An Integrative Approach to Leader Development

Connecting Adult Development, Identity, and Expertise

David V. Day, Michelle M. Harrison, Stanley M. Halpin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415964623
• eBook ISBN: 9781136675928
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

This book is a beginning, a first step, in taking leader development in organizations beyond conventional wisdom toward a scientifically sound research-based set of principles and practices. The authors looked beyond their own academic disciplines to bring to bear accumulated wisdom from researchers who have developed well-established and accepted

Section

1

Overview and Purpose

Chapter

1

Introduction

The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership.

—Harvey S. Firestone (Founder, Firestone Tire & Rubber Co.)

Leader development is arguably the most important single program of any army.

—Lieutenant General (ret.) Frederic J. Brown, U.S. Army (2003, p. 68)

Regardless of the equipment, materiel, logistics, or the organization and tactics, successful armies depend on well-trained soldiers and highly developed leaders. Although it has been said that armies fight on their stomachs, which emphasizes the importance of logistical support, armies win through the leadership that creates and implements effective responses to the spectrum of conventional and nonconventional threats (e.g., terrorism) faced around the world. Effective leadership begins with leader development. The Army’s leader development system is emphasized by many senior leaders as a critical component in its ability to effectively serve the nation. But what do we really know about the process of leader development? Army doctrine speaks of a progressive and sequential growth process. But does this provide a meaningful framework for Army leader development? Is it consistent with what is known about adult development, skill acquisition, and other related bodies of research?

The goal of this book is to present an integrative theory of leader development. Although this theory was developed with the U.S. Army in mind, we believe that the basic propositions and hypotheses generated by this theory-building process are relevant for understanding and improving leader development in other contexts. The Army is a very large organization with more than 1 million soldiers, more than half serving in the National Guard and Reserve, and its presence can be found in 120 countries around the world. The Army also has a unique and serious mission of protecting and defending the United States and its territories. But the nuances of that mission can run the gamut from peacekeeping and humanitarian operations to counter-insurgencies and active combat situations. Upholding this mission is becoming an increasingly complex endeavor. The Army is also unique in that few nonmilitary organizations would expect its employees to sacrifice their lives or take others’ lives as part of their jobs. Another interesting aspect of the Army is that it does not hire from the outside, so there is no make/buy decision when it comes to its leaders. Relying completely on internal hires is unusual but not unheard of in the corporate world. For example, the pharmaceutical company Pfizer does not hire managers from the outside either. Over the last 30 years (as of 1997) every one of their research directors has come up through the ranks (Steere, 1997).

Your organization may not have the same demographics or mission as the Army, but we believe the central points from this integrative theory apply to leader development across a wide spectrum of organizations. In a recent study of global human capital issues (IBM Global Business Services, 2008), companies cited a lack of leadership capability as one of their top workforce challenges. Over 75 percent of companies indicated that building leadership talent is a significant challenge, and that is especially the case for companies in the Asia Pacific region (88% indicated that this is a significant challenge). Furthermore, as noted in the opening quote from Harvey S. Firestone, the growth and development of people is the epitome of leadership. We take the position that leadership development is a journey encompassing the entire adult lifespan. To best understand and intervene on leader development it is important to have a sound foundation in human development and especially adult development. The present theory identifies and integrates the most relevant aspects of developmental theory as it applies to leader development.

Knowledge that speaks to the process of human development but has not been systematically or rigorously linked to the process of leader development has been accumulated in many scholarly disciplines. In addressing the present knowledge gap, our leader development theory integrates knowledge and theoretical perspectives from a number of different disciplines dealing with sources of individual differences in human behavior that are relevant to the development of leaders—especially cognitive, social, developmental, and organizational psychology. An integrative approach is essential because the human organism is a complex system that cannot be understood adequately by looking at only one part of an interdependent system. A developmental theory of complex leadership skills and competencies cannot be adequately based on any one particular discipline or theoretical perspective, regardless of whether it is a leadership theory, a developmental theory, a cognitive skills theory, or a social identity theory. All of these various perspectives help to inform the leader development process; however, no single approach can address the full complexity and richness of the leader development process. As a result, our approach is eclectic in nature, but falls generally within the broad field of psychology.

