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Arts-based learning is a powerful approach that leadership educators should consider to enrich student learning. By employing an arts-based storytelling pedagogy, leadership educators can engage learners in the power of their lived experiences (Sutherland & Jelinek, 2015). At a large Midwestern research university, leadership educators have utilized an illustrative activity called the Little Buddy as a central pedagogical element to enhance student learning in regards to their cultural identity development and how this emerges in their understanding and practice of leadership. The Little Buddy activity is shaped and supported by literature in intercultural leadership, culturally relevant leadership learning, critical reflexivity, and arts-based narrative; and draws upon the power of storytelling as a pedagogy. Practitioner reflections and recommendations for practice will also be discussed.

In the present study an art-based leadership intervention has been evaluated in comparison to a conventional leadership development program. The purpose of this paper is to explore effects on two aspects of personality, namely Sense of Coherence and Agreeableness, as well as on two aspects of leadership behaviors evaluated by subordinates – Laissez-faire and Capacity to Cope with stress.

Participating leaders were randomized to two-year-long leadership programs, with follow-up at 12 and 18 months. The art-based program built on an experimental theater form, a collage of literary text and music, followed by discussions. The comparison program utilized more conventional pedagogical methods.

Leaders in the art-based group, compared to the leaders in the conventional group, showed a significant improvement in Sense of Coherence (stress resilience) and Agreeableness (pro-social behavior). Likewise, the leaders receiving art-based intervention showed a significant improvement in leadership behavior evaluated by subordinates; Laissez-faire decreased (increased responsibility) and Capacity to Cope with stress increased, while the opposite was found in the leaders in the conventional group.

This study represents a new, cross-disciplinary approach. To the knowledge, previous research has not attempted a comparison between art-based leadership approach and a more conventional education. The art-based intervention seems to be more effective in stimulating long-term favorable changes in leaders’ behavior than the conventional program. These positive findings are consistent with earlier findings from this research regarding improved neurobiological resilience and mental health in subordinates of the leaders receiving art-based intervention.

This chapter analyzes art-based methods that focus on the deliverables required from the student in an academic exchange.

The study will focus on a group of second-year Master’s students who, accompanied by an artist-coach and a researcher, were asked to produce an artwork reflecting their views on the technical or theoretical issues in accounting. These works were invented and realized in a four-day workshop and exhibition organized by the students.

Student submissions were found to fit into four types of outcomes: instrumental, developmental, directed, and embedded. The first two are produced by the processes mobilized in art-based teaching, while the second two are linked to the specific form of the artwork engaged in by the teaching process. Observing that few theories have explored the range of outcomes attributable to the form, the author draws on the experiment as well as Winnicot’s concepts of transition and intermediate objects to define the specific transformative quality of art forms. By investigating the special area where the delimitations between the self and the world are blurred and changing, the art-maker student adopts a posture of a natural researcher who creates knowledge at the moment he defines his self — or to put it differently, through art-making, the student produces his/her self and his/her knowledge at the same time.

Recognizing that empowering the complexity of expression liberates access to knowing abilities and independent critical learning.

The purpose of this paper is to present a new approach to leadership development founded on the principle of the Leader-as-Learner: a reflective human who pursues the 4C – virtues of courage, commitment, confidence and curiosity, rather than the laurels of traditional approaches of heroic leadership.

Exploring art-based methods and fostering a new approach to leadership development: Leaders-as-Learners.

In this paper, studies and theoretical findings from the literature are discussed.

This paper includes extending life stories and modes of learning by projecting possible selves as leaders, to learn the daily practice of leadership.

Leadership involves not only the art of judgment but refines it through a learning orientation to confront volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity conditions.

Leadership is not limited to organizations and in relation to work practices. It is a central aspect in all social affairs and integral to building societies which serve, through leaders, the common good.

An approach to leadership development that supports human flourishing and locates leadership among ordinary people who do extra-ordinary things.

In this innovative practice paper, we will illustrate how discursive practices of Visual Thinking StrategiesTM (VTS) can foster leadership development capacity of college students. We will show how VTS aligns with constructionist perspectives to post-heroic leadership grounded in discursive approaches to leadership development. This arts-based pedagogy advances leadership development through dialogue and sense-making.

Leader-centred teaching has often taken as normal a cyclical pattern of business, which Marques (2014) argues is no longer the appropriate model. The purpose of this paper is to examine the current leadership curriculum paradigm and the case for an alternative pedagogy which better caters for the messy reality – without recurrent patterns or historical certainties – that global organisations and their business leaders currently often have to deal with. In particular, it addresses implications for the “hero” model of leadership.

