Personal Development Planning and Vertical Leadership Development in a VUCA World

To explore how personal development can be utilized as a tool for leaders to adapt to our VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world, a qualitative study was conducted on the narrative experiences of eight leaders who had successfully completed personal development plans. The emerging field of vertical leadership development, recognized as a unique developmental approach towards overcoming complexity and uncertainty, was connected to the key themes of personal development planning. Vertical leadership development and personal development planning were united across five conceptual themes: development and application of skills, self-awareness, self-efficacy, self-exploration, and continuous improvement. The experiences of the participants helped to inform how their plans connected with these themes, and how plan success and retention can be ensured overall. The study found that plans are at their most successful when they are thoroughly structured with the individual’s personal goals in mind, have direct application to the participant’s working life, and are supported by some degree of accountability and/or reflection. The study observed thematic connections between conventional personal development plans and vertical leadership development, highlighting potential connections between developmental approaches that are focused on boosting skills competency and capacity in times of VUCA. The findings help to inform how personal development plans can best serve as a resource towards managing complexity, uncertainty, and change.

Older People With Dementia Running a Pop-Up Restaurant: How to Use Reality Shows to Reduce the Stigma of Dementia

The present study focused on a Chinese reality show, Forget Me Not Café, which brought together five older people (aged 65 and older) living with dementia to run a pop-up restaurant and intended to reduce the stigma of dementia. The study aims to explore how the reality-show participants describe dementia in older people and how their views relate to the macrosocial context of dementia and older people. This study performed a thematic discourse analysis on the written and spoken content about dementia in older people (or later life) presented in the reality show. Four discursive themes were identified including: (1) age is a risk factor for dementia; (2) early signs and symptoms of dementia in older people deserve attention; (3) putting pressure on family caregivers of people with dementia; (4) expectations to maintain social engagement and slow down the development of dementia. This study also found that the views of the reality-show participants highlight the capability of older people with dementia to communicate effectively and live with the condition, their personal goals of sustaining a happy, meaningful and sociable life, as well as their actions to positively influence personal circumstances. The results of this study indicate that this reality show might help reduce the stigma of dementia and empower older people living with dementia, while it also tends to stress the responsibility for care on family carers and shift the responsibility of managing the dementia-related challenges to older people living with dementia.

Does Personal Goal Pursuit Alleviate Family Caregiver Stress?

Family caregivers may experience reduced stress by maintaining their sense of self throughout their time in a caregiving role. Working towards personal goals is helpful for maintaining a sense of self, but pursuing one’s own goals amidst caregiving responsibilities may be challenging. In this study, we analyze the processes by which caregivers pursue their own personal goals – and how those processes impact daily stress – in an effort to develop a deeper understanding of goal-pursuit as a potential caregiver stress-reducing strategy. We utilized daily data from spousal (N=256 days) and adult-child (N=400 days) caregivers who participated in the PULSE (Personal Understandings of Life and Social Experiences) Project, a 100-day microlongitudinal study on goal pursuit amongst people 50 and older (Hooker et al., 2013). In daily surveys, caregivers reported progress made towards a personally-identified health and social goal, along with a 4-item measure of daily stress. We ran multi-level models to assess how daily goal progress was associated with same-day stress. Spousal caregivers’ daily stress was lower on days when their health goal (Estimate = -1.07, SE = 0.20, p<.0001) and social goal (Estimate = -0.97, SE = 0.15, p<.0001) progress was higher. Similarly, adult-child caregivers’ daily stress was lower on days when their health goal (Estimate = -0.67, SE = 0.19, p<.001) and social goal (Estimate = -0.52, SE 0.24, p=0.03) progress was higher. Results support the hypothesis that maintaining personally-meaningful goals can alleviate caregiver stress, and is a promising tool for caregiver health promotion.

Growing and Adapting During Continuous Change: Building Employee Resilience in the Public Sector

This chapter focuses on employee resilience in the public sector, and how managers can develop it. We adopt a contemporary view of employee resilience as a set of employee behaviours that can be developed, particularly through effective leadership. Employee resilience is an individual-level behavioural capacity, centred on using networks successfully, learning from experiences and adapting to change; behaviours that are essential for navigating the complex public management environment. We build on the view that resilience enables individuals to engage in exploration, learn from mistakes and grow from challenges. It can be fostered daily, enabling individuals to build capacity to handle challenges and crises before they emerge, and responding effectively when they do occur. This chapter discusses why and how resilient behaviours matter in public contexts, particularly in highly ambiguous knowledge intensive organizations (KIOs). It also discusses the crucial role that managers play in enabling resilience in employees, and focuses on the characteristics of resilience-enabling leadership. These characteristics include leadership behaviours such as viewing resilience as developable, supporting employees’ personal goals, providing challenging tasks and opportunities for safe failures and managing the whole team. In short, our contribution extends empirical understandings of resilience in public sector workplaces, with specific regard to employee resilience, its nature and development and its outcomes.

