academy of management learning & education up close and...

Up Close and Personal:Building Foundations for

Leaders’ Development Throughthe Personalization ofManagement Learning

GIANPIERO PETRIGLIERIINSEAD

JACK DENFELD WOODIMD

JENNIFER LOUISE PETRIGLIERIHarvard University

Courses that aim to foster reflection and personal development in the service of leaders’development are increasingly popular within MBA curricula and executive educationportfolios. We explore the process through which these courses enrich their institutionalcontext and enhance students’ ongoing development and practice of leadership. Throughan inductive, qualitative study of the Personal Development Elective, an offering withinthe leadership curriculum of an international MBA that gives students the option to workwith a psychotherapist, we develop a model of how the interplay between the regressiveand holding features of an intensive management program foster the personalization ofmanagement learning. The personalization process, we posit, allows managementeducation to provide the foundations for leaders’ development by transformingpotentially regressive experiences into material for participants’ personal learning,experimentation, and growth.

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Twenty-five centuries after it was engraved abovethe entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, theadmonition to “Know Thyself” has gained promi-nence in management education. At the dawn ofthe 21st century, a special issue of the HarvardBusiness Review declared self-awareness to be

“leadership’s first commandment” (Collingwood,2001: 8), and not long after, the advisory council tothe Stanford Graduate School of Business deemedit the most important ability for leaders to develop(George, Sims, McLean, & Mayer, 2007). Concur-rently, a burgeoning stream of academic work hasdrawn a link between identity development andleaders’ development (Carroll & Levy, 2010; Day &Harrison, 2007; DeRue & Ashford, 2010a; Ibarra,Snook, & Guillen Ramo, 2010; Lord & Hall, 2005;Shamir & Eilam, 2005), with some even suggestingthat “leader development is largely personal de-velopment. A major aspect of personal develop-ment is the process of becoming more aware ofone’s self” (Hall, 2004: 154). Business leaders, prac-titioners, and scholars seem to agree that it is timefor the motto that was once central to the education

We are grateful to Henrik Bresman, Declan Fitzsimons, RobinFryer, Jonathan Gosling, Herminia Ibarra, Janet Shaner, JamesSpee, and Mark Stein for their thoughtful suggestions and com-ments. Special Issue Coeditor Sim Sitkin and two anonymousreviewers provided invaluable guidance throughout the devel-opment of this manuscript. An earlier version of the paperreceived the Graduate Management Admission Council Awardfor the most significant contribution to graduate managementeducation at the 2011 Academy of Management Meeting in SanAntonio. The research reported here was partially funded by theIMD Research & Development Department.

� Academy of Management Learning & Education, 2011, Vol. 10, No. 3, 430–450. http://dx.doi.org/10.5465/amle.2010.0032

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of future leaders in the open-air amphitheaters ofthe Greek polis to be taken as seriously in theindoor amphitheaters of modern business schools.

Congruent with this emerging consensus, is agrowing interest in pedagogical approaches thatreach into the intrapersonal domain and encour-age reflection upon the ways students’ personalhistory, idiosyncrasies, and aspirations affect theirperceptions, decisions, and behavior. The aim ofthese approaches is to help managers outgrowlimiting sensitivities (Kaiser & Kaplan, 2006), andto meet “the challenge of developing the wholeperson” (Boyatzis, Stubbs, & Taylor, 2002: 151; seealso Hoover, Giambatista, Sorenson, & Bommer,2010). They build on the assumption that whilepersonal competencies, such as self-awarenessand self-management, may be the hardest to mea-sure and develop (Spencer & Spencer, 1993), theyrepresent the foundations on which the ongoingdevelopment and successful exercise of leadershiprest (Day, 2001; Day, Harrison, & Halpin, 2009; Ho-gan & Warrenfeltz, 2003; Luthans & Avolio, 2003).Despite the ubiquitous language of “transforma-tion” and “personal development” in managementeducation brochures,1 whether and how such de-velopment takes place in programs (such as MBAprograms) that remove students from their workenvironments for extended periods is a matter ofscholarly debate (Mintzberg & Gosling, 2002; Star-key & Tempest, 2009).

We contribute to this debate through an induc-tive study of the Personal Development Elective(PDE), a course embedded in the leadership curric-ulum of an international MBA program that offersstudents the opportunity to work regularly with apsychotherapist for elective credit. Introduced withthe expectation that a handful of participantsmight be interested, the PDE soon became one ofthe most highly rated and distinctive electives inthe program and has drawn the participation ofover 60% of each class in the decade since itsinception. On the one hand, the popularity of thePDE appears to run counter to the stigma usuallyassociated with seeing a psychotherapist and tothe reported lack of interest MBA students have forpeople-focused courses (Rynes, Trank, Lawson, &Ilies, 2003) and “probing into the patterns thatmake up a life” (Gosling & Mintzberg, 2006: 419). By

contrast, it echoes reports of students’ appreciationfor courses that offer opportunities for pause andreflection amidst the pace and pressure of theirmanagement studies and careers (Snook, 2007).MBA curricula and executive education portfoliosin many business schools increasingly featurecourses that endeavor to “open the minds andhearts of executives and stimulate reflection ontheir lives” (Mirvis, 2008: 174; see also George, 2011;Petriglieri, 2011). These courses respond to callsfor management education to be more mindful ofhow it not only enriches managers’ knowledgeand ability, but also influences their identity(Petriglieri & Petriglieri, 2010).

Our aim here is not to advocate for the PDE’sunique approach, compare it to other approaches,or test its efficacy in achieving a set of pedagogi-cal aims. We aim to develop theory, through aqualitative study, about the process through whichcourses of the kind mentioned above may enrichtraditional curricula and contribute to students’ de-velopment as leaders. As an exemplar of thosepopular yet vaguely mysterious management edu-cation offers that focus on “personal development”in the service of leaders’ development, the PDE andMBA in which it is embedded provided a researchsetting well suited to investigate a question oftheoretical and practical relevance: “How can amanagement education curriculum foster thetransformational learning that enables ongoingleader development?”

Our findings suggest that this occurs through aprocess of personalization, by which students ex-amine their experience and revisit their life storiesas part and parcel of management learning. Thisprocess complements the acquisition of conceptualknowledge and analytic skills from traditionalcoursework, strengthens students’ abilities in thedomain of self-awareness and self management,and allows them to clarify, revise, and integratetheir life narratives. In the program we studied, theprocess was ignited by students’ encounters with aset of MBA features—its encapsulation, novelty,and intensity—that rendered the program a regres-sive domain, that is, a social context that provokedand amplified individuals’ experience and enact-ment of habitual responses and personal sensitiv-ities. While the roots of issues explored in the PDEreached beyond the MBA, these issues emerged,and were vividly experienced, in the context of theprogram’s activities and relations. Two groups ofMBA features—institutional and interpersonal—affected how students interpreted, dealt with, andlearned from the stressful and puzzling experi-ences sparked by the regressive domain. Together,these features provided a holding environment

1 In March 2011, visiting the Web pages where the top-10 pro-grams in the Financial Times’ (2011) Global MBA Ranking de-scribed their distinctive features, we found 7 programs usingthe language of “transformation,” 2 mentions of “personal de-velopment,” and 2 mentions of “life-changing” experiences. Alltook place in business schools whose mission statements, asnoted by Snook (2007), focused on developing “leaders.”

2011 431Petriglieri, Wood, and Petriglieri

within the MBA, that is, a social context that re-duced disturbing affect and facilitated sense mak-ing (Petriglieri & Petriglieri, 2010; Winnicott, 1975).Institutional holding features framed students’problematic MBA experiences as learning oppor-tunities. Interpersonal ones in general, and thePDE in particular, sustained students’ engagementin a combination of self-clarification, emotionalprocessing, and planning of behavioral experi-ments. This framing and work, in turn, fosteredparticipants’ reflective engagement in every as-pect of the MBA. Reflective engagement, definedas the discipline to examine one’s experiences,acknowledge and manage one’s emotions, and at-tempt behavioral experiments in conditions of un-certainty and pressure, allowed students to dealmore constructively with potentially regressive ex-periences and to cultivate personal abilities thatsustain ongoing leader development.

Articulating how management education canbuild the foundations on which the development ofleaders rests, our study contributes to understand-ing the personal aspect of leader development,which has been deemed essential in conceptualscholarship (Ibarra et al., 2010; Lord & Hall, 2005;Shamir & Eilam, 2005) but has received scant em-pirical attention. While more research in a varietyof settings is undoubtedly needed to test and refinethe model proposed here, our study suggests thatcurricula which foster the personalization of man-agement learning may transform potentially re-gressive features common to many “boot-camp”-like management education programs into thesource of, and ground for, personal learning anddevelopment. In doing so, we bridge the focus ofthis special issue of the Academy of ManagementLearning & Education with the broader debate onthe values, purpose, and functions of managementeducation (Bennis & O’toole, 2005; Ghoshal, 2005;Khurana, 2007; Mintzberg, 2004; Petriglieri &Petriglieri, 2010; Pfeffer & Fong, 2002; Podolny,2009).

