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The purpose of this paper is to develop and evaluate a leadership development program with focus on transformational leadership and communication. It is explored whether these aspects of leadership can be trained in the course of a two-day intervention. Furthermore, it is tested if pre-training differences among leaders have an influence on the effectiveness of participating in the leadership intervention.

In the study, 38 leaders took part in the two-day training session. The control group consisted of 59 leaders. Information was collected from participating leaders’ followers (n=356) on pre- and post-training measures of transformational leadership as well as on communication skills (attentive and impression-leaving style).

Results show that transformational leadership behaviors improved more after training in the experimental group (EG) than they did in the control group. Also, ratings of the attentive communication style improved more in the EG compared to the control group. Furthermore, participants of the leadership development program benefitted to different degrees from their training. Participants who initially had a medium score showed the best improvement.

The present study advances the scope of leadership development by also considering the trainability of communication skills. Also, insights on the contingency of training effects are provided.