Leadership theory

Evidence-based leadership development

Whilst it has been argued that the leadership and management frameworks presented in Section 5 may suffer from an over-emphasis on the individual leader, they may also suffer from a lack of research basis. For many of the frameworks little, if no information, was available on how they were developed and it seems likely that no detailed research was conducted. Alan Hooper reported that following his research with companies to develop the “transcendent leadership” competencies he found the majority of corporate leadership frameworks to be loosely based on notions of the company culture, guidance of the CEO and “what seems to be acceptable around here”.

Even for those frameworks where research has been performed, there are some concerning methodological omissions. For example, the NHS Leadership Framework was developed following interviews with 150 Chief Executives yet is being used to direct leadership development at all levels within the organisation (Wood and Gosling, 2003).

Such a lack of empirical grounding is concerning for a number of reasons. Firstly, there is a danger that the qualities identified have little bearing on the effectiveness of leadership in the organisation. Secondly, there is a danger of forming a clique, whereby people are selected into leadership positions because of their similarity to existing leaders, thus neglecting those individuals who don’t fit this mould and forming leadership “blind spots”. And thirdly, a lack of concern over research at this stage is frequently translated into a lack of concern for the evaluation of leadership development activities.

Research is increasingly stressing the necessity of building evaluation structures into leadership and management development (Perren and Burgoyne, 2001; Rodgers et al, 2003; etc.). Huge spending is made on this type of activity yet to most organisations this remains a leap of faith. It may be a difficult task to evaluate beyond immediate post-course reactions (“happy sheets”) but the ability to identify whether such activities are leading to behavioural, attitudinal and organisational changes is a major source of competitive advantage. It not only enables the improvement of existing provision and identification of future provision but also an appreciation of the wider-scale impact of the intervention. Multi-stakeholder evaluation, for example, explores the aspirations and experiences of diverse stakeholder group and may well reveal that activities beneficial for one (e.g. participants) may have a negative effect on others (e.g. non-participants).

James and Burgoyne argue that “evaluation, like breathing, is not optional” whether done formally or informally it will always influence subsequent decisions about investments and budgets (James and Burgoyne, 2001). It would be best, therefore, that this is based on some proof rather than vague aspirations – few businesses would survive if they based business decisions on such weak logic.

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