LEARNING FOR LEADERSHIP:HOW AND WHERE?

There is broad agreement that learning from expe-riences of leading and following is the primarymechanism through which leaders develop (DeRue& Wellman, 2009; Kolb, 1984; McCall, 1998). Learn-ing from experience is an active, personal, andsocial process. The ways we examine, the infer-ences we draw from, and the actions we take inresponse to experiences are influenced by “theimages, assumptions, and stories that we carry inour minds of ourselves and others” (Raelin, 2007:

509). These, in turn, are rooted in and reinforced bythe social systems—families, schools, organiza-tions, and communities—in which we have beenand are embedded (Reynolds & Vince, 2004). Thisunderpins the suggestion that leader developmentmust guide individuals in becoming conscious ofand examining those inner images, assumptions,and stories—and in revising them when they arefound to limit ongoing development (Dominick,Squires, & Cervone, 2010; Kets de Vries & Korotov,2007; Ligon & Hunter, 2010).

Capturing an emerging consensus, Hackmanand Wageman (2007) argued that a key question inleadership studies is not “what should be taught inleadership courses, but how can leaders be helpedto learn?” (46, italics in original). Viewed from thisperspective, the function of leadership courses isto enable participants to make new meaning of,and draw more meaning from, their past and on-going experiences to support and accelerate theirdevelopment as leaders (Avolio & Hannah, 2008;Snook, 2007). Fulfilling this function entails devel-oping individuals’ self-awareness (Luthans & Avo-lio, 2003) and their ability to manage the ambiguityand anxiety attendant to leadership (Hackman &Wageman, 2007) and experiences that develop it(DeRue & Ashford, 2010b), so that they can exam-ine, draw lessons from, and integrate those expe-riences into their life narratives (Bennis & Thomas,2002; Shamir & Eilam, 2005).

Putting it in the language of educational schol-ars, courses that aim to develop leaders must beless concerned with informational learning, whichfocuses on “the acquisition of more skills and anincreased fund of knowledge” (Portnow, Popp,Broderick, Drago-Severson, & Kegan, 1998: 22), andmore with transformational learning, which in-volves reflection on one’s life experiences, corebeliefs, and ways of making sense of the world andoneself, thus affecting “a deep and pervasive shiftin a [person’s] perspective and understanding”(Portnow et al., 1998: 22). Whether managementeducation can foster the transformational learningthat supports and accelerates leaders’ develop-ment, however, is a matter of scholarly debate.

Transformational learning involves engagingwith and examining practice and experience asthey occur (Raelin, 2007; Schön, 1983); conse-quently, critics have argued that transformationcannot take place within courses, such as full-timeMBA programs, that remove participants for longperiods from the organizations and communities inwhich the practice of leading and managing for-mally takes place (Mintzberg & Gosling, 2002). Ac-cording to this view, such courses offer the worst ofboth worlds. They remove individuals from the

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flow of “real” work experience—the raw materialof meaningful learning—and immerse them in ed-ucational systems that privilege discipline-based,abstract knowledge while replicating the relent-less pace, task focus, and reflective deprivation ofwork environments (Gosling & Mintzberg, 2006).

A different view focuses on the opportunitiesthat such courses provide. Managers often attendbusiness schools as a way to facilitate career tran-sitions (Ibarra, 2003), and use them as “identityworkspaces,” that is, settings in which to questionand shape their personal and professional identity(Petriglieri & Petriglieri, 2010). During transitionsbetween roles, individuals are more open to ques-tioning their identity and career trajectory (Schein,1990). In addition, entering a novel setting andcommunity stimulates conscious sense making,which involves reflecting on and revisiting one’sunderstanding of both the context and oneself(Louis, 1980). Being separated from our familiarenvironments and communities loosens up oursense making from the constraints they present;affords the opportunity to examine, from some dis-tance, how past identifications have affected theimages, assumptions, and stories that populateour inner world; and offers the possibility of exper-imenting with different ways of approaching andunderstanding others and ourselves (Ibarra, 2003,2007). The question then becomes not whether, buthow can a management education curriculum fos-ter the transformational learning that enables on-going leader development? This research questionis our focus here. We are not concerned with as-sessing the prevalence of transformational learn-ing in management education, testing the efficacyof one approach in fostering it, comparing differentapproaches, or proving causal links. We aim todevelop theory that may inform scholarship andpractice on this important question, through aqualitative study of participants’ experienceswithin the Personal Development Elective and itsMBA context.

METHODS

Research Context

The PDE takes place within an international 1-yearMBA program that recruits a class of 90 studentseach year. With the exception of one or two na-tional residents, students arrive from their homecountries shortly before classes begin. The pro-gram places a heavy emphasis on work in small,diverse groups; participants are members of foursuch groups over the year. The first 6 months arededicated to the required curriculum; the second

half to a consulting project and recruitment activ-ities; and elective courses (other than the PDE)occupy the last month. In the year of our study, theclass average age was 31; average work experi-ence was 7.5 years; over 85% of the students hadprior management experience; and 20% werewomen. Forty-five nationalities were represented.

Alongside the traditional lecture- and case-based courses on the functional disciplines ofbusiness management, the MBA program featureda “Leadership Stream” that unfolded throughoutthe year. The design and pedagogy of this streamwas conceptually grounded in a “clinical” ap-proach, building on the assumption that both cog-nitive and emotional, conscious and unconscious,forces coalesce to shape human behavior and in-fluence the exercise of leadership; hence, leader-ship development needs to provide a safe place inwhich the investigation and integration of suchforces can occur (Kets de Vries, 2005a; Petriglieri &Wood, 2005). The Leadership Stream encompasseda required curriculum and two elective courses.The required curriculum included a series of class-room-based lectures and discussions of cases,readings, and self-assessment questionnaires; aweekend of experiential group activities facili-tated by professional group consultants who laterserved as individual coaches for their group’smembers;2 an autobiography that participantswrote before they arrived at the program and re-vised prior to the third coaching session; threereflective papers—on their first group’s develop-ment, on their role in groups, and on the dynamicsof their consulting projects; a feedback processwhere, by way of an anonymous on-line 180-degreeplatform, participants rated themselves and allother members of each group in which theyworked. The two elective offerings were the “Per-sonal Development Elective” and an “Introductionto Advanced Group Dynamics.”

The Personal Development Elective began in the2nd month of the program. The memo introducingthe PDE to participants positioned it as a “tutorialin self-awareness” with a focus on personalgrowth. It explained that the PDE consisted of20 hour-long individual sessions with a psycho-therapist and provided an opportunity to exploreissues of a private and personal nature. Upon com-pletion of the 20 hours, participants received oneelective credit.3,4 Other than the communication of

2 The three individual coaching sessions, attended by all par-ticipants, occurred at the end of the experiential weekend in the1st month, 3 and 6 months into the program.3 The allocation of 20 hours resulted from a multiparty negoti-ation between faculty championing the course, the MBA and


completion to the administration, the PDE wascompletely confidential. Together with a shortbriefing from the Leadership Stream director andthe memo description, students were given résu-més of 20 therapists and were encouraged, if inter-ested, to speak to two or three before choosing theone with whom they would like to work. In the yearof our study, 77 out of 90 MBA participants took thePDE, rating its overall value 4.5 on a 5-point scale.

Unlike the psychological support and short-termpsychotherapy offered by university clinics andcounseling centers to students in distress, the PDEdid not simply aim to deal with crises or to returnindividuals rapidly to their previous patterns offunctioning. It focused on examining the experi-ence and meaning of a student’s life with an eye tohis or her ongoing development. While it did payattention to the influence of early development onstudents’ functioning and aspirations, the PDEdid not focus on damage and dysfunction in theway that psychotherapy is often described in arti-cles distinguishing it from executive coaching(Coutu & Kauffman, 2009; Hart, Blattner, & Leipsic,2001; Kets de Vries, 2005b). Rather, it rested on aprospective view of psychic life—that the psyche isnot only bound in endless repetition of infantileexperiences and identifications but also is pullingthe individual toward the achievement of a ful-filled life and purposeful work.5

Our choice of research setting followed a theo-retical logic (Miles & Huberman, 1994). First, theaim of the PDE was to foster personal developmentthrough assisted exploration of the inner world,personal history, aspirations, and behavior ofmanagement students. Second, the PDE was em-bedded in an MBA program’s leadership curricu-lum whose explicit focus was enhancing students’capacity to exercise leadership effectively and re-sponsibly. These elements, common to many man-agement education offerings that aim to encour-age and assist personal reflection in the service ofleaders’ development, made the PDE and itsbroader context, as experienced by the people in-volved in it, a setting well suited to inductivelytheorize how management education may fosterthe transformational learning that supports lead-ers’ ongoing development.

