Developing Employees’ Mental Complexity: Transformational Leadership as a Catalyst in Employee Development

Abstract

As organizations grapple with greater complexity in the competitive business environment, more work is needed to understand how to create a human capability equal to the challenge. Research on adult learning suggests that increasing mental complexity, an individual’s system for processing information and making sense of their environment, can be a valuable way to help individuals become more adaptive in a complex environment and enhance performance. While there is evidence that this human capability can grow over time, individual growth does not come without considerable effort, and such growth can be facilitated by the right contextual factors. In this article, we examine the role of leaders in employee development. Synthesizing literature from adult learning and transformational leadership, we lay out a theoretical framework for why transformational leadership and its corresponding behaviors can serve as a mechanism to encourage developmental movement within an employee and increase mental complexity. We discuss the implications for human resource development.