178 Int. J. Indian Culture and Business Management, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2015 Copyright © 2015 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Teaching and developing leadership in business schools: a multilevel evaluative approach in Indian context Koustab Ghosh Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Rohtak, M.D.U. Campus, Rohtak 124001, Haryana, India Email: koustab.g@gmail.com Email: koustab.g@iimrohtak.ac.in Abstract: This paper has made an attempt to look into the industry expectations in terms of desired leadership attributes of business school graduates as well as the students’ orientations along with effective learning mechanisms involved for successfully imparting the leadership course in business schools. Brief industry opinion survey; meta-cognitive assessment of course participants in business schools; and in-depth faculty interviews from India were conducted at different stages of this study. The hierarchical regression analysis established the relevance of the set of course participants’ meta-cognitive factors as receptive facilitators for leadership course effectiveness. The major finding from this study implies that for effective development of desired leadership skills and behaviours among the business school graduates, course centric as well as boundary spanning learning mechanisms are required. Keywords: leadership development; meta-cognitive learning; teaching pedagogy; business schools; India. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Ghosh, K. (2015) ‘Teaching and developing leadership in business schools: a multilevel evaluative approach in Indian context’, Int. J. Indian Culture and Business Management, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp.178–192. Biographical notes: Koustab Ghosh is an Assistant Professor in the area of organisation behaviour and leadership at Indian Institute of Management Rohtak, Haryana, India. His academic interest lies in leadership development, creativity management, higher education management and corporate sustainability. 1 Introduction Leadership development has been the buzzword for industry and academia in the present decade. In the USA, 25% of annual learning and development budget is spent on leadership development (O’Leonard, 2010). Many organisations all over the world have set up exclusive leadership training/development centre for honing the leadership skills of their executives working at various levels of organisational hierarchy. The work done by Strack et al. (2010) showed that 5,561 executives surveyed in 109 countries highlighted improving leadership development and pipeline of future leaders as the most important human resource priority for organisations around the world. In alignment with this