Sample and Data Collection

The primary data for this study was drawn from awider investigation of the development of individ-uals in an international MBA program and wascollected through in-depth, semistructured inter-views conducted by the third author with the MBAparticipants and by the first author with the psy-chotherapists. Research participants were re-cruited by way of an e-mail sent to all 90 prospec-tive students in one MBA class. This invitationphrased the purpose of the study broadly as to“research both the personal and professional de-velopment process of individuals during their MBAyear,” stressed that participation was voluntary,and assured that interviews would be confidentialand used solely for research purposes. All 55 par-ticipants who signaled their interest were includedin the study. This sample is representative alongthe lines of age, work experience, nationality, andgender when compared to the demographics of thefull cohort. Of the 55 students interviewed, 48 choseto take the PDE elective, and 43 completed it.Twenty PDE psychotherapists were invited to con-tribute to the research and four accepted.

Each student was interviewed three times: dur-ing the month prior to the start of the MBA (wave 1),

school deans, and the participating psychotherapists. The de-cision reflected pedagogical, psychological, and economic con-siderations. Twenty hours allowed students, if they so wished,to take advantage of one hourly session every fortnight.Twenty hours was also the minimum duration of a significantcourse of therapy according to a psychotherapy training insti-tute of international repute based in the region. The PDE drewmostly on a pool of therapists in the late stages of trainingthere. Within their advanced training, therapists receivedweekly supervision, which ensured the quality and profession-alism of their work. Therapists were invited to a half-day dis-cussion session on the MBA and Leadership Stream context.However, they received no briefing to focus their work in anyparticular area other than those they would contract with indi-viduals who requested their services.4 Those who wanted to continue beyond the 20 hours could do soby contracting directly with their therapists.5 While sharing a developmental focus with executive coach-ing, the psychotherapy offered in the PDE differs in importantways. The scope of issues explored in psychotherapy tends tobe broader, encompassing clients’ early history and identifica-tions and addressing issues affecting both their personal andprofessional lives. Executive coaching usually aims to addressspecific work issues and reducing discrepancies between cli-ents’ behavior and that required of specific or ideal roles. Evenin longer engagements, coaches often do not have the time orremit to work on psychological issues that affect their clients’professional functioning. When they become aware of a conflict“between the need to do long-term development as opposed toquickly solving behavioural, performance, or organizational

problems related directly to work,” notes Kilburg (2004: 266) in areview of psychodynamic executive coaching, the long-termdevelopment is usually put aside. Finally, numerous authorshave cautioned that unlike psychotherapists, executivecoaches don’t always have the requisite professional trainingand expertise to safely bring into focus clients’ personal historyand development and help them explore how these may af-fect—consciously and unconsciously—their perceptions, emo-tional life, and behavior (Berglas, 2002; Hart et al., 2001; Kilburg,2004; Sherman & Freas, 2004; Wood & Petriglieri, 2005a).


at the midpoint of the program (wave 2)—whenthey were likely to have recently started the PDE—and in the final 2 weeks prior to graduation (wave3)—when they had recently completed it. All inter-views covered material of both a professional andpersonal nature and included questions about howparticipants felt in addition to what they thoughtabout their experiences. The first interview tookthe form of a life history interview (Atkinson, 1998),supplemented with additional questions regard-ing the person’s motivation for undertaking theMBA, expectations for the year and the post-MBAfuture. The second and third interviews includedquestions regarding students’ experiences in theMBA, their personal and professional develop-ment, and various course elements, including thePDE. Specifically, we invited participants to elab-orate on why and how they had decided to take theelective. We also asked how they would describethe process to an outsider and whether, to whatextent, or how they had benefited from it. The sec-ond and third interviews became progressivelymore focused to capitalize on themes that emergedduring our analysis (Spradley, 1979), and to followup on specific points discussed in previous inter-views. Interviews ranged from 40 to 90 minutes. Allwere tape-recorded with permission and profes-sionally transcribed.6

Interviews with the four psychotherapists wereconducted at the end of the program. These inter-views focused on the reasons students initiallyconsulted them, the themes that emerged duringtheir work with PDE participants, the process oftherapy, and their observations of the MBA envi-ronment. Although the therapists provided exam-ples during interviews, they kept client identitiesconfidential. On average, these interviews lasted60 minutes. All were tape-recorded with permis-sion and professionally transcribed. Sources ofsecondary data included documentation describ-ing the MBA, the Leadership Stream, and the PDE.Interview transcripts generated over 1,500 pages ofsingle-space text. We used ATLAS5, a qualitativedata management software, to store and organizeprimary data, field notes, and secondary sources.

Data Analysis

The data analysis followed an iterative process inwhich we moved back and forth between ouremerging thematic understanding of the data andexisting literature (Miles & Huberman, 1994). Anal-

ysis was conducted in two phases. The first wasrepeated following each wave of data collection.The second took place once data collection wascomplete.

Phase 1

Each wave of data collection was followed by aphase of analysis during which the first and thirdauthors jointly conducted line-by-line analysis ofsmall batches of interview transcripts. The pur-pose of this in-depth phase of open coding (Strauss& Corbin, 1990) was to find and group related state-ments into first order codes and tentative catego-ries of related codes. This process was highly iter-ative and involved many rounds of grouping andregrouping themes. For example, analyzing partic-ipants’ accounts of the early months of the pro-gram, the metaphor of the MBA as a “pressurecooker” kept recurring in relation to “difficult ex-periences” with the “coursework,” “small-groupdebates,” and “informal interactions.” While weused those as early codes, a closer look at thesestatements led to the emergence of the themes of“encapsulation,” “novelty,” and “intensity” of MBAactivities and relations, and of “emotional dis-tress” and “existential puzzlement” as partici-pants’ experiences. These themes later coalescedas the features and functions of the broader theo-retical dimension, “regressive domain.”

We typically agreed upon a preliminary codingscheme following detailed analysis of approxi-mately 20 transcripts. We then used this scheme tosystematically review all 55 transcripts and docu-ment the codes and categories represented ineach. We regularly checked the coding schemeduring this systematic review and made minor al-terations based on variations found in the data.Throughout this phase, and also during phase 2,we employed techniques of “constant comparison”(Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss & Corbin, 1990)that enabled the identification of patterns withinthe data as well as variations among and betweenthese patterns. We also read or returned to rele-vant literature. For example, as we coded partici-pants’ accounts of being more able both to “takemore distance and reflect” and to “express theirfeelings” and “behave differently” in the MBA con-text, we revisited work on reflective practice(Schön, 1983) and psychological engagement (De-Rue & Ashford, 2010b; Kahn, 1990; Noe, Tews, &McConnell Dachner, 2010), which helped us refinethe construct of “reflective engagement.” On com-pletion of phase 1 for the final wave of data collec-tion, we had three coded interview transcripts anda one contact form that summarized our analysis

6 The recording equipment malfunctioned during 7 of the 165interviews. For these interviews, data consists of the interview-er’s detailed notes transcribed within 24 hours.


for each of the 55 research participants (Miles &Huberman, 1994).

Phase 2

During the second phase, all three authors met toconduct axial coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1990) inwhich we consolidated categories into higher lev-els of abstraction and searched for relationshipsbetween and variations within categories. By com-paring the data across the three rounds of inter-views, we were able to assess how categories re-lated to each other over time. For example, thisphase involved refining the distinction betweenthe functions of institutional and interpersonalholding features, and theorizing how they comple-mented each other in fostering reflective engage-ment. In this phase, we consolidated a set ofthemes and theoretical categories (see Table 1 foran outline of the coding scheme with illustrativequotes). The final stage of this phase involved var-ious iterations of building and ratifying frame-works against the data to ensure accurate repre-sentation (Locke, 2001). Constructing a theoreticalmodel of the personalization of managementlearning concluded the analytic process. In report-ing our findings below, however, we outline themodel first, to orient the reader through the de-tailed description that follows.

FINDINGS

Overview

We set out to investigate how management educa-tion may foster the transformational learning thatsupports leaders’ ongoing development. On thebasis of the qualitative analysis described above,we propose that this occurs through a process ofpersonalization by which individuals examinetheir experiences and revisit their life stories aspart and parcel of management learning. In thissection, we outline a theoretical model, inducedfrom our data, that endeavors to capture the fea-tures of management education programs that ig-nite and sustain the personalization of manage-ment learning, how the process unfolds, and whatit develops.

The model begins with an often hinted at, butpoorly articulated, characteristic of managementeducation programs in general and MBAs in par-ticular—that is, their function as regressive do-mains. We define a regressive domain as a socialcontext that provokes and amplifies individuals’experience and enactment of habitual responsesand personal sensitivities. Three features of the

program we studied sustained its regressive func-tion: the encapsulation, novelty, and intensity ofMBA activities and relations. Encountering, beingimmersed in, and having to deal with the regres-sive domain provoked varying degrees of emo-tional distress and existential puzzlement amongparticipants. The former encompassed perfor-mance and social anxieties. The latter encom-passed focused questions about what caused spe-cific behaviors, as well as open questions aboutdirection and purpose.

