Leadership Development: MHRM 6200

Video Transcript:

 

Leadership training has never been more popular. Every year millions of dollars are invested in leadership training. But how is leadership training working for the organizations? Let’s take a look at the leadership training effect on long-term behavior change.

 

To begin with, we have to answer:

 

• What is leadership and what are purposes of leadership training?

 

There is never a definite answer to define leadership. Leadership is “The particular acts in which a leader engages in the course of directing and coordinating the work of his group members.” (Bass, 1990)

 

The research at the Ohio State University that identified the 2 types observable behaviors of leaders. From a behavioral perspective, leadership could be seen as a set of observable behaviors that are categorized as 2 groups: “Initiating Structure and Consideration. Initiating structure refers to the extent to which a leader focuses directly on organizational tasks, whereas consideration refers to the extent to which leadership expresses concern, respect, trust and support for the welfare of followers.” (Lai, 1996)

           

Lai believed “leadership training is a series of instructional activities conducted to change the performance effectiveness of persons” who has potential or already in leadership positions. (Lai, 1996)

 

Through leadership training, we expect to:

1. Improves trainee’s attitudes, skills, and knowledge.

2. Enhancing leadership effectiveness.

3. Improving the utilization of leadership styles. (Bass, 1990)

 

• How do we make sure that the leadership training is effective?

 

There are 5 components are critical to the effective training:

1. Presentation of a theory, or description of skills and strategy.

2. Modelling or demonstration of skills

3. Practice in stimulated and classroom settings.

4. Structured and open-ended feedback.

5. Coaching for application

 

By the combination of this components will make the leadership training most effective. (Joyce & Showers, 1980)

 

According to (Lai, 1996) two groups of study, the majority of 12 studies utilizing behavior measurement as evaluation criteria yielded positive training effects. The positive relationship exists between leadership training programs and behavior change after training in Lallo’s research which include 82 participants with age range from 30-60. (Lallo, 2007) In Maiya’s study, based on a pretest-posttest control group design, the data on behavioral scales, vision, support and relentlessness, and showed that trainees scored substantially higher than non-trainees from the control group by self-assessment (Tsyganenko, 2014).

          

It is safe to say leadership training has a positive effect on behavioral change and business impact but still there are still organizations do not their get money worth.

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In (Beer, Finnström, & Schrader, 2016)’s article, they conduct interviews and find out three-quarters of 50 organizations think their learning and developments function of the company is not working. After the training, the majority of employees just go back to the old way of doing things and their no behavior change whatsoever. Authors believe that the problem is the organizational system is not ready for the evolvement that aligns with the company strategy which is designed for the leadership training. To solve this problem, they discover 6 barriers organizations usually have that will make company transformation and leadership training not effective. Accordingly, they developed 6 steps to make sure the organization context is suitable for training and talent development. In their work with clients, these 6 steps have been designed into a training program which later is proved highly effective with significant results from program evaluation for financial wise and performance wise. So we could say with right organizational context , transformation strategy and customized designed training content，a leadership training program will have a significant influence on company development.