Evaluating shifting perceptions and configurations of social capital in leadership development

Abstract

Whilst Day's (2000) description of leadership development as an investment in social capital has been widely cited, there has been little subsequent empirical or theoretical work to explore and articulate the nature and purpose of this ‘social capital’ or how it changes over time. This paper revisits this issue by presenting findings from a qualitative in-depth longitudinal evaluation of a corporate leadership development programme. The study explored the multi-faceted and shifting nature of social capital during and after the programme, with particular attention given to how different aspects of social capital were perceived and engaged with by key stakeholders over time. Findings reveal differing perspectives on the nature and purpose of social capital and illustrate the impact of changing organizational contexts on programme aims and outcomes and how these are evaluated. The paper concludes by outlining implications for the evaluation of leadership development, advocating the value of a pluralistic approach that incorporates criticality alongside the logics of accountability, development and knowledge that characterise most current approaches to evaluation Kennedy, Carroll and Francoeur (2013) .

Transformations towards an integrated leadership development system—A longitudinal study in a high-performing public organization

“…When the purpose of LD is understood as directly improving the customer-oriented quality and the core business, such specific outcomes can be misleading if they are not supplemented with measurements from other relevant perspectives such as customer results, process measurements, employees’ experiences, and costs. Thus, our results strengthen previous arguments that leadership development needs to become more multifaceted in order not to limit the development to selected personal behaviors (Bolden and Gosling, 2006), and evaluations need to include several aspects in order to be able to show a broader picture of both negative and positive effects (Gilani et al, 2022).…”