We now know that leaders are mostly made, not born.

As organizations worldwide put a growing emphasis on finding, developing, and keeping leaders, leadership development has drawn from decades of research to become a discrete scholarly field of organizational psychology.

Establishing a framework for this field can help individuals and organizations create and expand their capabilities for effective leadership.

In their article “Leadership Development: An Outcome-Oriented Review Based on Time and Levels of Analyses,” David Day and Lisa Dragoni outline this framework and review the current knowledge to set up a theoretical foundation for future research.

“Leader development” implies a focus on individual leaders to identify short-term indicators that the work will bring about positive long-term outcomes. In this first video, Dr. Day, of the University of Western Australia, tells us more:

Once these indicators are established, Dr. Day goes on to explain that effectiveness of leadership should not be the goal of research and intervention. Instead, the goal should be to expand and enhance a leader’s capacity to be effective:

Beyond the individual, there are things organizations can do to foster leadership. In this video, Dr. Dragoni discusses the conditions that support leadership development. These include interpersonal comfort among team members, their expertise, and a shared mindset:

Lastly, Dr. Dragoni presents new avenues of research for leadership development. She insists that it is important to be very clear about the definition of the terms in order to advance this science.

Read the article in the 2015 Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, with our compliments.