The Role of Four Life-Story Aspects in a Collaborative Decision-making Process in the Field of Leadership Development

Abstract

[...]the theoretical contributions of this paper entail advancing and integrating the existing literature of the life-story approach and collaborative decision-making in the leadership development field. D91 Introduction The decisions that leaders make influence a wide range of people's lives, which is why complex decision-making processes (Ginkel & Knippenberg, 2012; Larsen, Gray, & Eckstein, 2014) are inevitable for leaders, and it is the positive outcomes flowing from effective decisionmaking processes what leaders strive for (Mendes, Mendes, & Salleh, 2019). [...]leaders should definitely learn to develop relevant skills that make processes more effective. Leadership members, i.e. members of the leadership process, can only make decision-making processes more effective, if they rely on collaboration as an organizational form instead of other alternative forms, as are competition and cooperation (Snow, 2015). Leadership members collaborate for the purpose of acting authentically in such a process (Morse, 2010) compared with competition, whereby a leadership member is engaged to be a protagonist within the team (Garfield, Rueden, & Hagen, 2019), while cooperation is related to an individual's ability to feel empathy (willingness to sacrifice for the success of others in the team) towards the efforts of colleagues in a given circumstance within a decision-making process (Binmore, 2006).