The Emergent Leadership Model: From the Stagnating to the Unbounded Culture

For many years, I have had a passion for personal development. As part of my research into this area, and its links to organizational performance, I have investigated in detail what occurs at both individual and collective levels in terms of individual mindset, behavior, beliefs and actions, leadership style and organizational outcomes. I studied various aspects of psychology, organizational behavior, complexity science, neuroscience, leadership theories, economics and so on. Based on this research, I produced the Emergent Leadership Model, which describes five levels that individuals go through during their development and corresponding organizational culture, as described in the following section. Some of the sources that have informed and influenced the development of this model include: Ken Wilber’s integral theory of consciousness,1 Jane Loevinger’s stages of ego development,2 Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs,3 Spiral dynamics model,4 Jane Loevinger’s stages of ego development,5 Susan Cook-Greuter’s Leadership Development Framework,6 Richard Barrett’s Seven Levels of Consciousness Model,7 Bruce Schneider’s Energy Leadership Model,8 Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development9 and research related to Tribal Leadership. 10 It is outside the purpose of this book to review all these theories and models in detail, though I have mapped the stages of some of these key models to the five levels of the Emergent Leadership Model, as detailed in Appendix 2.