The PDE was central among a set of MBA fea-tures that helped participants approach and inves-tigate these stressful and puzzling experiencesrather than brush them aside. Together, these fea-tures provided a holding environment within theprogram, defined as a social context that reducesdisturbing affect and facilitates sense making(Petriglieri & Petriglieri, 2010). Seven features ofthe MBA program contributed to the provision of aholding environment within it. Four were institu-tional—its encapsulation and novelty (which con-tributed both to the regressive domain and holdingenvironment); the leadership course content, activ-ities, and assignments; and the reputation of thePDE. Three were interpersonal: participants’ rela-tionships with coaches, select individual class-mates, and therapists.

Engaging with the holding environment affectedhow students made sense of, dealt with, andlearned from the stressful and puzzling experi-ences ignited by the regressive domain. Institu-tional holding features affected how they madesense of learning and of problematic experienceswithin the MBA. These features broadened themeaning of management learning to involve intro-spection and experimentation alongside the acqui-sition of models and skills. They also changed themeaning of problematic experiences, framingthem as valuable opportunities for personal learn-ing rather than as challenges or distractions. Last,they legitimized psychotherapy as a means to takeadvantage of those learning opportunities. Inter-personal holding features sustained participants’examination and revision of the ways they inter-preted, responded emotionally to, and acted upon,their experiences. The PDE was central among in-terpersonal features because of its continuity andposition within the MBA—integrated yet not im-mersed in it. Within the PDE, participants engagedin a combination of self-clarification, emotionalprocessing, and planning behavioral experimentsthat fostered reflective engagement in every as-pect of the MBA program.

We define reflective engagement as the disci-pline to examine one’s experiences, acknowledge


and manage one’s emotions, and attempt behav-ioral experiments in conditions of uncertainty andpressure. This discipline allowed students to dealmore constructively with and learn from poten-tially regressive MBA experiences. Participantswho were not involved in the PDE and broaderholding environment appeared more likely to deal

with the regressive domain by maintaining dis-tance from its emotional intensity and pursuingacademic and social activities. They engaged lessin the personalization process, and their accountsof learning from the MBA focused primarily on theabstract knowledge and professional skills gainedfrom traditional elements of the MBA curriculum.

TABLE 1Coding Scheme and Illustrative Data

Theoreticaldimensions

Second-ordercategories First-order themes Exemplary quotations (selected examples)

Regressivedomain

Regressivefeatures

• Physical and socialencapsulation

• Novelty of activities andrelations

• Intensity of activitiesand relations

“[My classmates] need to be extremely involved in everyone’s life. Itis as if they have nothing else to do but talk about everyoneelse.”

“You have different people skills, different experiences, differentbackgrounds, different cultures. And you need to work around allthat and come to consensus. It was very stressful.”

Regressivefunctions

• Experiences ofemotional distress

• Questions about causesof puzzling behaviors

• Questions aboutpurpose and direction ofcareer and life

“January and February were the most difficult periods for me. Everyday I woke up and I wanted to leave. I just wanted to go and tellno one. I had been through a lot of emotional issues at that point,not only because of the program but also family issues. All thatadded to making me a wreck basically.”

“I really had questions in my head. Why am I this way? I don’t havea reason to be this way. Why do I sometime fall back into thatbehavior that I don’t like? I have always been interested toexplore that more.”

Holdingenvironment

Institutionalholdingfeatures

• Protective nature ofencapsulation andnovelty

• Leadership stream’scontent and activities

• PDE reputation

“Given that we are in a big bubble, you have the right to dowhatever you want. So basically you are quite secure here. Youhave the luxury and the time to . . . discover yourself.”

“We had the classes with [leadership professor] and they sparkedmy interest. I started to see things, just by discussing in class andthen reflecting on what we discussed by myself. But I felt that if Ihad somebody who led me through this process, it wouldprobably be more valuable in accelerating it, and that’s why Idecided to embark on [the PDE].”

Institutionalholdingfunctions

• Learning involvesintrospection andexperimentation

• Stressful and puzzlingexperiences viewed aslearning opportunities

• Psychotherapy as meansfor leadershipdevelopment

“The highlight for me is to be able to reflect back on my experiencewith these people and not feel any negative feelings—on thecontrary, feeling happy that it went so wrong because I couldlearn so much.”

“[In the first group] it was kind of a painful experience because, youfeel misunderstood and then try to understand why it doesn’twork out, and why there are these conflicts, and this triggeredquite a process of reflection.”

Interpersonalholdingfeatures

• Relationship withtherapist

• Relationship with coach• Relationship with select

peers

“[My therapist] gave me an opportunity to express what I feltwithout being judged and without having to explain lots ofdetails. She gave me also the tools to be able to counteractsituations, because the first group was terrible. Now I can laughabout it, but it was very intense, very emotional, very negative.She gave me the tools to be able to go in and say okay, I amgoing to do it and I am going to do my best. Had I not had her itwould have been much, much more difficult.”

“We had a coach for the group and he said I could gain from doingthis. There were all these things in my behavior that I wanted tobetter understand from the beginning, like sometimes holdingback and lacking energy. That was why I took the PDE.”

(Continues)


Participants who did engage in the personaliza-tion process, by contrast, reported an additional,more personal, layer of learning that encompassedthree categories of outcomes. The first, self-aware-

ness, included understanding the influence of pasthistory on present experiences, being attentive toemotional and behavioral dynamics in social con-texts, and seeing the self as a broader whole. The

TABLE 1(Continued)

Theoreticaldimensions

Second-ordercategories First-order themes Exemplary quotations (selected examples)

Interpersonalholdingfunctions

• Examining roots andunfolding of behavior

• Assisting processing ofemotions

• Planning behavioralexperiments

“I think it was useful to look at this conflict that I have in the studygroups or in the class, to analyze each point, and to put it in adifferent perspective. [The PDE] helps me realize and understandmuch more what is happening with specific issues that areannoying me, why they annoy me, and how to really work withthat.”

“[My therapist] is getting me to realize my effect on others, and I amtrying to work on that. This is actually what she does. I wouldhave thought I would have broken down and cried or yelled at myteammates by now, or had a bigger fit, but I think part of why Ihaven’t is because I have had [the PDE] fairly regularly, almost ona weekly basis, where I am processing what is going on andhaving an outlet.”

Reflectiveengagement

Reflectiveengagement

• Examining experienceas it occurs in MBAcontext

• Acknowledging andmanaging emotions

• Attempting behavioralexperiments

“If I go back through my leadership papers, the one I wrote aboutthe first group was like, ‘Oh this guy is an arsehole and I hatehim, he is causing all the problems in the group,’ and now it hasevolved to ‘Ok, why am I reacting like this? What’s reallyhappening? Why is he behaving like this?’ ”

“I found out that in groups I avoid issues, or cover up certainissues, so as to avoid conflict. Now I’ve become better at notpushing things under the table, letting things be, not confrontingthem myself probably, but at least I let other people explore theirown conflicts instead of trying to sort it out for them.”

Developmentaloutcomes

Self-awareness • Understanding influenceof past history onpresent experiences

• Understanding effect ofown behavior on others

• Viewing self as a whole

“I feel more matured. I feel definitely more humble. But also olderin kind of where I am with my life in general, you know I amrecognizing that I am moving to the next stage. I am starting tothink about family and kids and what’s really important to meand I am giving myself time to say “okay, so what why am Idoing this, and why is this important.” So with that perspective Ithink it’s more wise in some ways because before I was justdoing.”

“[My work in the PDE] goes beyond the processing of the educationexperience, but really [brings together] being married to [X] andmy relationship with my family, the drivers of my decisions, andmore.”

Self-management • Expressing self moreopenly

• Holding back quickreactions

“I opened myself. I let people reach me some way. So I think I amnot afraid of letting it happen anymore. I showed people mysecret garden. That was very important, and very painful work.”

“Reflecting on my own, speaking with the analyst and trying toopen up helped me understand what reactions I can have incertain conditions. Sometimes I get triggered into those behaviors,but the fact that I spoke them out, I know what can happen andhow I can be perceived, helps me to stop the process.”

Life narrativerevisiting

• Feeling freed up fromprevious life patterns

• Feeling distinct parts ofself more integrated

“I had my script and I am trying to build a new story. In those termsI exceeded the expectations of coming here. I came with a fear ofhaving a breakthrough, but I am totally on the other side.”

“It has been very helpful just to learn to respect all parts of me. Iam just more in tune with myself and hopefully I’ll be able tocarry that forward.”


second, self-management, included expressingoneself more openly or, conversely, holding backone’s impulsive reactions. The third included ex-periences of liberation and integration related torevisiting their life narratives.

