Research on developing management and leadership expertise

Thanks so much for sharing this and doing this research!

Regarding this:

That high performance on measures of leadership effectiveness causes organisational success, rather than organisational success inspiring high performance on (or at least more positive evaluations of) measures of leadership effectiveness. Given that the research is almost exclusively correlational,[36] we cannot be confident that this assumption is correct. However, this seems to me to be intuitively likely.

The Halo Effect is a compendium of evidence to the contrary. Basically, leaders who are good at one thing (e.g. maximizing revenue) are considered to be good at everything else (e.g. being humble). It has great examples of how the exact same CEO behavior is described positively versus negatively as the company's stock price fluctuates.

I would recommend at least skimming the book – it has really helped me differentiate useful from less useful business research.

One thing I found really interesting about this research is statements like these:

Therefore, though transformational leadership has been contrasted to transactional leadership (with the former being suggested to be superior), the use of contingent reward behaviours seems similarly effective to transformational leadership.

It sounds very believable to me that ~0% of "nonobvious" leadership recommendations don't outperform a "placebo". (Or, as you suggest, are only good subject to contingencies like personal fit.)

I would be curious if doing this review gave you a sense of what the "control group" for leadership could be?

I'm imagining something like:

1. Your team has reasonably well defined goals
2. Your team has the ability to make progress towards those goals
3. Your team is not distracted from those goals by some major problem (e.g. morale, bureaucracy)

We might hypothesize that any team which meets 1-3 will not have its performance improved by "transformational" leadership etc.

Do you know if anyone has studied or hypothesized such a thing? If not, do you have a sense from your research of what this might look like?

Do you know what these researchers are measuring when looking at the "results" level?

If I'm understanding correctly, they are claiming that training increases some sort of result by 0.6 standard deviations, which seems huge. E.g. if some corporate training increased quarterly revenue by 0.6 sd's that would be quite shocking.

(I tried to read through the meta-analyses but I could only find their descriptions of how the four levels differ, and nothing about what the results level looks like.)