PEDAGOGY, LEADERSHIP, AND LEADERSHIP
DEVELOPMENT
John R. Turner, PhD Rose Baker, PhD
Leadership and leadership development have negotiated identities with individuals, dyads, collectives,
and even complex adaptive systems. Leadership development needs to extend from traditional
competency development to a broader, multilevel spectrum of leading complex interactions with people,
social entities, and organizational elements. Turner’s Leadership Development Spectrum provides the
groundwork for the examination of leadership capacities and developmental theories, laying the
foundation for the investigation of capacity and theory investments in leadership development
applications.
LEADERSHIP HAS BEEN identified as being individ-
ualistic (trait-based, Xu et al., 2014; competency-based,
Hollenbeck, McCall, & Silzer, 2006), a dyadic relation-
ship (Epitropaki, Kark, Mainemelis, & Lord, 2017) be-
tween the leader and follower, and as a multilevel phe-
nomenon (Gooty, Serban, Thomas, Gavin, & Yammarino,
2012) while taking place “in and of complex (CAS) dy-
namics” (Uhl-Bien & Marion, 2009, p. 632). Leadership
research has spanned from the individual to the collective
and to organizations (Bliese, Halverson, & Schriesheim,
2002), and even to the environment. Some leadership re-
search has had a crippling effect by identifying only a
few capacities belonging to an idealized leader. Instead,
a leader should be capable of being adaptive by utilizing
multiple leadership styles given the situation and environ-
ment (the landscape).
Although situational leadership (Blanchard, 2010)
views leadership operating at differing levels of direc-
tive and supportive, based on the situation and based
on the follower’s level of experience, situational leader-
ship theory primarily focuses on the leader–follower dyad.
Other leadership theories follow the leader–follower dyad
such as House’s path-goal theory (House, 1971; House
& Mitchell, 1975; House, 1996) and leader-member ex-
change (LMX) theory (Hooper & Martin, 2008). These
theories have been criticized, thereby indicating that
leader–follower dyads are not necessarily “representative
of the nature of leadership situations, which are character-
ized most often by a leader and multiple members working
together in some type of interacting collectivity” (Graen &
Uhl-Bien, 1995, p. 233). This has forced leadership theory
to expand further into the realms of systems, network as-
semblies (Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995), and complex adaptive
systems (Uhl-Bien & Marion, 2009).
These trends in leadership theory, the trends ranging
from individual leader traits to collective views to net-
works, are representative of the progress that the discipline
of leadership has made over the years. Unfortunately, this
same progress has not necessarily been found on the lead-
ership development front. The following section touches
more on leadership development.
LEADER AND LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
A distinction needs to be made between leader develop-
ment and leadership development. Leader development is
often associated with leader education (Callahan & Rosser,
2007), which focuses more on the content being delivered.
Leader-development efforts typically teach leadership the-
ory to individuals, often to introduce them to a “narrow or
homogeneous model of the ideal leader” (Gagnon, Vough,
& Nickerson, 2012, p. 304). This can become problematic
when these individuals are expected to change their be-
haviors from an ideal leadership type if they believe that
Performance Improvement, vol. 56, no. 9, October 2017
© 2017 International Society for Performance Improvement
Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) • DOI: 10.1002/pfi.21734 5