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Integrative Executive Leadership: Towards a General Theory of Positive Business LeadershipBusiness today is conducted within societies facing complex global challenges and unprecedented demands for effective, ethical, and excellent business leadership that proactively manages its societal impacts. Integrating economic success with service of the common good requires a sound, shared understanding of “positive” executive business leadership to guide executive selection, education and development, and practice. This thesis formulates and theoretically grounds a general theory of positive executive business leadership. Integrative Executive Leadership (“IEL”) addresses the individual, pairs/groups/teams, organizational, and societal levels of business. Within these contexts, IEL exercises positive integrative agency through multi-stakeholder professional stewardship, integrated performance management, and living codes of ethics. This requires the practice of five mutually-reinforcing positive behavioural repertoires: contemplative self-leadership, functional-relational facilitative leadership, full range managerial-leadership, visionary strategic leadership, and transforming-developmental leadership. These are reinforced by five positive philosophies or styles of leadership: authentic, moral, spiritual, servant, and wise leadership. Consequently, IEL is predicated upon essential competencies, attainments, and positive dispositions. Especially, IEL requires the cultivation of positive psychological states, traits, and virtues, eudaimonic character, postautonomous levels of ego development, psychological complexity, integrative consciousness and flow. In addition to promoting intrinsic morality, these farther reaches of human nature contribute to effective and excellent leadership performance. Integrative Executive Leaders do well by doing good. IEL was developed through multiparadigm theory-building, adopting a pragmatic epistemology, and employing a transdisciplinary, positive scholarship approach to integrate the findings from a broad range of qualitative and quantitative research from the humanities and the social sciences. IEL theory articulates important theoretical relationships derived from: leading insights from management and organization theory; salient research findings from the social sciences and the humanities; insights from positive psychology, positive organizational behaviour, positive organizational scholarship, constructive developmental psychology, transpersonal psychology, and integrated empirical ethics; interpretive analyses of the biographies of great world leaders; and, a rich case study of an extraordinary executive business leader. Accordingly, IEL is advanced as an emergent theory with both theoretical grounding and empirical reference. The path forward requires further transdisciplinary, multiparadigm, multi-method research to further develop and refine IEL and establish it as a grounded theory of positive executive business leadership.
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Virtual Simulation in Leadership Development Training;the Impact of Learning Styles and Conflict Management Tactics on Adult Learner PerformanceAdult learners can develop leadership skills and competencies such as conflict management and negotiation skills. Virtual simulations are among the emerging new technologies available to adult educators and trainers to help adults develop various leadership competencies. This study explored the impact of conflict management tactics as well as learning styles on the efficacy of virtual leadership development training.In this quantitative study, participants (n=349) completed electronic versions of both the Power and Influence Tactics Scale (POINTS) and the Kolb Learning Styles Instrument (KLSI). Results of participant scores for both instruments were compared with scores from a virtual leadership simulation. Performance within a virtual leadership simulation was not found to be significantly impacted by diverse learning styles, indicating that virtual simulations can be effective for adult learners with any learning style. Statistically significant correlations were found between all seven conflict management tactics and key virtual leadership simulation scores, indicating that virtual leadership simulations can be effective tools for practicing multiple conflict management tactics. Experiential learning techniques are becoming commonplace and the use of technology is growing within the field of adult and leadership education. This study elucidates the effectiveness of new technologies such as virtual simulations as tools for leadership development. This study contributes to leadership education best practices by exploring the effectiveness of virtual simulations as a method for training leaders that will allow educators to incorporate emerging best practices into their repertoire of methodologies
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Spiritual African and Africentric Leadership for Social Justice:Understandings, Experiences and Spiritual InfluencesThe imprint of spiritual African and Africentric educational leadership is deeply entwined in the struggle over education and educational spaces. Despite this robust and contentious history, research pertaining specifically to spiritual African and Africentric educational leaders is noticeably miniscule within the field of educational leadership. This discrepancy is alarming when one considers how spiritual African and Africentric leaders have been actively involved in shaping the nature and quality of education within various contexts. This dissertation explores the conceptions and experiences of spiritual African and Africentric leaders and the function of spirituality within leaders’ practices toward social justice. Based on qualitative interviews with 10 school- and community-based participants, this research deliberately centres the perspectives of individuals who proclaim the spiritual as a natural and transformative force within their personal and professional lives. Furthermore, the present research study offers an informed understanding of African and Africentric spiritualities within the context of educational leadership for social justice and outlines the meanings, influences and tensions which participants believe to entwine the task of leading. The practice of spiritual African and Africentric leadership arises in opposition to the threat of racialization and against barriers which restrict a more inclusive understanding of education. Narratives construct leadership for social justice as an indigenous and embattled endeavour imbued with tensions, risks and prohibition. Spiritual African and Africentric leaders understand and experience their practice beyond the rudiments of functionality as leaders respectfully enter into the arena of leadership with a concern towards instituting individual, communal and systemic change. Leadership endeavours contest marginalization, initiate inclusive engagement and strategically reconstruct education within a more democratically just space. Moreover, participants depict spiritual African and Africentric leadership as a hopeful and relationally influential undertaking.