Promoting post-conventional consciousness in leaders: Australian community leadership programs

Well-being as a staged social responsibility process: exploratory testing of a new theory

Purpose

This paper aims to extend the conceptualization of well-being as a staged social responsibility process by undertaking further conceptual development of these ideas as well as exploratory, small-scale international testing.

Design/methodology/approach

The sample comprised 117 leaders from Alaska, India and Norway. Cluster analysis was used to determine systematic differences in the way leaders think about societal well-being (well-being action logics), and regression analysis was used to test positive and significant relationships between well-being action logics and stages of consciousness.

Findings

Cluster analysis confirmed the three theoretically derived well-being action logics of top managers: compensatory, integral and hybrid. The authors found preliminary empirical support for a systematic relationship between well-being action logics and stages of consciousness as per constructive-developmental theory.

Practical implications

Better adoption of societal well-being as a normative ethic hinges on building the capacity of top managers to process more complex understandings of the range of components of societal well-being and how these components interact, conflict and synergize.

Social implications

Being asked to embrace more complex views about societal well-being can be overwhelming, leading top managers to retreat into defensiveness. The result is resistance to change, preferring instead to stay with familiar yet outmoded conceptions. Societal well-being can thus suffer.

Originality/value

This paper opens the black box to find systematic differences in the way managers think about societal well-being. Further, the research has uncovered that these differences follow a staged developmental process of greater complexity.

Well-being as a staged social responsibility process for business and society

Purpose

This paper aims to conceptualize how business and society co-evolve their efforts to maximizing the greatest well-being of the greatest number following a conscious-unconscious, staged, dialectical process.

Design/methodology/approach

This study used a conceptual framework linking eight components of well-being (economic, environmental, social, cultural, psychological, spiritual, material and physical), with stages of consciousness and the co-evolution of business and society.

Findings

Stages of consciousness – traditionalist, modernist, post-modernist and integral – moderate both the pace and direction with which business and society co-evolve to the greatest well-being of the greatest number across eight components of well-being.

Research limitations/implications

This is a conceptual framework which integrates existing empirical relationships, but the overall framework itself is yet to be empirically tested.

Practical implications

The whole process of maximizing well-being can become more conscious for both business and society. This requires making unconscious components conscious and becoming conscious of the inseparability of the eight components of well-being as a counter-balanced set.

Social implications

Businesses and societies can maximize well-being across eight inseparable components. But implementing this is a staged process requiring progressing populations through stages of consciousness. Earlier stages lay the platform for a critical mass of people able to integrate the eight components.

Originality/value

Knowledge of well-being is dominated by disciplinary disconnection and bivariate studies; yet, current meta-crises and calls for post-conventional leaders indicate the importance of an integrated multidisciplinary well-being model which explains past efforts of business and society, diagnoses current problems and points towards more viable paths.

Developing Employees’ Mental Complexity: Transformational Leadership as a Catalyst in Employee Development

As organizations grapple with greater complexity in the competitive business environment, more work is needed to understand how to create a human capability equal to the challenge. Research on adult learning suggests that increasing mental complexity, an individual’s system for processing information and making sense of their environment, can be a valuable way to help individuals become more adaptive in a complex environment and enhance performance. While there is evidence that this human capability can grow over time, individual growth does not come without considerable effort, and such growth can be facilitated by the right contextual factors. In this article, we examine the role of leaders in employee development. Synthesizing literature from adult learning and transformational leadership, we lay out a theoretical framework for why transformational leadership and its corresponding behaviors can serve as a mechanism to encourage developmental movement within an employee and increase mental complexity. We discuss the implications for human resource development.

Who Overrates, Who Underrates? Personality and Its Link to Self–Other Agreement of Leadership Effectiveness

The study investigated if personality can explain why certain managers are prone to overrate or underrate their own effectiveness. Thus, the relationship between self–other agreement of effectiveness and personality was studied. In total, 214 managers completed a multisource feedback and provided personality data on the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator. Results show that more extraverted leaders overrated their effectiveness in relation to their supervisors but had more accurate perceptions when self–peer and self–subordinate ratings were compared. Leaders with an intuition preference had more accurate perceptions when comparing self and supervisor or subordinate ratings while leaders with judging preferences received lower subordinate than self-ratings. Findings show that personality partly explains why leaders overrate or underrate their effectiveness and thus can be used for understanding leaders’ careers.