ABSTRACT

The paper challenges conventional thinking on what to evaluate in leadership development. Drawing upon recent empirical findings in the area of leadership development, as well as developments in our understanding of leadership from relational, team and complexity perspectives, a multi-level model to underpin evaluation research and practice in the area is outlined. This identifies differing evaluative criteria for leadership development at the individual, dyad, team, organizational and community levels with a clear focus on social as well as human capital. The paper concludes with re-iterating the need for the HRD field to adopt far more expansive models to both guide and understand leadership training and development than the traditional, rational-economic approaches that have dominated much of the literature to date.