Sean T. Hannah

DEVELOPMENTAL READINESS: ACCELERATING LEADER DEVELOPMENT

The development of leaders is a stated goal of most organizations, yet a validated framework and theory for leader development does not yet fully exist, nor is there a method for determining who is developmentally ready to engage in leader development. The authors of this article provide a framework for examining how one can accelerate leader development. They propose that leader developers first focus on assessing and then building the developmental readiness of individual leaders, as well as the developmental readiness of the organization as prerequisite steps for accelerating positive leader development. They identify and discuss 5 specific constructs comprising their initial modeling of developmental readiness (i.e., learning goal orientation, developmental efficacy, self-concept clarity, self-complexity, and metacognitive ability), as well as suggest methods for assessing and developing these 5 components.

A framework for understanding leadership and individual requisite complexity

This paper examines the relation of individual perceptual, conscious, and self-regulatory processes to the generation of requisite complexity in formal and informal leaders. Requisite complexity is a complex adaptive systems concept that pertains to the ability of a system to adjust to the requirements of a changing environment by achieving equivalent levels of complexity. We maintain that requisite complexity has both static and dynamic aspects that involve four domains (general, social, self, and affective complexity), with each being more or less important for leaders depending upon the task requirements they face. Dynamic complexity draws on these static components and also creates new aspects of complexity through the interaction of mental processes. The implications of these issues for understanding leader adaptation and development are also discussed.

Toward a courageous mindset: The subjective act and experience of courage

This paper presents a new model outlining the subjective experience of courage. Various positive psychological states and traits are proposed to reduce the level of fear experienced when facing risk, that join with an individuals core values and beliefs to create a courageous mindset which, bolstered by affirming normative and informational social forces, promotes courageous action. Finally, intrapersonal attribution processes are proposed to influence self-perceptions of courageousness and that, through self-reflection, reinforce the courageous mindset, perpetuating future courageous action.

Advancing a Research Agenda for Leadership in Dangerous Contexts

We propose that leadership is uniquely contextualized when confronting dangerous contexts such that specific causations and contingencies occur that are not present in non-dangerous contexts. Yet we know very little about how such leadership operates and what constitutes effective leadership for such dangerous contexts. To guide future research, we take a multilevel and systems approach to leadership and suggest important areas for future research of leadership in dangerous contexts at the micro-, meso-, and macrolevels.

Leadership in Military and Other Dangerous Contexts: Introduction to the Special Topic Issue

Although researchers have examined the situational demands that conventional environments place on leadership, the demands that highly dangerous environments impose on leadership have been much less explored. While investigations in such environments are extremely difficult to conduct, such research is essential if we are to understand the functioning of leadership in contexts where leadership matters most. This paper introduces six studies that accepted the difficulties of this kind of research; and examined leadership in various challenging, dangerous contexts. We discuss the contributions of the six papers in terms of three related questions (1) what precisely is leadership in dangerous environments?; (2) what does danger do to leadership?; and (3) what distinguishes effective leadership in dangerous contexts?

Leadership and collective requisite complexity

We maintain that the requisite complexity of collectives is an important component of collective learning and adaptive performance. Collective requisite complexity is comprised of two components: static complexity, which consists of group or team heterogeneity in general cognitive, social, self, and affective domains; and dynamic complexity, which is a social interactive process by which one person’s contributions transform those of another. We propose that social-regulation processes involving active goals, identity, and affect, as well as formal and emergent leadership processes, such as shared leadership, provide the key social structures within which dynamic complexity emerges. We also propose that successful adaptation to task or organizational demands, as well as social feedback, transform these structural aspects through “double-loop learning” and provide a basis for individual and collective learning.

The Moralities of Obligation and Aspiration: Towards a Concept of Exemplary Military Ethics and Leadership

A fundamental tension in military ethics is not just how to prevent unethical behavior, but also how to inspire supererogatory conduct “above and beyond the call of duty.” In this article, we provide a conceptual analysis and integrative framework for understanding the dynamics of military ethics based on two contrasting but complementary moralities—moralities of obligation and aspiration; and two types of moral motivation—rule-following and identity-conferring. We then provide analysis of the exemplary leadership required to inform and inspire military members to realize the aspirations embedded in an exemplary military ethic.

Tactical Military Leader Requisite Complexity: Toward a Referent Structure

The U.S. Army has focused on developing leader competencies in order to promote adaptability for asymmetric warfare. Expanding leader adaptive capacity, however, requires integrating competencies with deeper knowledge structures and leader identity. We conduct a three-stage exploratory study using semistructured interviews and three separate samples of experienced combat leaders to assess the organization of tactical leader functional roles. We identify the breadth of roles, tasks, skills, and attributes representative of expert tactical military leaders. We hope to take a first step in circumscribing the requisite cognitive and behavioral complexity required of tactical leaders and thereby provide a referent structure for future research on what constitutes requisite complexity for tactical military leaders.

Neuroscience of Moral Cognition and Conation in Organizations

Abstract Behavioral ethics research in the field of management is burgeoning. While many advancements have been made, applying an organizational neuroscience approach to this area of research has the possibility of creating significant new theoretical, empirical, and practical contributions. We overview the major areas of behavioral ethics research concerning moral cognition and conation, and then we concentrate on existing neuroscience applications to moral cognition (moral awareness, moral judgment/reasoning, effects of moral emotions on moral reasoning, and ethical ideology). We also demonstrate the usefulness of neuroscience applications to organizational behavioral ethics research by summarizing a recent study on the neuroscience of ethical leadership. We close by recommending future research that applies neuroscience to topics such as moral development, group ethical judgments and group moral approbation, and moral conation (e.g., moral courage and moral identity). Our overall purpose is to encourage future neuroscience research on organizational behavioral ethics to supplement and/or complement existing psychological approaches.

Leadership Beyond the Tipping Point: Toward the Discovery of Inversions and Complementary Hypotheses

Leadership theories often include a contingency effect where the relationship between two or more variables is normally theorized to be monotonic, i.e., that it has a generally accepted direction—positive or negative—across the full range of the contingency variable. Most examinations of contingencies estimate how the monotonic relationship changes at mean, or near mean, levels of the moderator variable. We push the logic of moderation further to explore whether, for extra-ordinary values of the moderator, the effect may actually become non-monotonic, e.g., invert by moving from positive to negative in slope (or vice versa). Discovering such inversion effects in models of leadership would provide a deeper understanding of the operation and boundaries of theories, thereby calling for refinements of underlying theoretical assumptions. Using an innovative inductive approach, we search the leadership literature and find studies where extra-ordinary moderator values signal a potential inversion effect. We narrow onto two example leader-member exchange (LMX) studies to inductively theorize the mechanisms creating the inversion. We then generalize the logic of this mechanism to propose new theory for why such inversions might be occurring in a wider range of phenomenon beyond LMX, and discuss the associated implications for leadership and organizational theory.