TITLE:
Teaching Leadership Better: A Framework for Developing Contextually-Intelligent Leadership
AUTHORS:
Josephine Chinying Lang
KEYWORDS:
Contextual Intelligence, Leadership, Requisite Complexity, Active Learning, Social Complexity, Self-Complexity, Affective Complexity, Situation Awareness, Situation Judgment, Sense-Making, Contextual Adaptation, Assessment Rubrics
JOURNAL NAME:
Creative Education,
Vol.10 No.2,
February
25,
2019
ABSTRACT: This paper discusses the importance of context, which is that which makes content relevant and meaningful. It highlights what context ought to mean for organizational leaders, given today’s business environment of crunching change. Based on published research about context, this paper develops a model of contextual intelligence, upon which better ways of teaching leadership may be cultivated. This model encompasses four concerns, namely: contextual sense-making; situation awareness and situation judgment; contextual adaptation; and, response judgment. Next, the paper focuses on the requisite complexity that leaders should acquire if they are to operationalize such a model. That requisite complexity comprises four components, namely: general cognitive complexity; social complexity; affective complexity; and, self-complexity. The paper finally delineates a pedagogical framework to develop leadership training programs that can better foster the requisite complexity in individuals to become contextually-intelligent leaders.