Investigating educative mentoring for provisionally certificated teachers in the New Zealand primary school

<p>The Guidelines for Induction and Mentoring and Mentor Teachers were published in 2011 by the New Zealand Teachers Council. The Guidelines signalled a shift from what had been an induction programme based on advice and guidance to one that involved educative mentoring. These guidelines were developed to support the provision of nationally consistent, high quality, and comprehensive support for provisionally certificated teachers (PCTs). This qualitative investigation used an interpretative case study approach to describe what educative mentoring looked like in three New Zealand primary schools. Data were gathered using an online survey, interviews, recorded meeting and analysis of documents. The findings were that mentors and provisionally registered teachers had differing levels of understanding of educative mentoring. While mentors espoused using educative mentoring components (Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand, 2015a, pp. 25-26) this did not appear to be happening in practice. This suggests the need for mentor training if educative mentoring is to become embedded. Mentors need training to understand what educative mentoring really means. In particular the elements of deconstruction (describing, analysing, and discussing evidence) and co-construction (setting new personal goals) were missing to some degree in each relationship investigated. The process of induction and mentoring is to develop practice and ultimately for the provisionally registered teacher to attain the Practising Teacher Criteria. However this study revealed that the developmental process of practice appears to be more focused on meeting the Practising Teacher Criteria than developing understanding through the setting of personal goals.</p>

Investigating educative mentoring for provisionally certificated teachers in the New Zealand primary school

<p>The Guidelines for Induction and Mentoring and Mentor Teachers were published in 2011 by the New Zealand Teachers Council. The Guidelines signalled a shift from what had been an induction programme based on advice and guidance to one that involved educative mentoring. These guidelines were developed to support the provision of nationally consistent, high quality, and comprehensive support for provisionally certificated teachers (PCTs). This qualitative investigation used an interpretative case study approach to describe what educative mentoring looked like in three New Zealand primary schools. Data were gathered using an online survey, interviews, recorded meeting and analysis of documents. The findings were that mentors and provisionally registered teachers had differing levels of understanding of educative mentoring. While mentors espoused using educative mentoring components (Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand, 2015a, pp. 25-26) this did not appear to be happening in practice. This suggests the need for mentor training if educative mentoring is to become embedded. Mentors need training to understand what educative mentoring really means. In particular the elements of deconstruction (describing, analysing, and discussing evidence) and co-construction (setting new personal goals) were missing to some degree in each relationship investigated. The process of induction and mentoring is to develop practice and ultimately for the provisionally registered teacher to attain the Practising Teacher Criteria. However this study revealed that the developmental process of practice appears to be more focused on meeting the Practising Teacher Criteria than developing understanding through the setting of personal goals.</p>

Personal Goals as Moderators of a Cognitive-Behavioural Intervention for Depressive Symptoms in College Students

The objective of this pilot study was to assess the effects of the indicated level of a multilevel preventive program on depressive symptoms and to examine personal goals appraisal as a moderating factor among college students aged between 16 and 29 years old with depressive symptoms. Students were screened for anxious and depressive symptoms in the beginning of their semester. Those who scored higher than the cut-off score were invited to be part of the intervention group. A comparison group was formed with students who did not wish to participate with the intervention group. Thirty-six students were included in the analyses. Both groups completed pre-test, post-test, and follow-up questionnaires. Results indicated a reduction in depressive symptoms at post-test and these gains were maintained three months later. Students in the intervention group with a more positive appraisal of their academic and career goals showed fewer depressive symptoms than students in the intervention group with a less positive appraisal of these goals. Limitations and implications for further implementation are discussed.

Self-Determination Competencies, (Dis)Agreement in Decision-Making, and Personal Well-Being of Adults with Mild Intellectual Disabilities in Hong Kong

Background: The self-determination of people with an intellectual disability (ID) in the contexts of adulthood and Chinese culture is under-examined in the field of ID, even though the concept of self-determination has vigorously developed in recent decades. This study examined the relationship between self-determination competencies and the personal well-being of adults with mild ID in Hong Kong, as well as their personal goals and decision-making (dis)agreements with their significant others. Methods: We interviewed 170 participants using the AIR Self-Determination Scale—Chinese Version (AIR SDS-C) and the Personal Well-Being—Intellectual Disability (Cantonese) (PWI-C), along with a self-constructed questionnaire. Results: When the demographic characteristics were controlled, self-determination competencies correlated positively with personal well-being (r = 0.313, p < 0.001), diverse personal goals were identified, and agreement with significant others was dominant in both daily and major decision-making. Conclusions: A positive correlation between self-determination and personal well-being was confirmed in a Chinese population with mild ID. These findings expand the understanding of the types of personal goals and agreement patterns of people with mild ID and yield implications for further research and practices.

Personal Achievement Goals, Learning Strategies, and Perceived IT Affordances

What people perceive when they interact with technologies are not the features and functionalities of the technology but rather the behaviors it affords them. Affordance perception determines how organizational information technology (IT) is used by employees and the benefits they provide to organizations and their members. In this article, we explain how employees who pursue different personal goals and use various learning strategies come to perceive different IT affordances. We identify three distinct pathways: (1) performance-avoidance goals are positively associated with surface processing, which leads to perceptions of common in-role IT affordances; (2) performance-approach goals are positively associated with surface processing and effort regulation and these learning strategies lead to perceptions of common and specialized in-role IT affordances; and (3) mastery goals are associated with deep processing, effort regulation, and peer learning, which are positively associated with perceptions of specialized in-role and extra-role IT affordances. By identifying the different pathways to perceived affordances, the article identifies potential interventions that can help managers steer employees toward certain affordances and away from other, less desirable affordances.