Gower Handbook of Leadership and Management Development

Citation

Korte, R. (2010), "Gower Handbook of Leadership and Management Development", Journal of European Industrial Training, Vol. 34 No. 8/9, pp. 876-880. https://doi.org/10.1108/03090591011081048

Book synopsis

From earlier editions as a book on management development, the editors have expanded the content and vision to include leadership with the intent to better capture the convergence and divergence of leadership and management in today's organizations. Across the various chapters in this book a variety of perspectives emerge about leadership and management, leaders and managers, along with a forays into the realm of development interventions. Perspectives vary from the view of leadership as a distributed phenomenon to the more traditional view of the individual hero. The result is that leadership is not a singular concept in this book nor is it comprised of a singular set of characteristics, skills, traits, or competencies. The book adequately portrays a holistic view of the breadth and complexity of leadership while assuming managers to be leaders and separating the routine, administrative tasks from the visionary and influential work of leadership.

The 30 chapters divide into five parts beginning with an overview of the current state of leadership and management development (LMD) in part one. Part two focuses more closely on strategic work in LMD, especially in the realm of top‐management teams and organizational development. This section ends with chapters on diversity, ethics, and evidence‐based management. Part three covers a few topics related to development addressing measurement, assessment, evaluation, and learning theory. Part four skips around various topics under the title of advanced processes and tools, although it appears the topics were more randomly chosen. For example, the various chapters address feedback, 360‐degree methods, coaching, mentoring, and e‐learning mix with neuro‐linguistic programming, intuition, and critical action learning. The final part of the book ventures into LMD in community and voluntary organizations, the public sector, global contexts, as well as futures management and a post‐modern turn toward social constructionism and narrative analysis. Overall, the book concentrates on an interesting mix of perspectives about leadership with much less emphasis on the specifics of development. Readers looking for thought‐provoking and challenging views of leadership will find interesting reviews from diverse scholars among these chapters.

Many of the development practices recommended by various authors echo the tenets of good instructional design in general. Trends include a tendency for customized or personalized interventions as responsibility for development shifts from organizations to individuals becoming more self‐directed in their development. Preferences for quick, mini‐interventions conflict with the need for a broad, holistic view of leadership and management. And while the overarching objectives of LMD focus on creating more effective leaders and managers, there is scant evidence available of a positive link between LMD and organizational performance.

There are some unresolved contradictions among the chapters. For example, it is oftentimes pointed out that leadership and managerial abilities are not only personally based, but also contextually and situationally based yet most of the book focuses on the individual as leader or manager. Another example of a contradiction was the amount of discussion about the competencies of leaders followed by arguments in other chapters that stated that a focus on competencies was inadequate or lacked evidence of effectiveness. These contradictions underscore the difficulties of drawing a sharp focus on just what is meant by effective leadership and management. We are reminded of this difficulty in the opening lines of the chapter on measuring and assessing managers and leaders when the authors struggle with how to measure something that lacks a clear and precise definition. While the book repeatedly stresses the lack of clear and simple answers, it does a nice job of presenting a broad range of issues and topics that can help inform LMD.

Evaluation

The major strength of this book is the breadth of topics included and the emphasis on current theorizing and research on LMD. This breadth is also the source of its weakness. There is always a risk of losing focus in a book that is a collection of various topics by 38 authors. Thus, while there are very interesting chapters the overall vision is somewhat muddied.

Early on the editors recognize the confusion surrounding definitions and delimitations of leadership and leader, however there is little to clarify the thinking as demonstrated by different chapters using different definitions throughout. Also, it is unclear to this reviewer of the reason some chapters were included at the expense of others. For example: Even though several authors recognize the influence of contextual factors on their arguments about the individual qualifications of leadership and management, there is scant information on the context of leadership and management to complement the strong emphasis on individual capabilities. Furthermore, there are chapters arguing for the values of attending to issues of diversity, ethics, and evidence‐based management in LMD – arguments that are well‐known in organization and management studies – and yet it is curious that other critical issues are not included, such as work on complex, adaptive systems or structuration and activity theory perspectives, which provide insightful perspectives of organizations (context) and individuals. There is a notable lack of work presented on contextual and environmental constraints on leadership and leaders, despite the recurring theme that leadership is situational and contextually grounded.

Another missing feature was a concluding chapter that reflected on the numerous topics presented throughout and drew conclusions from the diverse issues in LMD. The editors opened with a wonderful overview of the field and then left the reader to make sense of the collection of topics. This might be a minor stylistic point, but an important theme of the book promoted the value of reflection and the editors missed an opportunity to help readers make sense of the book.

Despite these shortcomings, this reviewer found the breadth of work on leadership interesting and several chapters opened the doors to more in‐depth study of contemporary issues in leadership research and theory. Of specific interest were the chapters addressing strategic leadership, evidence‐based management, reflection, intuition, social constructionism, and narrative. As a general resource, this book is a good place to start.

In the authors' own words

Our  view  remains  that  those charged with development continue to offer a rather narrow focus   when   developing   individual   leaders  and  managers  …  We  argue   strongly   that leadership and management development activities need to address both distributed forms [of  leadership]  and  the  way  in  which  leaders  and  managers  need  to  develop  a  greater awareness and vision for the future, make judgments and act creatively. This aspect we refer to as “making history.” Retrospective sense‐making takes individuals only so far in a rapidly changing world: what is also required is imagination, judgment and vision.

About the reviewer

Russell Korte is an Assistant Professor in Human Resource Education, College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign. He has been a co‐investigator for the Collaborative Research Lab at Stanford University, a Research Assistant for the Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education, and is currently a Fellow with the Illinois Foundry for Innovation in Engineering Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign. His research investigates how students navigate their education and how graduates transition into the workplace – specifically studying how they learn the social norms of organizations and navigate the social and political systems in the workplace. Research interests include theory, philosophy, strategy, management, leadership, workplace learning and performance, socialization, adult education, social psychology, and organization studies.