This thesis concerned with understanding what makes young people as future leaders. It sets out to explore leadership development for secondary school students (12-to-18-year), focussing on what makes young leaders and how they become future leaders. The fundamental purpose of this explanatory and exploratory qualitative study was to investigate leadership development at the age of adolescence. There are three key objectives for this study: (1) to explore and investigate what contributes to forming young people as future leaders; (2) to clarify and understand how young people become future leaders; and (3) to create a multidimensional and holistic framework for developing secondary students as future leaders. These aims were achieved via conducting qualitative in-depth interviews (N=46) with established leaders (N=19) and university professors (N=27) in both the UK and the kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Additionally, as this study focuses on adolescence, it was important to conduct three focus groups with secondary school students in KSA (N=27). Succinctly this study aims to deepen our understanding of the issue of developing young people as future leaders. This study used multi-levels of analysis and multi-domains of purposive sampling via using maximal variation sampling, both leaders and academics are categorised into six domains (business, education, social, voluntary sector, YLD programmes directors, and developmental psychologists). The secondary school students were selected from government school, private school, and gifted students. Due to the extensive sample gathered (46 interviews and 3 focus groups) and significant data generated (287.000 words), the author’s study produces both emergent themes and abundant numerical results. However, these large quantities can encourage various quantitative studies in the future. There are several key contributions of value in this study; (1) creating and conceptually testing a comprehensive framework to develop young people as future leaders; (2) the theoretical contribution as the qualitative analysis has generated massive number of new emergent themes related to the research questions; (3) analysis of the empirical contributions revealed lots of variables, factors, criteria, tools; (4) a cross-cultural YLD which verify that there are both differences and similarities between the UK and KSA; (5) the findings proved that leadership for young people is learnable to a great extent; that adolescence is a critical period for developing leaders; that sparking the motivation to lead is important at this age; there are serious obstacles facing YLD; generic leadership is more applicable for YLD; and finally, one of the significant contributions of this study is its focussing of attention on a long-term approach for young people leadership development. The further contribution of this study is creating a multi-dimensional and holistic framework for YLD based on theories of adult leadership and intensively reviewing the literature review on YLD. It has been developed via pilot study and finally developed and validated throughout a cohort of stablished leaders and university professors (N=41). This study’s findings can benefit policy and practice to a great extent since it focuses on the secondary school students; as they are the future leaders, this study can be of significant help to the strategic planning of policy makers in the Ministry of Education, Youth Ministry, and generally within the political context, family business. This study inspires me to establish a leadership-based academy, which focuses on high-school students and develops them as national leaders.

In this postindustrial era, organizations have realized a dire need to have work force with leadership skills in order to maintain their competitive edge in the market place. This has stretched the scope of leadership education to diverse field of studies and has raised the number of leadership education programs offered in colleges and universities all over the world. This thesis is an exploratory study to identify key features of leadership education that distinguish it from conventional educational programs. In view of key early career challenges faced by graduates, research hypotheses were generated regarding the role played by different type of leadership educators and various means employed for leadership education. In order to test the research hypotheses web based questionnaire was distributed among 72 students of three Master Programs at Linnaeus University, Sweden, of whom 32 responded, giving an overall response rate of 44.4%. Among the three Master Programs, two offer leadership education while one offers courses in business strategy and marketing. Furthermore, interviews were conducted with the program directors of three Master Programs. The commercial statistical software GraphPad Prism version 5.04 was employed for statistical analysis of the data. The results have showed a clear distinction of perceptions among the students of two types of programs, one that offer leadership education and other that do not, in terms of role of different type of leadership educators and various means employed for leadership education. It has been concluded that leadership programs have helped in developing the leadership mindset and vital leadership skills.

A lot of effort is put into diversity by organizations today, but the diversity question mainly focuses on gender, ethnicity, cultural and beliefs (Robertson, et al., (2017), while one of the most daunting diversity challenges has been proven to be diversity between generations, which often goes overlooked and unaddressed. A new generation represent an increasing share of the work force and many of them are already today positioned in leading positions, aspiring for leadership positions or aiming to reach for management positions to be able to do difference. Organizations that understand how to successfully address generational conflict and leverage each generation’s strengths will be better able to keep employees motivated and productive amidst the social and economical changes.   This study aims to explore the leadership preferences and motivation factors for the Millennial Generation, in order to unlock their potential and be able to bridge this knowledge gap. The preferences were examined through a survey, targeting a study group of millennial knowledge workers with various backgrounds from different companies to be able to dismiss possible bias reflecting different cultures. The survey was performed by adopting items from the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ), based on Bass’ (1985) Transactional – Transformational leadership theory and the Career Orientation Inventory (COI) reflecting Schein’s (1985) theory about career anchors.   The survey was delivered through several channels and in the end a sample group of 105 Millennial knowledge workers were included in further analysis. An Explorative Factor Analysis (EFA) was conducted to determine the underlying structure among the variables in the analysis. Since this research is based on previous studies (Blom, 2010), the methodology is chosen as a confirmatory approach with Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) to show how well the model fits the data. A Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) is performed to evaluate the relationship between the variables from Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) for Transactional and Transformation Leadership theory and Career Orientation Inventory for Career anchors.   Findings by Blom, (2010) reveal that the Millennial knowledge workers prefer leadership dimensions that involve intellectual stimulation and charisma, which correspond to a transformational leadership style compared to a transactional leadership style. This type of leadership focus on the change in individuals and creates valuable and positive changes, which inspires towards both common and individual goals. Similar results were obtained in our study and the relation with motivating factors shows that the sample group with higly educated people in the knowledge sector are motivated by having meaningful purpose with their job. They also wish to reach administrative positions in their companies and are interested by the thought of create and manage their own business. The interrelation between these factors determines the degree of satisfaction which is directly linked to the relationship between motivation and productivity. This is why it shall be one of the highest priorities of each organisation to find how to motivate their employees on an individual level, it is directly connected to productivity. Key words: Millennials, Transformational Leadership, Transactional Leadership, Career Anchors, knowledge workers

Hiring the wrong leader can have disastrous effects on the productivity, moral, time and budget of an organization. In fact, a gap of leaders will arise in the next years, which makes it necessary to know and use the right strategies for attracting and selecting the appropriate future leaders who have the ability to successfully lead a company. Therefore, recruiting and selecting the right leaders is an important challenge for all organizations worldwide. How can they find, attract and choose people to become leaders? To answer this question, this Thesis looks at the whole process of hiring future leaders for organizations. First, we want to determine what is necessary to be successful in a leadership position in an organization. Second, we figured out what kind of recruitment strategies can be used in order to attract and find leaders, and third, we aim at showing which methods companies can employ to select the best fitting candidate for their vacant leadership position. In order to find answers to these questions, we have conducted interviews with seven leaders from different industry sectors, who shared their experience about leadership and the way of finding, attracting and selecting talented people who can become future leaders. Moreover, we conducted a questionnaire that has been handed out to students who might be potential leaders of the future. To ensure the meaningfulness of the study, we asked students from different faculties in 21 countries. The reason of the mixture of different sources is to acquire a broader insight into how the recruitment and selection of leaders takes place, with the aim of creating a representative picture.

digitization, digital transformation, innovation, energy industry, HR, work with students, trainee program, trainee scheme, corporate culture, project management, onboarding, gen Z, generation Z