Two boundary conditions should be noted at thispoint. This study did not aim to confirm or refuteextant scholarship arguing that self-awareness,self-management, and the ability to process andintegrate life experiences into an overarching nar-rative are foundational for the ongoing develop-ment of leaders. It does, however, theorize howthese abilities may be fostered within manage-ment education through the personalization ofmanagement learning. As with all theoreticalmodels developed inductively, future research isneeded to test the model’s validity. Similarly, thisstudy does not advocate for, or test the efficacy of,the use of psychotherapy within management cur-ricula. As mentioned earlier, the PDE and its MBAcontext were a research setting well suited to ex-plore how management education may fostertransformational learning that supports leaders’development. Other pedagogical approaches thatassist ongoing personal exploration and experi-mentation in the context of potentially regressivesettings are likely to foster the personalization ofmanagement learning. Although we speculateabout what the key elements of such approachesmay be in the discussion, comparing different ap-proaches is beyond our scope here. Our study putsforward a model of the personalization processthrough which these approaches may foster lead-ers’ development. Below we describe each elementof this process, weaving the voices of study partic-ipants into our analytic narrative.

The Regressive Domain: Features and Functions

It is not unusual to hear that students in manage-ment education programs, individually and collec-tively, sometimes behave “like kids actually.” Ourstudy participants experienced the MBA as a re-gressive domain, defined as a social context thatprovokes and amplifies individuals’ experienceand enactment of habitual responses and personalsensitivities. These experiences and enactmentsoccurred on the stage provided by daily MBA ac-tivities and relations. As one participant put it, hesoon realized that he had “the same problem withmy family, with my friends, and with my col-leagues in the group.” Three features of the MBAwe studied, common to many such programs, con-tributed to its function as a regressive domain: theencapsulation, novelty, and intensity of MBA activ-ities and relations.

Encapsulation

The physical and social encapsulation of the MBAcommunity was extreme, and the MBA was oftenreferred to as “a big bubble.” Most students knewno one in the area outside of school, and in theirlittle free time, they socialized with each other.Many actively distanced themselves from groupsback home to take a break, gain a fresh perspec-tive, and develop new relationships. Having di-vested former work roles and responsibilities andparted with familiar communities, participantsfaced the challenges to decipher, operate in, andnegotiate relationships within the MBA contextwith little external help. “You have nothing butyourself here,” remarked one student, noticing howexposed he felt in comparison with his old work-place, where he could hide his “weaknesses.” “Inthe office,” noted another, “we are forced to behaveourselves and show ourselves nicely, otherwisepeople may think you are not credible. But here,because we have no title and we are friends andnot colleagues, we can show ourselves morestraightforwardly.” Because of the encapsulation,separating one’s “personal” from one’s “profes-sional” life and social circles was hardly possible.Classmates were colleagues, social acquain-tances, friends, foes, and, occasionally, romanticpartners.

Novelty

MBA activities and relations were by and largenovel. Although all participants had been in edu-cational institutions in the past, they had spentyears prior to the MBA mostly in corporate set-tings—doing work altogether different from study-ing, debating case studies with classmates fromall over the world, and working on projects andassignments in diverse groups with a flat formalauthority structure, on the composition of whichthey had no control. One participant, who hadmanaged a large department in a health care or-ganization for 5 years before the MBA, recalledthinking, “My God, do we really have to haveseven people all agree on this? I’d like to just workon it on my own and make all the decisions.” Ex-cept for brief encounters and on-line interactions,participants were strangers to each other whenthey arrived, and the MBA community was morediverse than any educational or professional com-munity most of them had been members of before.Despite having managed teams with members inmultiple continents, one student noted that “theclass is very diverse in terms of culture, beliefs,


values and religion, and has exposed me to differ-ences that I didn’t have much exposure to before.”

Intensity

The program’s reputation as being extremely in-tense was mirrored in participants’ reports aboutthe toll taken by MBA activities and relations. Par-ticipants often stayed in school past midnight. Onedeadline or other always loomed, and 80-hourworking weeks were the norm. As a result, manystudents felt they were “never on top of things.”The discussion-based pedagogy of most classes,the structure and diversity of the groups, and theweight class participation and group projects hadon grades meant that participants were constantlyinvolved in heated debates with each other. Otherthan the few hours they slept, they were seldomalone. The only respite from work was offered byparties that contributed to the regressive intensity.“It was like being in high school,” recalled oneparticipant. “Who are your friends? Are you gettinginvited to this and that? It was surprisingly uncom-fortable at times.” One last factor contributing tothe intensity was the large investment, financialand personal, that participants had made to attendthe MBA and the feeling that one needed to “reallymaximize each second.”

The encapsulation, novelty, and intensity werecaptured by the image of the MBA as a “pressurecooker” used by several of our study participants.Cast in a novel context, stripped of the possibili-ties to take a break or separate personal and pro-fessional circles, and pressured by the programintensity, people’s most ingrained personal habitsand sensitivities came to the surface. In the wordsof one participant, “the pressure cooker environ-ment, particularly in the first 6 months, just mag-nifies everybody’s behavior to an extreme degree,and then it becomes much easier to see than if youare in a relaxed environment and people are ableto suppress some of it.” The daily encounters withthe regressive features of the MBA, and the con-scious and amplified experience of their habitsand sensitivities, generated varying degrees ofemotional distress and existential puzzlementamong participants.

Emotional Distress

All participants reported being “stirred up,” or“struggling” emotionally in the first months of theprogram. The feelings of distress ranged from mildexpressions of concerns, such as, “I never expectedthat my security would be so challenged. I feltnervous for ridiculous things,” to strong feelings of

discomfort, such as, “I needed help, because I wasgetting too stressed.” For some, the distress wasrelated to performance anxieties raised by theMBA coursework and the high standards of profes-sors and classmates. Commenting on the work-load, one participant recalled imagining “someonesitting in a control room turning up the stress dial.We were really pushed.” The most common causeof reported distress in the first half of the program,however, was difficulties in relationships. “Thefirst group was painful” was a common remark inour sample. Later on, concerns about the groupssubsided and the “job search mass hysteria” tookcenter stage.

Existential Puzzlement

Even for those who had not entered the MBA wres-tling with specific dilemmas, the program stirredup questions about who they were and what theywanted. Some questions concerned specific as-pects of one’s behavior that were hard to under-stand—habits and sensitivities that kept affectingpersonal and professional relations. “I feel like aLatin guy in a European suit,” reflected one stu-dent. “I don’t know where it comes from. Some-times I want to approach people, to speak to them,but I have all these things that hold me back.”Other questions concerned broader issues of pur-pose and direction. “I came here and everythingimpacted me in the same moment,” recalled an-other student participant. “You are in a new envi-ronment, you are under a lot of pressure, you arealone, and you don’t know what to do with yourlife—with the life that you left and the life that iscoming after. So you have a lot of questions goingall the time.” Often the questions were accompa-nied by a vague feeling of restlessness, that onestudent described as “a personal feeling thatdoesn’t allow me to rest, doesn’t allow me tosleep.” As one therapist put it, “Every student Ihave worked with, every one, I felt, had a strongdesire to talk about a real, I won’t say problem, butit was something that they needed to tell someoneabout. It was very much a psychological problem,not so much about career, it went much deeper.”

The Holding Environment:Features and Functions

The Personal Development Elective was centralamong a number of MBA features that affectedhow participants understood, dealt with, andlearned from, the feelings and questions sparkedby the regressive domain. The combination ofthese features—which we grouped into institu-


tional and relational ones—provided a holding en-vironment within the MBA.

Institutional Holding Features

Encapsulation and novelty contributed both to theregressive domain and to the holding environmentwithin the MBA. Because of them, the MBA commu-nity developed its own culture, distinct from—andoften in opposition to—those of students’ everydayworlds. It was a culture where self-examinationwas the norm, and there was no stigma attached toseeing a psychotherapist. One student character-ized the difference as follows: “In the work envi-ronment things stay superficial, while we go a lotdeeper here.” Another observed: “You have an op-portunity here, you are in a safe environment, ev-erybody’s doing [therapy]. So you don’t feel an out-sider if you do it. It feels safe to say, ‘I’m seeing myshrink tomorrow’—which is something I wouldhave difficulty saying in public back home.”

The meaning and value of self-examination andpsychotherapy within the MBA culture was shapedsignificantly by the Leadership Stream. With itsfocus on investigating the covert and unconsciousaspects of human behavior, the stream lent animportance to introspection for leaders’ develop-ment and legitimized psychotherapy as a means topursue both. As one student put it, “For the first 3months we had the leadership course, the groupdynamics, and all of a sudden it gave me this ideaof going to a psychoanalyst. I’ve never thought ofdoing that before, I mean, I’m not nuts.” The PDE’sreputation with alumni and the press reinforcedthe narrative linking introspection and psychother-apy with leaders’ development. Commenting onwhy he had opted to take the PDE, a student re-called that “when the Wall Street Journal said youhad your own shrink, I thought that’s for me, it’sgood to reflect.”