There have been previous attempts at developing an integrative theory of leadership, drawing together many different leadership theories under one conceptual umbrella (e.g., Chemers, 1997, 2000). But there do not appear to be any recognized attempts at an integrative theory of leader development (Avolio, 2007). There may be good reason for this gap in the literature because the implications associated with the word “development” are far-reaching. Perhaps most important is the recognition of time. Development occurs over time, and in the case of leader development in the U.S. Army, over the course of an entire professional career or perhaps even the majority of the adult lifespan. Development also involves change, which has had historically its own particular research difficulties (Cronbach & Furby, 1971; Day and Lance, 2004).

In particular, development involves growth of some sort—a qualitative or quantitative change in state. Putting these two parameters together yields the even trickier notion of change over time that includes topics such as personal trajectories, growth modeling, lag times, end states, and a whole host of other related topics. For all of these reasons associated with addressing time, change, and change over time, an integrative theory of leader development has to be as much about development as leadership. Rather than spending a great deal of effort trying to identify just what leadership is, our approach adopts a perspective that is grounded in Army doctrine and manifested in leadership competencies. A good deal of work has been dedicated to defining leadership and delineating effective leadership, yet little attention has been dedicated to its development. So in many respects, this integrative theory is more about development than it is about the specifics of effective leadership. In that spirit we have given more attention to the questions of how and why leader development processes unfold than to the question of what in terms of the specific content of leadership. The latter has already received a great deal of attention in both scholarly literature and the popular press.

A question that presents itself immediately concerns whether there is a need for an integrative theory of leader development. Why is such a theory needed at all? The answer, like leadership itself, is multifaceted. The first part is practical. As discussed in more detail in the next chapter, there is a pressing need to accelerate leader development in the Army as well as in most other types of organizations. As noted by a Personnel Director of a government agency, “Fifty percent of our leadership positions across the organization could be vacated in the next five years, so the need to build leaders and pass knowledge on is consistent across the organization” (IBM Global Business Services, 2008, p. 20).

Additional challenges stretch the current levels of leadership capability in the Army. Specifically, there is an increase of task migration from higher echelon to lower echelon leaders (Brown, 2003; Bartone, Snook, Forsythe, Lewis, & Bullis, 2007). For example, what might have been expected as a typical task of a lieutenant colonel a decade or so ago may now be performed by a major or even a captain. What was previously done by a captain might now be taken on at times by those who might not even be in the commissioned officer ranks. We believe that similar task migration is occurring in other disciplines partly as a function of the trend toward removing layers of organizational hierarchy and flattening organizational structures. It is also generally the case that leaders in all types of organizations are being exposed to increasingly novel and complex challenges. As their attention is drawn to these new challenges, those leaders in subordinate positions need to take responsibility for the rest of the work that was previously taken on by the higher level leaders. As a result, role expectations are expanded and heightened across all organizational levels.

This ongoing task migration from upper-to lower-echelon leaders requires greater leader competence at much lower leader echelons than previously needed. Part of the impetus behind task migration is the overarching strategic imperative of the Army to be as flexible and adaptive as possible “to meet the threats across the spectrum of conflict, from global war to isolated instances of asymmetric terrorism” (Brown, 2002, p. 10). An added impetus comes from proposals to take better advantage of developing computer-based networked information systems within military operations (Alberts, Garstka, & Stein, 1999; Alberts & Hayes, 2003). As the following quote indicates, the future possibility of network-centric (i.e., edge) organizations has wide-ranging leadership implications given the proposed need to self-synchronize these networks:

… the leader [needed] for a particular task at a particular time (and place) emerges. Exactly who “takes charge” will differ as a function of the characteristics of the individuals and the situation … empowered individuals and organizations that constitute an edge organization have a greater “bandwidth” for action than their unempowered counterparts in traditional hierarchies. (Alberts & Hayes, 2003, pp. 184–185)

Not addressed in their discussion is the implicit assumption that the “empowered individuals” who emerge as leaders will be capable of successfully executing this leadership role. What development paths should be set down for the next generation of leaders who will function effectively in such an organization?

