Developing Leader Character: Finding a Way Forward

<p>We provide a reflexive critique on the <em>Academy of Management Learning and Education's</em> best paper award given to "Developing Leadership Character in Business Programs" (Crossan, Mazutis, Seijts & Gandz, 2013), surfacing underlying assumptions and persisting limitations in the field of leader character development. We offer and employ a theoretical framework that poses a set of interconnected questions: <em>Why do we need to develop leader character? How do we move from awareness of leader character to the habituation of leader character? What do we need to know to develop leader character?</em> We insert <em>who</em> as the center point of management learning and education generally and leader character development especially. We offer a way forward with the goal of encouraging discussion, imagination, and collaboration across disciplines and across the research, teaching, and practice cycle to spur the next decade of action in relation to developing leader character.</p> <p>We offer a thoughtful critique of the article "Developing the Character of Leaders in Business Programs" (Crossan, Mazutis, Seijts, & Gandz, 2013), which received the <em>Academy of Management Learning and Education's</em> Best Paper of the Year award, and bring to light the underlying premises and limitations that persist in the area of leadership character development. We propose and use a theoretical framework that poses a set of interconnected questions: Why do we need to develop character in the context of leadership? How do we go from having awareness or knowledge of the character of leaders to creating habits of character in leadership? What do we need to know to develop the character of leaders? We place emphasis on "who we are" as the central point of learning and educating business management, in general, and of character development in leadership, in particular. We offer a way forward with the aim of fostering debate, imagination and collaboration across disciplines and across the cycle of research, teaching and practice to drive the next decade of action in relation to character development in leadership.</p>