Sustainable Leadership Development Model Integrating Moral Conscience
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current leadership development methods lack a moral component, leading to unsustainable leadership outcomes, despite significant spending and research, resulting in failures such as unnecessary deaths, financial losses, and organizational damage, due to a lack of a general theory and focus on skills and traits rather than ethical conduct.
Innovation Solution
The Sustainable-unsustainable Leadership Theory (SULT) introduces a grand theory with a multiple-triadic relational model that emphasizes the development of conscience, interacting with cognition and conduct, and prioritizes moral influence, wisdom, understanding, knowledge, and purpose as essential dimensions for sustainable leadership, providing a framework for leadership development and practice.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If leadership development focuses on skills and traits acquisition, then leadership capabilities are improved, but leadership sustainability deteriorates due to lack of moral foundation
Solution Approach 1:
The model performs preliminary action by developing the conscience before other leadership capabilities. The conscience development is the foundational step that enables subsequent cognitive and conductive leadership functions to be sustainable and ethical.
Solution Approach 2:
The model segments leadership development into distinct components: conscience development, cognitive development, and conductive development. This segmentation allows each component to be addressed systematically, with conscience being the foundational element that sustains the others.
2Device complexity
If leadership development ignores moral component, then development process is simplified, but leadership outcomes become unsustainable and harmful
Solution Approach 1:
The model applies preliminary anti-action by preemptively developing the conscience to prevent unethical leadership behaviors before they occur. By establishing moral foundations in advance, the model counteracts the potential for harmful leadership outcomes rather than reacting to them after they manifest.
3Ease of manufacture
If leadership development uses traditional skills-based approaches, then implementation is easier, but return on investment decreases due to frequent failures
Solution Approach 1:
The model invests in preliminary conscience development, which may appear more complex initially, but this foundation prevents repeated failures and reduces the need for continuous corrective interventions, ultimately improving return on investment despite the added complexity.
Data Source
AI summary
A method and model for sustainable leadership development, premised on the sustainable-unsustainable leadership theory (SULT) is set forth herein to intervene in the phenomenon of leadership failure and associated crises. Empirical evidence of leadership failure longitudinally, demonstrated a need for a paradigm shift for leadership. Unnecessary war-related deaths and expenditures, scandals, and other harms to people are unsustainable. The method and model supported by leadership's grand theory, is underpinned by a 3-year exploratory sequential mixed methods study. A theory emerged during theoretical sampling and constant comparative analysis of interviews from six continents, giving rise to the aphorism “leadership in the absence of moral action is unsustainable.” Random sampling from 2,523 global cases, analyzing 2,191 in a quantitative phase, showed statistically significant association between unethical leadership action (ULA) and unsustainable leadership outcomes (ULO), χ2 (1, N=2,191)=119.643, p<0.001. There was relatively strong association between the variables.