Date of Award

2018

Document Type

Doctoral Thesis

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Applied Social Studies

First Advisor

Prof Margaret Linehan

Second Advisor

Prof Irene Sheridan

Abstract

The majority of managers and leaders do not advance to postconventional stages of ego development (Boyd & Laske 2018), yet increased leader effectiveness has been correlated with the quality of personal meaning-making acquired at postconventional levels of maturity. This dissertation provides an original contribution to knowledge regarding the differences in personal meaning-making structure which are found by comparing conventional- with postconventional-stage leaders. This study focuses on the elements which make up a leader’s conative capability i.e. their conative intelligence and their conative complexity. Along with cognition and affect, conation is one of the three traditionally identified components of mind (Vandenbos 2007). Loevinger’s Sentence Completion Test (SCT) as well as Rooke & Torbert’s Leadership Development Profile (LDP) were used to determine the meaning-making ‘action logic’ stage of 13 leaders. Additionally, semi-structured interviews with all participants inquired into their lived experiences of the main elements of conative capability. The findings demonstrated that participants at the postconventional tier of ego development have a more integrated ‘conative intelligence’ sensibility as evidenced by their values-framework, in their conceptualization of autonomy as an inter-independent phenomenon and in the scope of their interests in acting i.e. their locus-of-concern. Additionally, leaders who profiled as being at postconventional levels were markedly self-transcendent or more self-differentiated in their goalsetting motivations, their goal-striving (volition) and their reflexivity. They expressed extremely high levels of curiosity which coalesced around transformative and purposeful change with the aim of delivering an enduring legacy for the benefit of others. This thesis concludes by contributing a new model of leader meaning-making complexity to the study domain. Implications which inform practice are discussed in the areas of capacity management, legacy management, ambiguity management and identity management as well as consideration of spatio-temporal dynamics and the adoption of an organizational agenda of leader vertical development. Overall, the findings of this dissertation demonstrate that scholarly investigations in the field of leader development which omit conation as a factor, fail to take into account an important aspect of psychological maturity, and therefore are likely to return findings which are incomplete. Future research directions are proposed.

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info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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