abstract: ABSTRACT This action research case study explored the ways participation in a teacher leader learning community contributed to the identity development of teacher leaders at the Canajoharie Central School District. The goal of the study was to identify how a teacher leader learning community supported the identity of teacher leaders in their work. This action research study used a case study methodology and included qualitative and quantitative data collection. Purposive sampling identified six participants for the study. The qualitative data collection included initial and final one-on-one semi-structured interviews, meeting observation notes, research journal entries and peer interaction logs. Quantitative data were gathered using pre- and post- innovation surveys. Participants completed a pre-innovation survey and initial interview prior to the start of the innovation. Structured teacher leader learning community meetings were conducted over a four-month period of time in the Fall of 2018. Study participants led the design of collaborative group norms and meeting protocols. Participants facilitated the teacher leader learning community meetings. At the conclusion of the study period participants completed a post-innovation survey and final interview. Meeting observation notes, research journal entries and peer interaction log data were collected during the study period. Analysis of the quantitative and qualitative data of this study suggests that teacher leader identity is supported by participation in a structured teacher leader learning community. Teacher leaders benefitted from a formal structure through which to share successes, problem-solve situations and continue growth as leaders. The findings also suggest that meeting norms and protocols benefit the work of the teacher leaders in the learning community. These findings are consistent with previous research studies which indicate that teacher leaders need opportunities to come together and network to sustain their work. The findings from this action research study may assist other school districts in supporting teacher leaders in their local context. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Educational Leadership and Policy Studies 2016

Organisations depend on strong and competent leaders for their sustainability, profitability and competitiveness. Therefore organisations have an extremely strong focus on development, and especially on leader development. Mentoring has been recognised as a developmental tool (Truter, 2008, p.61) and is therefore employed by many organisations to foster such development. The primary aim of this study is to determine whether and to what effect, mentoring can be used to foster leader development in a business context. The research is of a qualitative, phenomenological nature and enquires into the perceptions, personal experiences and knowledge of people who have been exposed to mentoring and leader development, in order to understand how mentoring has played a role in the development of their leadership. In-depth interviews were conducted with a sample of six participants in order to collect the required data; and South African and international literature was consulted in order to interpret the interview data accurately in terms of the primary aim of the study. The study revealed the following results amongst others: <ul> <li> There is a connection between mentoring and leader development and mentoring can be used to develop leaders.</li> <li> Leader development is not possible in the absence of mentoring.</li> <li> Mentoring can contribute to leader development by focussing on a person’s development and teaching that person to become a good or a better leader.</li> <li> Mentoring has the ability to positively impact or benefit leader development.</li> <li> Mentoring has the ability to develop a person’s leadership capability and competence (i.e. his/her ability to be a leader).</li> <li> Mentoring can be used as a tool to develop effective leaders.</li> </ul> / Dissertation (MCom)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Human Resource Management / unrestricted

Members of Generation Y in the training and development industry will be required to assume leadership roles as Baby Boomers retire, yet little empirical research exists regarding how best to prepare them for leadership. The purpose of this study was to examine differences in leader developmental readiness between generational cohorts in the training industry, specifically Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Generation Y. Leader developmental readiness provided a definition of developmental readiness for leaders using the five constructs (learning goal orientation, developmental efficacy, self-awareness, leader complexity, and metacognitive ability). A volunteer sample was compiled from members of the ASTD National LinkedIN group (n = 636). Results were analyzed using structured means analysis with maximum likelihood (ML) estimation. Generational cohorts demonstrated differences in leader developmental readiness. Baby Boomers indicated statistically and practically higher metacognitive ability and developmental efficacy than Generation Y. Results demonstrated statistically and practically higher leader complexity in Generation Y and both Generation X and Baby Boomers. These results should inform leader development practitioners as they continue to use existing methods in preparing the different generations for leader development interventions while pointing to possible needs to increase the metacognitive ability and developmental efficacy in Generation Y and ensure accurate perception of leader complexity in those individuals. Further research would be helpful to confirm or refute findings and expand on the target population for enhanced generalizability.