These institutional holding features broadenedthe meaning ascribed to learning to include intro-spection and experimentation alongside the acqui-sition of business concepts and skills. As one stu-dent put it, “Before I came to [MBA program], Ipictured myself studying a lot and finding a job. Inever imagined thinking about myself, having amoment in my life to get away from everything andreally focus on who I am, what I want.” The mean-ing of difficult experiences shifted from being dis-turbances to being learning opportunities of aunique kind. This shift, in turn, normalized thedisturbing affect and gave it potential value, asreflected in the following therapist’s view.

The mental and physical stress starts wear-ing [participants] down during the year. Theirdefenses really do start breaking down, andthey either overreact or their reactions andconversations become very unguarded. Yousee fits of anger breaking out, you see pettyjealousies emerging. So many interestingthings start appearing during the course ofthe year, and that’s the real material to workwith. From that often there are very signifi-cant breakthroughs that can be and havebeen achieved.

Interpersonal Holding Features

The coaching sessions early in the year, close re-lationships students developed with select indi-vidual classmates, and the PDE, were features thatsustained participants’ examination of their MBAexperiences. The PDE was central among interper-sonal holding features because it was more fre-quent and ongoing than coaching, and because itwas removed from, and yet close to, the MBA ex-perience—integrated but not assimilated to therest of the program. As one participant put it, “Thestudy group situations, the program, all the inter-actions—they make you think. Talking with an ex-ternal person is difficult because they are not partof the program. The people in your group are partof the problem, so it’s difficult to share with them.The PDE was good because it gave me a moreexternal point of view.” Within it, students workedon a range of personal concerns (outlined in Ex-hibit 1), and their manifestations within the MBAcontext. This work encompassed three mutuallyreinforcing processes: self-clarification, emotionalprocessing, and planning behavioral experiments.

Self-clarification involved identifying and exam-ining the patterns of cognition, emotion and be-havior underlying puzzling experiences, and link-ing them with one’s history and identity. Thisresulted in a clearer understanding of the roots,triggers, and consequences of those experiences.“There was a role I found myself in,” explained oneparticipant, “which related a bit to my being ayounger brother . . . That was a point we discussed,and it has been useful because [the therapist]helps me understand. If you know your, let’s callthem complexes, or scripts, or whatever is inside ofyou, as soon as you know them better, it’s easier tomanage them.”

Emotional processing involved expressing, ex-amining, and managing the emotions ignited byMBA experiences. This diffused the disturbing af-fect and fed into the self-clarification work. As onestudent put it, the PDE had “unloaded a lot of


anxiety and negativity that I was carrying around,which enabled me to lighten up and interact withpeople much better. It has been a whole dominoset of consequences. I am not a perfect humanbeing but I am certainly much more comfortable inmyself about why I feel the way I feel, and how tounderstand why I behave in some way.”

Planning Behavioral Experiments. The insightsand equanimity gained through self-clarificationand emotional processing, in turn, led students toplan how to behave differently. Discussing howexamining his frustrated silence in group debateshad led him to taking a more active role, one stu-dent noted that “the reason I stayed on the periph-ery of groups was that I was afraid of what couldhappen if I got involved and they didn’t like it, or tobe seen as stupid or arrogant. Working in the PDEI realized it didn’t make sense. I wasn’t experi-menting at all.”

Reflective Engagement

The holding environment helped participants tomake new meaning of difficult MBA experiences,

EXHIBIT 1What Did the MBAs Bring to Therapy?

The concerns most commonly expressed and exploredwithin the PDE can be grouped into four broadcategories: trauma, insecurity about self-worth, personalrelationships, and future direction and meaning.

Trauma. Some students’ development had been heavilyinfluenced by trauma in their past. Sometimes thetrauma derived from war, accident, or naturalcatastrophe, as the following student recounted, “Threemonths before I was born, war broke out in [my homecountry]. After the war most of my family had to go toprison, to some kind of jungle camps. My father had togo for 3 years. After that he and my brother took a boatand left the country overnight. I was 4 years old.Luckily, my father and my brother made it to [Europe].After more than 2 years, they managed to bring mymother and my two sisters and myself.” For otherstudents, the trauma derived from a sense of absence,loss, or betrayal within the family. Rather than an acutetrauma related to any specific event, some studentswere affected by subtler deprivations or stiflingdemands, resulting from being deprived of freedom orcarefree time as children, or being forced to study amusical instrument against one’s will, or being forced tocompete relentlessly in school to win their parent’sadmiration and love.

Insecurity about self-worth. Many students’ sense of self-worth was highly, if not excessively, dependent onexternal approval. As a result, they struggled to upholda shaky self-image to stave off feelings of insecurity.Every endeavor became a test, and proving oneselfstarted anew every day. As one of the therapists put it,“I am astounded [by] how achievement meanseverything to them. One of the things that alwaysseems to come up is, “Who are you without thistangible achievement? Why do you define yourselfthrough what you do? Who are you underneath that?What if you just did nothing, who would you be?” To methat’s an important question, and it is often theessential sign of development when they startperceiving that they are more than what they achieve.”Given the novelty and intensity of the MBA, insecurityin the face of relentless pressure to perform is a naturalreaction. However, for many of these students, beinggood wasn’t good enough; they felt they should beperfect. Behind their glittering “high flyer” personalingered a fear of being “imposters,” who did notdeserve their reputation and success (Kets de Vries,2005c). A consequence of this fear was ambivalenceabout intimate friendships, and a preference for“pleasant” acquaintances instead. Despite a broadsocial circle, our data echo Dubouloy’s (2004) finding ofthe MBAs’ persistent loneliness. “I have moved aroundso much,” noted one student. “You don’t really becomeclose to people, because they’ll leave, because youknow the expat life, so you tend to not open up a lotand you stay a little bit closed, protecting yourself alittle bit.”

Issues surrounding personal relationships were anothermajor thread in the tapestry of MBAs’ personal work—failed relationships in the past; lack of relationships inthe present; discomfort within marriages; instability ofimmediate partnerships; and the intensity of currentinteractions with colleagues.

EXHIBIT 1(Continued)

Some students were keen to explore, within the PDE, theinfluence of significant past relationships on their life;others focused on their present ones—both within andoutside the class. One student discussed this focus asfollows: “I used to be jealous and I still am, but it usedto be more debilitating. I thought we were being open,but I was unconsciously controlling, making [mygirlfriend] feel as if she had to report back to me if shewas going out with a guy friend and things like that.And she was like, I am okay with it. But then as [mytherapist and I] discussed, maybe she is okay with it,but after a while it can feel very suffocating. So shemight be okay now, but 5 years down the road it mightbe different.”

Future direction and meaning. During the course of theMBA, it was common for students to pause and inquireabout the meaning of what they were presently doingas well as about the wisdom of their desires for thefuture. Sometimes they even inquired about themeaning of their whole life. This questioning oftenbegan with mild feelings of unease, a sense thatsomething was missing, or even of boredom. In time,the questions emerged more fully and provided anopening for exploration of their life trajectory andimportant existential issues. “I thought it was a goodopportunity,” said one participant about the PDE,“because a lot of things were probably going to comeup. I was looking for direction, and I wanted to takesome time to think about what I was going to do. So itwas a good opportunity to meet my curiosity of whatthis kind of thing is about in general and also to try toredirect any thoughts I could have within the program.”


thanks to institutional features that framed themas learning opportunities, and to draw more mean-ing from them, thanks to interpersonal featuresthat sustained their interpretation and manage-ment. In doing so, it fostered students’ reflectiveengagement in all aspects of the MBA. We definereflective engagement as the discipline to exam-ine one’s experience, acknowledge and manageone’s emotions, and attempt behavioral experi-ments in conditions of uncertainty and pressure.This discipline helped students deal more construc-tively with potentially regressive MBA features.

First, reflective engagement entailed takingenough distance from the regressive intensity ofthe MBA to be able to examine the meaning ofone’s experiences as they occurred and focus onthe questions one intended to pursue. As a studentput it,

When you start here, you realize a lot ofthings, and you have a lot of questions in yourhead, but you don’t really have the time toanswer or think about them. The PDE hasgiven me the time to reflect on myself, onwhat’s going on in my head, on what’s goingon in my heart, on what’s going on in my life.It is also making me pay attention during theeveryday activity, to what I am thinking. If Iwouldn’t have the PDE, I wouldn’t have to stopand think about me, I would do somethingelse, study more, whatever, but not really stopand be aware of what’s happening.

Second, reflective engagement entailed ac-knowledging and managing the emotional under-currents of potentially regressive experiences. “Iwas sitting in my group last week,” recalled an-other participant discussing how he felt moreequipped to examine, rather than react to, difficultemotional experiences, “and all of a sudden I re-alized that I was totally being excluded from thegroup. Probably for some good reasons, as I amvery different from that particular group of people.It was just incredible to sit there and see thathappening. I felt really bad about it, I felt like therewas something wrong with me, and I could thinkabout how did I get into this position, why did thishappen, how did this happen. That is the type ofthing that I have not done before in a group situa-tion.” Reflecting on the emotions he experiencedduring recruitment season, another participantnoted: “It was important for me to have lots ofoffers, honestly speaking, to get that kind of recog-nition—maybe it is not so nice to say—assuring methat I can be better than others. I became awarethat I look for that, which was not clear to me

before, and it kind of released me—it’s a burden offmy shoulders.”

