on subordinate outcome variables. An obvious question that comes to mind almost 2-l/2 decades later is: Where has such a road taken those of us in the leadership field? The present paper explores this issue by very briefly describing the theory (for more detail, see House, 1971; House & Dessler, 1974; House & Mitchell, 1974), summarizing the empirical evidence and discussing concerns about the future direction of path-goal leadership research.