The empirical findings are elicited through a combination of case studies, qualitative surveys and action research methods which include organisational development which encourages leaders to develop skills and capability to enquire into and work with their own group processes and design. Arts-based methods, such as poetry, music, painting, sculpture or music are offered as a means to help cultivate the leader’s creative potential and reach into those vulnerable places which often remain hidden amongst traditional didactic methods of facilitation.

The empirical findings call for a deconstruction of the hero leader through increasing reflexivity to help leaders understand their own feelings, reactions and motives. It encourages bespoke leadership competencies which can be adapted for individuality. This suggests that contemporary leaders and managers first need to understand what capacities and deficiencies they have as individuals, and second how to build an appropriate mix of skills through understanding and reflecting on their own individual experiences and actions.

The paper introduces an approach to leadership training which takes account of the demand for organisations to serve a social purpose, and the need for effectively leading a workforce where the power of the individual is growing with millennials pushing this and questioning the very premises of corporate behaviour and economic and social principles which guide it. It acknowledges that the demands on leaders are shoulder-buckling at the best of times but proposes that business school teaching on leadership must address the messiness of reality and offer means and ways of thriving in spite of such chaos.

It is no surprise that artists rely closely on their senses to create, develop, and perform their art. Musicians rely on what they hear, dancers rely on their proprioceptive sense and sense of movement, and painters rely on their vision. They rely on these senses to make decisions during creation and performance. At the same time their art can be seen as an exploration of what humans can experience through the senses. Developing the capacity to sense is an integral part of art education that is valued as highly as learning technical skills, such as the musician’s mastery of the instrument, the dancer’s mastery of the body, and the painter’s mastery of color and brush techniques.

In management education, things are different. Relevant techniques are taught, but no special attention is given to developing the ability to sense. There is an implied assumption that managers already know how to do this. However, on a two-day MBA course, it became clear that not only is this assumption wrong, but moreover the traditional pedagogical formats used seem to actively limit the participants ability to sense. The result is leaders who know techniques for enacting leadership, but due to their underdeveloped ability to sense, are unable to apply these techniques appropriately in practical settings.

This research explores the various ways in which performative inquiry was implemented in a graduate organizational theories course within an educational leadership cohort at a medium- sized urban Canadian research university. Drawing on Fink’s framework for significant learning experiences, the researchers used performative inquiry to enact the “Practice” and “Reflection” domains of his pedagogical model. The data show that as the course unfolded, the class experienced a shift from instructor-centered transmission of information to a curriculum co- constructed by students and instructors. We conclude with ways in which educational leadership professors can incorporate performative inquiry as a teaching strategy to enhance the learning process for aspiring educational leaders.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a qualitative observational study of how middle managers in healthcare in the UK on a work-based masters programme in leadership were introduced to foundational aspects of creativity and delivering innovation through an assignment on contemporary architectural design.

The assignment involved individual research of a recent architectural design followed by group poster presentations of findings and structured analysis. No prior knowledge of design was required. An activity theory approach was used to explore common principles of creativity and leading innovation, key features of design processes and tools for facilitating implementation.

A total of 89 managers in seven cohorts completed the assignment. Data from process records and group work, artefacts and follow-up evaluation questionnaires were analysed within an interpretive approach. Analysis of data lent support for the view that exploring architectural design as an activity system helped participants to develop conceptual and applied links between management performance, creative collaboration and delivering innovation in their own, different field of practice. Where participants expressed limited self-efficacy regarding the capacity for fostering creativity, this was usually ascribed to systemic inhibitors.

Exploring architectural design could provide a relatively low-cost, highly stimulating component of management development programmes seeking to harness the contribution of creative industries to foster work-based creativity and innovation.

This study explores a novel use of architectural design within the context of work-applied development programmes for healthcare managers.

The purpose of this paper was to assess two different leader development interventions by comparing their effects on leadership behaviour and evaluating their combined impact after two years, from the viewpoints of both the participating managers and external raters.

The study was a longitudinal randomised controlled trial with a cross-over design. Health care managers (n = 177) were first randomised to either of two 10-month interventions and a year later were switched to the other intervention. Leadership behaviour was rated at pre-test and 12 and 24 months by participating managers and their superiors, colleagues and subordinates using a 360-degree instrument. Analysis of variance and multilevel regression analysis was performed.

No difference in effect on leadership behaviour was found between the two interventions. The evaluation of the combined effect of the interventions on leadership behaviour showed inconsistent (i.e. both increased and decreased) ratings by the various rater sources.

This study provides some evidence that participation in leadership development programmes can improve managers’ leadership behaviours, but the results also highlight the interpretive challenges connected with using a 360-degree instrument to evaluate such development.

The longitudinal randomised controlled design and the large sample comprising both managers and external raters make this study unusually rigorous in the field of leadership development evaluations.