SBIR-STTR Award

Prior research suggests that effective application of available cognitive capacities represents a crucial determinant of high-level organizational leadership. The effort proposed herein is intended to provide the infrastructure required for programmatic interventions concerned with developing these capacities so as to enhance managerial performance and organizational effectiveness. The first phase will begin with a systematic review of the literature bearing on the nature of cognitive development in adulthood. The extant literature, prior research, and available theory will then be used to specify the cognitive skills contributing to leadership performance as well as any temperament constructs factors and training interventions conditioning the development of and successful application of these cognitive skills in leadership settings. Subsequently, available measures of these attributes will be identified, and , if appropriate measures of these attributes are not available, new measures will be constructed. In the second phase of this investigation, these measures will provide a basis for establishing the causal impact of these cognitive skills and temperamental factors on leadership performance.

Benefits:
The research proposed herein should prove of substantial value to military, federal, and private sector organizations concerned with management development. More specifically, cognitive skill and temperamental measures will be generated for use in appraising individual training needs and assessing executive potential. Additionally, this descriptive base and the associated theoretical structure will provide a necessary framework for the design and evaluation of management development programs.

Keywords:
Leadership Adult Development Cognition Problem Solving Personality Performance Measurement Performance Development

Leader performance is an important determinant of long-term organizational success. Unfortunately, it has proven difficult to formulate sound principles for the identification and development of organizational leaders. In the first phase of this effort, a general theoretical model of leader performance was proposed, based on the postulate that leaders must be capable of identifying and solving problems in a variable and ill-defined organizational domain. This principle was then used to specify the capacities contributing to performance at different stages of a leader's career. The intent of the proposed effort is to test certain hypotheses derived from this model with special references to continuity and change in the requirements for leader performance with changes in age, experience, and positions. Thus, a cross-sequential design was proposed that considered multiple factors influencing performance. It is anticipated that the resulting measures of continuity and change derived form this model will provide the empirical infrastructure required for sequential and progressive leadership development efforts.