Childhood and Adolescence: Developmental Assets

Understanding the Leaders of Tomorrow: The Need to Study Leadership in Adolescence

“…Also note that leadership is contextual and dynamic (Day et al, 2014), arising with respect to a given combination of individuals and in a specific situation, each of which may contain both facilitating and constraining features that evolve over time (Dinh et al, 2014;Murphy & Johnson, 2011). This latter point illuminates how the developmental focus of adolescent leadership is substantively compatible with theoretical frameworks of adolescent development more generally (Lerner et al, 2015). It is also important to acknowledge research showing that leadership potential and propensity emerges in childhood, well before adolescence.…”

“…In organizations, industrial-organizational psychologists are often hired to perform this mapping via job-analysis techniques to specify job requirements that inform appropriate recruitment, selection, training, and promotion processes (Morgeson et al, 2019). Indeed, this practice in the organizational literature is consistent with the developmental concept of mapping "individual assets" to "ecological assets" to promote youths' thriving (e.g., Lerner et al, 2015). This therefore calls for additional multilevel research and application given data with time points nested in developing adolescents, who, in turn, are nested in academic, family, and career-related environments.…”

“…We begin with a theoretical justification for focusing on adolescent-leadership emergence. In general, critical-developmental periods throughout the lifespan—such as adolescence—represent times of heightened vulnerability because of accelerating maturity or development (Dahl et al, 2018; Lerner et al, 2015; Steinberg, 2005). These periods are “vulnerable” not only to risk but also to opportunities for development of a host of constructs, skills, and tasks.…”

“…Drawing on the rich scientific knowledge base on adolescent development, we identity many topics that likely have relevance for leadership emergence and development. Generally speaking, adolescent development occurs in rich, multilayered contexts, including biological, cognitive, and personality development in the individual; the context of the peer group; and external contextual factors, such as the societies, time periods, and institutions within which adolescents are embedded (Lerner et al, 2015). Here we highlight some of the key aspects of adolescent development across these different contextual levels alongside key findings from leadership research in adults to identify potential points of synergy ripe for more fully developed integration.…”

“…By bringing together expertise from different areas of psychological science, interdisciplinary teams can advance scientific understanding of early leadership. We further underscore the negative consequences of neglecting this area of research, including (a) missed opportunities for youths to recognize and nurture their own leadership potential (Lerner et al, 2015); (b) the wasted resources in schools, neighborhoods, and communities that are launching leadership-development programs that lack a comprehensive scientific foundation to justify large-scale investments of time and resources (Carroll & Firth, 2021; Karagianni & Montgomery, 2018); and (c) the consequences borne by society as a whole from ineffectual or incompetent high-stakes leadership (Hogan & Kaiser, 2005). The need and demand for this type of work are clear; it will take interdisciplinary teams of scientists and practitioners sharing and working across their areas of experience and expertise to meet this call effectively.…”