Maturity of the Organisational Leadership Development Process – Development and Validation of an Afrocentric Measure

Abstract

Organisations spend enormous amounts of money on leadership development. Yet, these organisations do not necessarily know exactly in which leadership development programmes or areas they should invest for each level of work (leadership). The purpose of this study was to develop and validate a measure of the maturity of the organisational leadership development process that is fit for use in southern Africa across the different levels of leadership. This measure consists of two instruments, namely the qualitative Social Perspective Profiling and the quantitative Leadership Development Process Maturity Index. Both these instruments were validated against two large multinational southern African organisations and revealed different levels of maturity of the leadership development process across the levels of leadership in these organisations. As a result, southern African organisations are now able to measure themselves against the benchmark areas that represent the maturity of the leadership development process. This will allow these organisations to close the gap between their leadership development process status quo for each level of leadership and what is most or least critical from a leadership development point of view, which will result in an improved return on learning and the increased success of these organisations.