Leadership and Emotional Intelligence

cited journaling – the practice of reflecting on one’s leadership experiences – as an
important developmental tool.
This section concludes the discussion of scholarly literature as regards leader and
leadership development, and research amalgamating leader(ship) development with EI.
Attention now turns to learning. Leader development and learning are interrelated:
“Making explicit the approach to leadership development and linking approaches to
learning (given time, resources, organizational culture, etc.) is ... one part of the equation
[for leader development learning to be part of the organization’s fabric]” (Allen &
Hartman, 2008, p. 18). Two adult learning theories, experiential and situated learning,
are acutely relevant. As such, this literature review is delimited in terms of not
describing the panoply of adult learning theories. The following section commences
with a general review of learning and adult learning.
Learning
For purposes of this study, the Illeris (2007) definition of learning was used:
Learning is “any process that in living organisms leads to permanent capacity change and
which is not solely due to biological maturation of ageing” (p. 3). The study’s focus is on
adult learning, a surging research topic given longer life expectancies (Halpern, 2004),
which is briefly discussed in the next section.
Adult Learning
Illeris (2007) noted that “it becomes quite clear that people in different life ages
generally have essentially different motivational structures and different perspectives on
learning” (p. 197). Given this premise, the question is: How do adults learn? Children