A well-developed theory can help answer this type of design question by describing proposed mechanisms—call them levers or forces— that drive the leader development process. These may take the form of relevant individual differences, general developmental processes, or other key aspects of leader development. By systematically investing research resources in examining and empirically testing these developmental forces, the expected result is a set of scientifically supported findings that can be implemented in practice to accelerate the leader development process. It is for reasons such as this that the eminent social psychologist Kurt Lewin noted that “nothing is as practical as a good theory” (1945, p. 129).

In a similar vein, in his classic discussion of the role of theory in psychological research, Melvin Marx provides a quote from E. G. Boring:

I remember how a professor of genetics many years ago showed me published drawings of cell nuclei before and after the discovery and description of chromosomes. Chromosomes kept showing up in the later drawings, not in the earlier. In other words, microscopes do not reveal concepts until the concepts have been invented. (Boring, 1953, as cited in Marx 1965, p. 6).

An integrated theory of leadership development will not provide a new microscope for examining leadership behavior; however, it will provide a clearer and more accurate view as we examine the feasibility of relevant organizational concepts and evaluate the possible utility of their implementation.

Another reason for the need for theory is to serve as a guide to where to devote research investments. As in most domains, resources available for conducting scientific research on the topic of leader development are finite. A pertinent question thus becomes where should the investments of these limited research resources be made? The answer to this question should be guided by theory or some other rational overarching strategy. Otherwise, there is the risk of trying to make sense of myriad findings across any number of independent studies that have little apparent theoretical connection. A cumulative effect of theory-based research findings has much greater practical potential than a disparate set of seemingly unrelated results. In short, theory helps to focus research efforts and provides for ways of integrating findings across studies. The goal of science is to understand, predict, and control phenomena of interest. Theory is the frame or skeleton on which empirical science is hung. It provides the meaning for interpreting the results of scientific research.

W. Edwards Deming (the father of the quality movement in the U.S.) was fond of saying that experience without theory teaches nothing. Theory provides the overarching sensemaking frame for experience (broadly defined as any empirical fact). Without a theoretical framework to connect and integrate experiences there is no sensemaking, and thus there can be no learning. Theories are the structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. As another great American—Homer Simpson—put it: “Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that’s remotely true.” We need theories to put facts into context so that they can be sensibly interpreted and to help protect us from repeatedly “proving” things that are not remotely true.

Although it may be tempting to use the terms framework, model, and theory interchangeably, to do so would be inaccurate. These terms range from low to high on a continuum of scientific rigor. We have the audacity to call our contribution a theory of leader development with full realization that using the term theory with an academic audience is like waving the proverbial red flag in front of a bull. It is just asking for trouble. Theory holds a very special place in the hearts and heads of academics. We hope that you can reserve judgment for the time being as we try to distinguish between these various concepts and explain why we believe that our approach is one of building theory, or theorizing, as Karl Weick (1995b) said.

At the simplest level, frameworks can take the form of taxonomic lists of variables or constructs. The more intermediate term “models” offers some speculation on the relationships among variables or constructs. But it is theories that are the most formal and rigorous of these concepts because their value resides in the precision of predictions (propositions and hypotheses) that serve as their foundation. One other distinction...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Authors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Section 1: Overview and Purpose
• Section 2: Perspectives from Adult Development Literature
• Section 3: Fundamental Aspects of Adult Development
• Section 4: Learning-Based Approaches to Leadership
• Section 5: Integrative Theory of Leader Development
• Section 6: Future Directions
• References
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Subject Index
• Author Index