Third, reflective engagement entailed resistingthe pull of familiar roles and habitual patterns ofbehavior, and experimenting with a broader be-havioral repertoire. Reflecting on how his role ingroups had changed over the year, one participantgave the following example:

There was an instance this morning where wehad a meeting at 8 and one guy turned up at9.30. He called ahead, and I said, ‘be there at9.’ So when he arrived I said, ‘look I want totalk about this, this is really pissing me off.’ Iwouldn’t have done that six months ago. Iwould have been pissed off then gone homeand told my wife about it. I am much morelikely to say “actually, this really bothers me,”as a result of that.

Rather than becoming less inhibited, someoneelse’s experiments had taken the opposite trajec-tory: “I used to get frustrated, I would interrupt thegroup and say, ‘this is going nowhere, just picksomething and do it.’ I have learned to handle myown behavior. I had a tendency to drag everyonealong, and I learned that getting everyone to agreeon what we are doing at the start is pretty usefulrather than charging ahead.”

The long duration of both the PDE and the MBA,and the recurrence of many potentially regressiveexperiences made it possible to exercise and con-solidate reflective engagement over the year.Many students spoke of how their experience andlearning in the MBA were inextricably linked withtheir work in the PDE, and vice versa. MBA expe-riences provided rich data for personal explorationin the PDE. This, in turn, allowed them to engagedifferently with the MBA. Several claimed thatwithout the support of the PDE they would not havehad the discipline to “stop and think” about impor-tant questions, that they would have been caughtin relentless activity or overwhelmed by stress,that they would “have never really learned.”

Some evidence supporting these statementsemerged from analyzing how participants whohad not taken or had engaged little with the PDEdealt with the experiences that ignited the person-alization of management learning for the majorityof our sample. While their accounts of the MBA’sregressive features were similar to those of partic-ipants engaged in the work described above, theymanaged the regressive features differently. Theymade sense of the distress the MBA ignited and thereflective efforts it sparked among many of theirclassmates, as tests or distractions for which they


had little time. One of these participants noted, “Ittook me a few weeks, but then I realized the gamewas to beat us up. It’s like the army deals withbuilding leaders. This place does it with stress andsleep deprivation. It was like, oh my God, is thisever going to end? It was disorienting, until I real-ized it was a game and said ‘well, how hard canyou push us?’ ” Another remarked, “most peoplehere seem to be searching for something, I don’tknow what they are going to do with their lives.” Inshort, rather than examining puzzling experiencesand approaching emotional distress to processthem, they located the source of distress and un-certainty in “the system,” and focused on pursuinggrades, job offers, and social activities.

In addition, upon leaving the MBA these stu-dents described their learning differently thanthose who engaged in the personalization processillustrated above. Their accounts focused primar-ily on the abstract knowledge and analytic skillsacquired through the traditional elements of theMBA curriculum. “Most importantly,” said one par-ticipant reflecting on what he had learned, “I havegained a big toolbox to see and analyze problemsor situations differently, and to understand when Xworks better than Y.” Participants who engaged inthe personalization process reported an addi-tional, more personal layer of learning that wascomplementary, not alternative, to the learningdrawn from the traditional curriculum—hencethese students’ claims that they had learned“more” and gone “deeper” than they expected inan MBA.7 As one put it, “there’s been learning onthe outside and learning on the inside.”

Developmental Outcomes

Three broad categories of developmental out-comes resulted from the personalization of man-agement learning—self-awareness, self-manage-ment, and revisiting of life narratives.

Self-Awareness

Most students used the language of “self-aware-ness” to describe what they gained from the PDE.

When they mentioned it in interviews, we followedup to obtain a clearer understanding of what “self-awareness” meant to them. What they describedwas one, or a combination, of three features.

The first was a clearer understanding of the in-fluence of past history on current values, inclina-tions, and patterns of behavior. For example, oneparticipant realized, “I have always been thisloner, I am very social but I am a loner. It comesfrom a very early age, maybe the first three yearsof my development. Because my eldest sibling washyperactive, and the middle one was needier, Iwas sort of always on my own, and I ended upbeing this independent loner. [My therapist and I]were able to explore all the way back to that periodand identified that as my default position. It issomething I ended up being, but is it where I reallywant to be?”

The second feature was the ability to focus on,and the interest in, making sense of one’s own andothers’ emotional and behavioral patterns in socialcontexts. At one level, this involved holding a viewof the likely effect of one’s behavior on others. Onestudent, for example, remarked, “I’m more aware.I’m very controlling, and if I do something verycontrolling when I work with other people, I imme-diately recognize it, and I do something else to sortof counterbalance.” At another level, this meaningof self-awareness encompassed a dynamic capac-ity described by one participant as being “moresensitive to observing what’s going on around mein a group, inside me, to use more of my emotionsas a sort of indicator of what’s going on in a group,and to maybe also express those emotions more torelate with people.”

The third feature involved developing a view ofthe self as a whole, accounting for the reciprocalinfluence of professional and personal aspects ofone’s life. As one participant put it, “I had a verysiloed life. Personal life, school life, career life, thislife, that life, and I think it is important to step backand look at yourself in the absence of all of thosethings and really understand who you are. It kindof helps you be that person in each of those differ-ent lives, so to speak.” Common to all three mean-ings of self-awareness is the process of linking—past and present, emotion and cognition, self andothers, personal and professional. Each denotes aprocess of active sense making that is separatefrom, but enables, personal change or action.

Self-Management

Self-management was the second broad categoryof ascribed outcomes that emerged from the data.It involved the perception of being more equipped

7 The few exceptions consisted of those individuals who hadreported, at the outset, that the personal development focus wasthe main reason for choosing this particular MBA. These werelikely to describe the conceptual learning as far less meaning-ful, relevant, and important than the personal insights andabilities they had developed during the year. “If I knew thislevel of self-reflection would be achieved studying veterinary,”said one participant, “I would have come anyway because thecontent of the courses was not as important as the process thatwent throughout and that made me reflect.”


to manage one’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior.This was reflected in accounts of being able to do“more of” or “less of” something, which we labeled“self-expression” and “self-restraint,” respectively.

The former refers to occasions in which individ-uals were able to express, in words or actions,something that they would have previously feltinhibited about expressing—usually because ofpersonal insecurities or uncertainty about others’impressions and reactions. There were numerousaccounts of individuals reporting that they had“found their voice” and felt more comfortable andable to express their honest view in public, evenwhen it was not aligned with a majority opinion.Comparing her behavior at the beginning andlater in the program, one student remarked, “I wasmuch more worried about what the group wasthinking about me, or if I was doing the right thing.Then I realized that the right thing changes withperception. So I am much more me centered now interms of positions. If I believe something, or I don’tagree, or I think that this is the right way to go, I amsticking to my point.”

The latter aspect of self-management, “self-restraint,” refers to an individual’s ability to re-frain from expressing immediate reactions thatthey would have previously been unable to controlor understand. This, in turn, made them feel morereceptive and able to communicate effectively. Asone student said, it did not mean “shutting up” butinvolved being able to ponder one’s way of expres-sion and its potential consequences before acting.“I’m less explosive,” he noted, “I was more explo-sive with people, I didn’t listen to others, or I didn’tlisten in the same way that I listen now, in a moreopen way and more reflective way. My girlfriendsaid that I am more relaxed when something is notgoing as I am expecting. Of course, I complain, butI am not reacting in as aggressive or explosive away as I did before.”

Revisiting of Life Narratives

Several research participants reported subjectiveexperiences of “liberation” and “integration,” re-lated to a loosening up or a grounding understand-ing of their life narratives. Experiences of libera-tion encompassed feeling released from theburden of a troubling history or a limiting view ofthe self, having more flexibility in imagining one’sfuture, and feeling able to escape the grip of dis-turbing reactions and self-defeating behavioralpatterns. One student described this shift as fol-lows: “When I came, I saw that there were someproblems in my personal life, and the way I wasaffected by these events was actually significant.

The [PDE] sessions changed the way I look at theevents that happened, and this impacted the way Isee the situation that I am in now. I felt a lot ofanger initially, and now it’s more acceptance.”

Experiences of integration encompassed feelinggrounded in an understanding of one’s life unfold-ing coherently across various settings. The learn-ing fostered by the personalization process helpedto integrate past, present, and future; cognitiveand emotional; personal and professional aspectsof the individual’s life. “I had never questionedthat much the impact of my family background onmy reactions and my decisions,” explained onestudent, “or even on the way I am thinking of mycareer development right now. There are too manythings going on, my wife is pregnant, I am gettingthis MBA, and at the same time I need to make theright money and I want to be happy and do some-thing I love. How do you put those things together?These sessions help me to try and find out whichare the things you should look at when makingthose decisions.”

