Developing Employees’ Mental Complexity: Transformational Leadership as a Catalyst in Employee Development

As organizations grapple with greater complexity in the competitive business environment, more work is needed to understand how to create a human capability equal to the challenge. Research on adult learning suggests that increasing mental complexity, an individual’s system for processing informatio...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Human resource development review 2018-09, Vol.17 (3), p.234-257
Main Authors: Crane, Bret, Hartwell, Christopher J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult learning
Andragogy
Employee development
Environment
Human resource management
Leadership
Occupational psychology
Professional development
Staff Development
Transformational leadership
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Summary:As organizations grapple with greater complexity in the competitive business environment, more work is needed to understand how to create a human capability equal to the challenge. Research on adult learning suggests that increasing mental complexity, an individual’s system for processing information and making sense of their environment, can be a valuable way to help individuals become more adaptive in a complex environment and enhance performance. While there is evidence that this human capability can grow over time, individual growth does not come without considerable effort, and such growth can be facilitated by the right contextual factors. In this article, we examine the role of leaders in employee development. Synthesizing literature from adult learning and transformational leadership, we lay out a theoretical framework for why transformational leadership and its corresponding behaviors can serve as a mechanism to encourage developmental movement within an employee and increase mental complexity. We discuss the implications for human resource development.
ISSN:1534-4843
1552-6712
DOI:10.1177/1534484318781439