ABSTRACT
Since the first edition of Leadership in Organizations there seems to have been little to dampen the belief in business leadership as a pillar of organizational success. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that advice proliferates on designing and implementing leadership development programmes. Much of this is still consistent with the ideas encapsulated by Fulmer and Wagner (1999) in eight core principles. These highlight the importance of: aligning leadership development to business strategy; developing an HR and business partnership; using competency frameworks; developing home-grown talent; forging strong links to succession planning; encouraging action learning; ensuring high-level support for development activity; and comprehensive evaluation of outcomes. However, anecdotal evidence and increasing academic research suggest that organizations find approaches based on this advice to be problematic, signalling an enduring gap between the theory and practice of leadership development. Criticisms of leadership development practice continue to refer to a lack of strategic integration between HR, management development and the business (Mabey and Gooderham 2005; D’Netto et al. 2008), poor evaluation of outcomes (Yorks et al. 2007), the quality of HR specialists (Wright 2008), and the overuse of action learning projects (Kramer 2008). It is not surprising, then, that numerous authors note that we are still some way from realizing strategic integration of HRM and HRD in practice. Moreover, with insufficiently rigorous data on the effectiveness of leadership development approaches, the relative strategic impact of development activities remains an area of conjecture (Boaden 2006). So, is the longstanding best practice advice fundamentally flawed or is it simply in need of refinement or contextualization?
