Many full-time MBA programs limit their effectiveness by clinging to functionalism. At best, they have made incremental changes to meet the market demand for MBA graduates. These changes, in most cases, have failed to integrate the various functional facets of complex business challenges. For insights into how to do so, many business schools need look no further than their own executive programs. Executive programs typically emphasize the synergistic use of core competencies and delivery systems in a way that enables one to truly master business administration.
The positivist tradition for studying leadership involves correlational analyses and manipulation of an independent variable to determine the effect on a dependent variable while holding all other variables constant. Despite voluminous empirical data, an understanding of leadership has remained elusive. This article proposes the convergence of an arts-informed qualitative research with positivist methodologies, opening up space for a nontraditional approach to understanding leadership that is storied, embodied, and participatory. The epistemological pluralism of arts-informed research, rooted in the literary, visual, and performing arts, generates possibilities for understanding the tacit personal worldview of culturally diverse leaders who, as the result of globalization and changing demographics, are reaching leadership positions. Through a process of reflexivity, knowledge of the particular, and shared meaning-making, this approach has the potential to inform scholarship by enabling researchers to tap into and appreciate emotional as well as cognitive processes that differentiate and explain the behavior of leaders.
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