UNDERSTANDING LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT WITH THE LIFETIME LEADERSHIP INVENTORY

摘要

As evident by the volume of publications and research studies, leadership is a topic of keen interest to both the general public and researchers. Since leadership has an impact on all areas of society, this interest is not unexpected. What is unexpected is that despite all of the attention it garners, leadership remains a poorly understood topic, with scholars unable to even reach consensus on a single definition. Given this state, it is perhaps not surprising that efforts to understand how leaders develop are common in the leadership literature, but offer few clear-cut solutions for how best to grow future leaders. One reason for this lack of a clear leadership development path is that research into leadership development tends to focus on the characteristics of the leaders being studied, and investigates the experiences that lead to the development of the leader far less often. Studies that do investigate the impact of experiences tend to utilize structured interview techniques, resulting in limited breadth and small sample sizes. This study sought to provide a means to address this limitation through development of a new instrument, the Lifetime Leadership Inventory (LLI), that investigate the breadth of experiences theorized in the literature to impact leader development. The LLI enables researchers to understand the wide range of development experiences of respondents and gather that information from a considerably larger sample than interview based studies enable. This paper discusses the need for the LLI, its theoretical foundation, and the process undertaken to develop and validate the instrument.