Nearly every graduate school, especially professional schools, claims to train, educate, and develop leaders. However, the leader-development literature offers little evidence of how a graduate level leader-development course might actually do that. Developmental theory informing experiential and constructivist leader-development methods suggest that those methods might be useful in promoting development, and one’s capacity to lead, however there is little empirical evidence of impact. This dissertation is comprised of three studies. The first two used a constructive-developmental lens to explore the interaction between participant’s stage of development and two different leader-development courses that deploy experiential and constructivist pedagogies: Adaptive Leadership and Authentic Leadership. These studies collected participant stage of development at the beginning and end of each course in addition to interview questions about participant learning in each course.
The first study focused on Adaptive Leadership. Findings from this study suggest that experiential and constructivist methods that bring dominantly socialized levels of consciousness to the limit of their meaning making provoked developmental growth for those participants. Dominantly self-authorized participants did not demonstrate developmental growth, but did demonstrate compensational learning—learning that uniquely compensates for the limitations of the dominantly self-authorized stage. Study two compared findings from the first study against findings from an Authentic Leadership course. That comparison revealed a very statistically significant correlation between the Adaptive Leadership course and developmental growth among dominantly socialized participants. An analysis of the tasks used in each course suggested that dialectical tasks are correlated with development over dialogical tasks.
The third study focused on efforts at the professional school to integrate the experiential and constructivist methods I examined in studies one and two into the management curriculum. For that study, I organized and analyzed documentation regarding the establishment of Yale’s School of Organization and Management in 1973 and the schools restructuring in 1988. That restructuring effort eliminated the experiential and constructivist methods the school was established upon in 1973. I found that the school was not strategic about the purpose of experiential and constructivist methods and generated a divided learning experience for students, which fueled a dynamic that subsequently split faculty along ideological lines.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:harvard.edu/oai:dash.harvard.edu:1/27112706 |
| Date | 31 May 2016 |
| Creators | O'Brien, Timothy J. |
| Contributors | Elmore, Richard |
| Publisher | Harvard University |
| Source Sets | Harvard University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis or Dissertation, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | open |
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