What’s Emotion Got to Do with It? The Role of Emotion in Transformative Leader Development

This study examines the process of navigating emotions in transformative leader development and is comprised of an analysis of interviews with senior leaders who have completed executive coaching as a client in the past 12 months. Emotions affect the deep structures that motivate and guide leaders’ thinking and action, but the leader development literature does not provide a sufficient explanation for the role of emotions in transformative development. Therefore, executive coaches and adult learning practitioners lack a conceptual framework to facilitate the leader’s experience of emotion. The primary outcomes of the study are deeper understandings of how emotion catalyzes or impedes the development journey, and identifying the conditions necessary to engage and stay in the journey. The study reveals a bias for explaining cognitive processes and leads to under theorized roles of emotions in deep learning processes in adulthood.

Author

• Elliott, Maryanne Honeycutt

Language

• en

Keyword

• Executive coaching
• Emotion
• Leadership development
• Transformational learning

Date created

• 2021

Type of Work

• Dissertation

License

• All rights reserved

Rights statement

• In Copyright

GW Unit

• Human & Organizational Learning

Degree

• Ed.D.

Advisor

• Scully-Russ, Ellen

Committee Member(s)

• Yakamura , Yoshie
• Miser , Martha

Persistent URL

•  https://scholarspace.library.gwu.edu/etd/12579s89c