Leadership Development Programs in Organizations: New Dimensions, Impact and Evaluation

We want to identify how the concept of leadership has evolved in recent years, the implications of that evolution for managers’ work, and the impact of leadership development programs on the lives of organizations and their employees. We will describe the main sources of evaluation of the effectiveness of these programs. We will focus on the learning transfer process from the classroom to the companies and people in the real world. Leading change in organizations entails changing people’s behaviours and, in order to do that, appropriate metrics and rewarding mechanisms need to be developed.

Leadership development interventions will be analysed and their forms of assessment such as: interviews, feedback forms, in-depth consultation. Participants in those programs draw very interesting conclusions contrasting their newly acquired knowledge with their previous first hand life experiences. Implications for business schools, universities and learning institutions in general are also to be considered, particularly with respect to their role as change agents and mobilizers of knowledge.

We will describe the new leadership dimensions and how they affect the roles and responsibilities of those holding a leadership position. Is there a change in the role and purpose of business leaders? What are the main characteristics of that change? Does this change extend beyond business boundaries? What are the effects of this change for people in organizations? We will further analyse concepts such as Community and Collective Leadership, Distributed and Shared Leadership, and others closely related to them: corporate social responsibility, coaching, relational management, motivation, communication, empathy and personal connection, commitment, engagement, career development, work/life balance.

Our investigation will be based upon the last five years’ published research from Ashridge Business School, a very well recognized institution for translating theoretical organizational knowledge into best practices in organizations.