What is new about leadership development? Since Plato’s time leadership has been much spoken about, but the question “Do we have enough leadership?” has not had an answer at any point of time, implying that as the world changed the perspective on leadership also needed to change. Leadership is a continuous journey of evolution, and not a destination.

In today’s organizational context Knowledge Workers form the significant portion of employees in knowledge based organizations. Their paradigm is found to be different from the traditional Industrial labor. While the organizational climate dimensions that were considered motivating earlier have moved on to being basic expectations, the organizations are challenged to take a deeper look into the kind of Organizational Climate that is required to nurture these knowledge workers.

We live in interesting, and damning, times. Despite the efforts of companies to build ethical cultures, the actions of a few who have traded integrity for profits have cast a shadow on all. Never has it been more important for businesses to ‘talk and walk the talk’ of what they stand for. Designing and understanding corporate cultures has been an uphill task for leadership and workers alike.

Historically research has focused on understanding and evaluating organizational culture, and not so much on designing processes that enable organizations to develop and manage their culture. In the face of continuing corporate breakdowns, it is crucial to address the critical importance of creating ethically viable corporate cultures. It is also imperative for corporate leadership to make an assessment of their organizations’ growth and eliminate the risk of corporate scandals.

Human Resource is one of the most important and dynamic capital in the growth of the organization. In the era of information and knowledge, the two most serious issues that plague industry are Retention and Development of human resource. The motivational theories of yesteryears propounded by Maslow and Vroom have proved to be of limited help in understanding and dealing with knowledge workers of the knowledge era. Standing on the threshold of the knowledge era and moving towards the era of consciousness we can sense a sea change in the expectations of the people working in the organization.

Social work researchers have eluded experimental studies in general and true experiments in particular due to its complexity. True Experimental Designs have maximum control and hence highest degree of internal validity. The essential components of an experimental research design involve (a) random assignments of subjects to experimental and control groups, (b) introducing the stimulus (independent variable) to the experimental group while withholding it from the control group, and (c) comparing the amount of change in dependent variable in experimental and control groups.

The field of leadership development has been moving in a direction over the past several years that point to a new perspective – a perspective that defines leadership more and more as an insight-driven state of awareness. This state of awareness and being is grounded in knowing the essence of who you are, what you aspire to be in your life, and aligning actions that are consistent with that aspiration. While technical skills and abilities remain an important element of the leadership equation, self-insight is increasingly becoming the mantra for helping executives to discover lasting insights that lead to more effective behaviors and more meaningful lives.

In a rapidly changing Industrial management scenario, the profile of the employee has moved towards that of a 'knowledge worker', chiefly characterized by his/her use of knowledge as tool of production. In this context, the concept of Belongingness must be move beyond that of a mere affiliative need to a tacit feeling element of the individual, which is manifested in his/her behaviour. This study attempts to derive the meaning of Belongingness in the current industrial organizations, the factors, which influence or bring forth the feeling of Belongingness and the supporting environmental factors from the employee perspective.

Over the years as consultants we have been helping organizations to understand their culture. We also got to work with quite a few software companies in enabling them to understand their culture. During our interactions with the software engineers, we soon realized that they were different from the engineers working in other industries. Hence, we decided to probe them and understand their likes, dislikes, attitudes etc. What emerged as result of this effort was - the profile of a software professional.

Over the years having worked with variety of groups and people, it is increasingly becoming evident that many of us fail to understand how to work in our own interest in the real sense. I have tried understanding what prevents us from being able to act in our own interest. One of the main reason for not being able to work in our interest is our in-ability to make the distinction between some of the critical factors of life…

‘Discovery’ is a Values Clarification Transformative Learning Tool aimed to introduce basic human values to a person and to initiate a process of self-enquiry, which takes care of the need to learn to learn. The tool is presented in the form of a game using ‘snake and ladder’ with hundred parables/stories forming the backbone of the game. The eleven theme-based spirally evolving charts are included to inquire into specific dimensions like team building, creativity, self-esteem, leadership, etc. With exploration as the key methodology, the players are taken through three levels of learning…