<p>This dissertation is about leader development. It focuses on similarities and differences between contents in different in-house leader development programs, and on how these programs are organized. The purpose is to contribute knowledge about leader development in Swedish working life, by describing and analyzing different organizations’ ways of doing leader development from a context-actor perspective. Very little research has been undertaken about leader development from a comparative perspective, although leader development is a question of current interest, and can be viewed as a fashion now in the beginning of the 21st century. The context-actor perspective that I use as theoretical point of departure is influenced partly by Bhaskar’s transformational model of social activity, partly by institutional theory and the notion of isomorphic processes, containing powers in the context of the organization in combination with local actors. An educational culture is seen as a single organization’s specific way to manage leader development. The dissertation is chiefly based on a case study of six organizations’ leader development. I have interviewed 13 persons that had the responsibility for creating, carrying out and developing leader development efforts in these organizations. I also studied different documents from these organizations, and observed when actors from one of the organizations met their colleagues from similar organizations for discussions concerning leader development. The analysis of the data has had a distinct feature of abduction, and I used eight constructed aspects and 131 variables when comparing the organizations. My results suggest that the organizations’ educational cultures had both overarching similarities and considerable differences. The deeper I probed into the ways in which the organizations did leader development, the more specific details I found. Most of the dissimilarities that appeared in the comparison turned out to be exclusive to specific organizations rather then to groups of organizations. The organizational level appeared as the most important context for shaping the specific characteristic of the different leader development programs. Likewise, the branch level and national level seem to play a central role, but the sector level turned out to be the context with the least importance for the organizations’ ways of doing leader development. For the national level it is possible to argue that the similarities the organizations showed may constitute an example of the spirit of the times and everyday talk about leader development that can be found in Swedishworking life. The actors turned out to be part of the organizations’ human resources, and they were not seldom human resource managers and women. It was above all these actors that had the responsibility for and organized the leader development. The interplay between the actors and the context can be described in terms of the actors as creators of culture and bearers of culture respectively. There is consequently a potential for both transformation and reproduction as a result of the interplay between the powers that contexts and actors constitute. From the actors’ statements it is obvious that they saw themselves as active actors. Overall, the research indicates that it is reasonable to describe an organization’s educational culture as a result of how the actors have interacted with different contexts. The existence of certain leader development ideals in Swedish working life is not necessarily a determining factor for how a single actor chooses to work with the leader development in a certain organization, though it depends on the latter.</p>

This dissertation is about leader development. It focuses on similarities and differences between contents in different in-house leader development programs, and on how these programs are organized. The purpose is to contribute knowledge about leader development in Swedish working life, by describing and analyzing different organizations’ ways of doing leader development from a context-actor perspective. Very little research has been undertaken about leader development from a comparative perspective, although leader development is a question of current interest, and can be viewed as a fashion now in the beginning of the 21st century. The context-actor perspective that I use as theoretical point of departure is influenced partly by Bhaskar’s transformational model of social activity, partly by institutional theory and the notion of isomorphic processes, containing powers in the context of the organization in combination with local actors. An educational culture is seen as a single organization’s specific way to manage leader development. The dissertation is chiefly based on a case study of six organizations’ leader development. I have interviewed 13 persons that had the responsibility for creating, carrying out and developing leader development efforts in these organizations. I also studied different documents from these organizations, and observed when actors from one of the organizations met their colleagues from similar organizations for discussions concerning leader development. The analysis of the data has had a distinct feature of abduction, and I used eight constructed aspects and 131 variables when comparing the organizations. My results suggest that the organizations’ educational cultures had both overarching similarities and considerable differences. The deeper I probed into the ways in which the organizations did leader development, the more specific details I found. Most of the dissimilarities that appeared in the comparison turned out to be exclusive to specific organizations rather then to groups of organizations. The organizational level appeared as the most important context for shaping the specific characteristic of the different leader development programs. Likewise, the branch level and national level seem to play a central role, but the sector level turned out to be the context with the least importance for the organizations’ ways of doing leader development. For the national level it is possible to argue that the similarities the organizations showed may constitute an example of the spirit of the times and everyday talk about leader development that can be found in Swedishworking life. The actors turned out to be part of the organizations’ human resources, and they were not seldom human resource managers and women. It was above all these actors that had the responsibility for and organized the leader development. The interplay between the actors and the context can be described in terms of the actors as creators of culture and bearers of culture respectively. There is consequently a potential for both transformation and reproduction as a result of the interplay between the powers that contexts and actors constitute. From the actors’ statements it is obvious that they saw themselves as active actors. Overall, the research indicates that it is reasonable to describe an organization’s educational culture as a result of how the actors have interacted with different contexts. The existence of certain leader development ideals in Swedish working life is not necessarily a determining factor for how a single actor chooses to work with the leader development in a certain organization, though it depends on the latter.

