Modeling Youth Leadership: An Integration of Personality Development Theories and Ethics

Abstract

Although youth leadership has been well described within the literature, the dearth of theoretically derived models that specifically reflect ethics and comprehensive nature of youth development still remains. The purpose of this article is to synthesize the existing youth leadership research and theories of personality development to propose a model of youth leadership. The resulting model includes 5 major interconnected components, such as cognitive, socio-emotional, motivational, behavioral, and ethical. As part of the model, ethics is suggested as a core of youth leadership and its development. The model can be used to inform planning of contextually reflective leadership education, specific curriculum and developmental interventions.