Developing leadership behaviors in higher education: A quasi-experimental study on the effect of experiential and reflective learning methods

Higher education institutions are recently devoting a growing attention to the design of educational programs aiming at developing leadership. However, one of the main critiques moved to traditional leadership programs concerns the overreliance on cognitive training and technical skills, that limits the transfer of the behaviors learned during in-class lessons into participants’ real-life context. The purpose of this study is to analyze the effectiveness of a leadership education program for graduate students, which aims to promote an individual change in its participants in terms of development of a set of emotionally intelligent leadership behaviors. Through a quasi-experimental research design, this study analyzes the improvement in the adoption of leadership behaviors over time through self and external evaluation. In addition, this study explores the effectiveness of some learning techniques required to the students as assignments during the course (such as the definition of a learning plan and conducting structured self-reflections through journaling) in terms of their overall impact on the development of leadership behaviors. Results show that both the definition of a learning plan focused on specific individual change goals and the personal reflections on the practice of leadership behaviors improve leadership development. Moreover, engaging in both these learning techniques creates a synergistic effect on leadership development. Starting from these results, this study provides insights for educators and for higher educational institutions on how to improve the effectiveness of leadership programs favoring a process of perceivable individual change.