Changes in the workplace and impending shortages of organizational leaders make it imperative that HRD professionals develop a better understanding of the developmental processes of emergent leaders entering the workplace. While leader development research within the field of HRD has typically focused on established workers, the research in this study assumes a lifespan approach to leader development. This study contributes to the development of the field by examining the leadership experiences of 18 to 20 year olds who were leaders of organizations in high school and how these experiences shaped the identities of these emergent leaders. Themes that emerged related to their experiences included their relationships with others, how they led by example, the development of authentic leadership qualities, and their motivation to lead in new venues. Implications for practice and future research are identified.

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Although there are several robust leader development programs in the U.S. Army, no standardized access to leader development is provided to all service members at the start of their career. Forty-four percent of the Department of Defense (DoD) active duty personnel are 25 years of age or less. Despite this known experience gap, there is a shortfall in policy that ensures standardized access to leader development during this foundational period. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore the experiences of service members who participated in the United States Army Pacific's Regional Leader Development Program-Pacific (RLDP-P) to inform DoD policy on leader development. The RLDP-P and its unique participant composition provided the conceptual framework and transformational leadership provided the theoretical framework for this study. Semistructured interviews of 16 RLDP-P participants were used to identify scalable and feasible elements of the program that positively impacted the service members' professional goals. Data were analyzed using inductive coding to identify the study's major themes. This study's central research question addressed the RLDP-P's impact on the participants' professional goals. The findings revealed the program inspired participants to create or refine their professional goals, increased their desire for self-development, and motivated them to develop others. Policy recommendations to the DoD for future leader development programs include diversity of mentor engagements in a small group environment and exposure to professional broadening opportunities. These findings will inform future DoD policy on standardized access to leader development from the start of service members' careers.

The cornerstone of transformational leadership is vision. For our school leaders to act as more than middle managers, they have to foster a school community's vision - cultivate the school community's direction and purpose. This qualitative study uses semi-structured interviews with school leaders and following focus groups with their teachers to understand better how principals develop and instantiate their vision and how this vision is perceived to have manifested by the school community. This study was designed to answer the questions of (1) do principals have a clearly defined personal vision for the schools they serve, and in what ways do they enact their vision?, (2) what professional and training experiences contribute to how a principal develops a vision for a school?, (3) what the relationship between the articulated vision and the culture of the school? The four themes that emerged from this study were that ( 1 ) principals have guiding statements that serve the same purpose as a formal vision that gives them and their school communities direction for the work, (2) principals primarily invest their teams in a shared vision through a visioning process, (3) principals most cited avenue for vision development was through working with others, and (4) principals whose articulated vision most aligned with the culture of the school were successfully able to operationalize the vision. The recommendations and implications for all stakeholders from this research are that (1) principals are trained taught how to develop guiding statements, (2) principals are taught how to invest others in a shared vision, (3) the importance of mentor matching and principal reflection in the principal training and development process, and (4) principals are taught how to operationalize their vision through ongoing coaching and support. / Educational Administration

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