DISCUSSION

Our study extends a burgeoning stream of aca-demic work that affords the individual’s innerworld and life story a central place in the develop-ment of managers (Kaiser & Kaplan, 2006; Lyons,2002; Torbert & Fisher, 1992), and leaders (Day,2001; Mumford & Manley, 2003; Shamir & Eilam,2005). Scholars have argued that developing lead-ers entails deeper personal work alongside theacquisition of knowledge, skills, and abilities (Lord& Hall, 2005; Mumford & Manley, 2003), and yet thelink between personal development and leader-ship effectiveness remains “underexploited in boththe theory and practice of leader development”(Ibarra et al., 2010: 668). If exercising leadershipauthentically requires that leaders make their“values and conviction highly personal throughtheir lived experiences, experienced emotions, andan active process of reflection on these experi-ences and emotions” (Shamir & Eilam, 2005: 397),our work here provides a rich account of that pro-cess in action and builds theory on how manage-ment education can sustain this fundamental as-pect of leader development.

There is little debate among leadership scholarsabout the importance of intrapersonal abilities forthe ongoing development of leaders (Day & Harri-son, 2007; DeRue & Ashford, 2010b; Dominick et al.,2010; Hogan & Warrenfeltz, 2003). Empirical work inthis area shows that individuals who continue be-ing reflective in conditions of ambiguity and highemotion and who can manage their thoughts, feel-


ings, and behavior—with the help of others—areable to access more developmental assignmentsat work (Dragoni, Tesluk, Russell, & Oh, 2009)and to learn more from challenging leadershipdevelopment opportunities (DeRue & Wellman,2009). Hackman and Wageman (2007) suggestthat leading well requires the emotional matu-rity to approach, and even sometimes provoke,anxiety-arousing situations to learn from them.Developing such maturity, they argue, involves“working on real problems in safe environmentswith the explicit support of others” (47). Ourstudy reveals the process through which the ex-plicit support of a set of holding features canhelp students work with, and learn from, the realproblems and anxiety-provoking situations en-countered in educational settings.

Even advocates of leader development throughwork experiences note that in action-learning proj-ects, especially those that are demanding and vis-ible, individuals often become overwhelmed bythe focus on accomplishing the task, and learningtakes a back seat (McCall, 2010). Therefore, Day(2010) recommended that the notion of “deliberatepractice”—that is, practice separate from work ex-perience—be given more attention in leadershipdevelopment. Starkey and Tempest (2009) arguedthat hosting such “rehearsals” should be a primaryfunction of management education. We posit thatthe personalization of management learning pro-vides opportunities for deliberate practice or re-hearsal, not only of behavioral routines or ana-lytic skills, but of reflective engagement indemanding conditions. Our study participants’voices echo scholarship on learner engagement,which suggests that the more individuals en-gage personally with learning interventions, themore they will benefit from those interventions(Noe et al., 2010).

The conceptualization of personalization of man-agement learning put forward here complementsexisting work on the value of its contextualization.The latter provides the rationale for action-learn-ing approaches and part-time, project-based, andmodular management development courses (Gos-ling & Mintzberg, 2006; Mintzberg & Gosling, 2002).We argue that the former provides the rationale forintense and encapsulating forms of managementeducation. Seen from this perspective, the very fea-tures of management education programs thathave been lamented as not being conducive toreflection—intensity, novelty, and encapsulation—provide a unique setting in which to undertakepersonal examination and development. Our studysuggests that curricula supporting students in theprocess of making sense of, and dealing with, po-

tentially regressive experiences help them to cul-tivate personal abilities that sustain and acceler-ate leader development. In other words, we positthat the personalization of management learningprovides the link between management educationand leader development.

A practical implication of our study and argu-ments is that attempts to design management ed-ucation programs that do away with regressivefeatures, if ever possible, may also limit their abil-ity to foster the personalization process. A morepragmatic, and perhaps fruitful, approach to helpleaders build foundations for their ongoing devel-opment may be to design curricula that balanceregressive and holding features. Our studyshowed how an offering like the PDE, and its insti-tutional infrastructure, can enhance the reflectivecomponent of management education programs,such as MBAs, where it is often lacking. The pro-cess we have described may shed light on howparticipants develop in leadership courses basedon a “clinical” approach (Kets de Vries & Korotov,2007; Petriglieri, 2011; Wood & Petriglieri, 2005b),complementing scholarship on courses based onself-assessment and 360-feedback instruments,coaching, project work, and action plans (e.g., Boy-atzis et al., 2002; Hoover et al., 2010). The personal-ization of management learning can surely be fos-tered by a variety of pedagogical approaches. Ourfindings, however, suggest that fostering it is notsimply a matter of adding a reflective course toalready packed curricula. It entails designing cur-ricula where institutional and interpersonal hold-ing elements give meaning and positive value toregressive experiences, frame those experiencesas learning opportunities, and support students’reflective engagement with them.

A vital characteristic of such curricula is educa-tors who sustain a mainstream institutional dis-course that broadens the meaning of learning be-yond the acquisition of knowledge and skills,acknowledging regressive experiences as bothpart and parcel of attending a management pro-gram and as valuable learning opportunities. Pro-gram brochures, alumni testimonials, course syl-labi, and deans’ opening speeches all have a placein a holding institutional tapestry. Courseworkthat highlights the importance of examining howlife stories affect—and are affected by—the wayleaders interpret and act in the world is anotherimportant thread in that tapestry. Case studies canbe fruitfully used for this purpose, by steering thediscussion toward the meaning making that un-derpins leaders’ decisions and actions. Concep-tual learning about this topic can then be comple-mented by reflective writing assignments about


students’ life stories and their effect on their way ofbeing in the world of work—and in the program.Normalizing and legitimizing the exploration ofstressful and puzzling experiences that studentsmight otherwise be reluctant to acknowledgeand discuss, or might even pathologize, is a keystep in fostering the personalization of theirlearning. One way to gently do so is to bringthose experiences into the least personal of ed-ucational settings—the classroom—for exampleby incorporating in the leadership coursework acase discussion of a student’s personal journeythrough an MBA (e.g., Petriglieri & Petriglieri,2007). This also can be complemented by reflec-tive assignments about students’ questions andsalient experiences in the program as comparedto other settings.

Sustaining students’ examination of their expe-riences in various groups; helping them give, askfor, and interpret feedback; and supporting exper-iments within those groups are probably center-pieces of such curricula. These processes can bekick-started by experiential group workshopsand can be enhanced by reflective writing as-signments about the development of students’groups and their roles in them. However, ourstudy suggests that supporting students’ reflec-tive engagement beyond those workshops wherereflection is the task, and into everyday programactivities, is the function of interpersonal hold-ing features. To what extent this function can beserved by structured peer coaching (Parker, Hall,& Kram, 2008) to what extent it requires profes-sionals, and what training and skills best suitsthose professionals are fruitful avenues for fu-ture research.

Limitations and Future Research

There are clearly limitations to our study. Becausewe developed our theory from a single researchsite, our findings may be viewed as idiosyncraticartifacts of that particular setting. Although ourfindings may not be generalizable in any strictsense, numerous characteristics of our study set-ting and the regressive features described arecommon to many MBA and other general manage-ment curricula. We hope future quantitative stud-ies will test the validity of the model proposed hereand establish causal links among its constructs.Future research may also examine a number ofopen questions. How is the personalization processaffected by program duration, location, or status?Is there an optimal balance between regressiveand holding features? Do different combinations ofthe two affect the proportion of students who en-

gage in the process? Do programs with solid insti-tutional holding features, but few structured inter-personal ones—such as ones where there is talk ofself-awareness but little assistance in examiningone’s experience—result in increased pressure, ordoes the value of peer relationships increase tocompensate for the lack of programmatic interper-sonal holding? What influence, if any, does stu-dents’ personalities or learning styles have on thepersonalization process? Does it affect their pro-gression through stages of adult development(Kegan, 1982)?

This was not a study of a course efficacy inachieving a set of short- or long-term outcomes.Such a study would require a control or compari-son group, and pre- and postprogram measure-ment of the outcomes of interest. In addition, ourstudy scope and data do not allow us to makeclaims as to how the insights gained affected par-ticipants’ experience and leadership after theMBA. Studies with a longer time frame may ad-dress this limitation. Research may test the rela-tionship between engagement in the personaliza-tion process and quantifiable outcomes of jobsearch efficacy, psychological well-being, identi-fication with the school— upon graduation andlater on—and, most important, subjective per-ceptions and others’ observations of leadershipability. Another research avenue is the extent towhich the ability to sustain reflective engage-ment, which resulted from the interaction be-tween individuals’ work and institutional con-tainer, is affected by the “holding” provided bythe organizations to which students transition.Whether they consider this to be an individualskill, or acknowledge its dependence on a num-ber of conditions in the social context, may affectits long-term sustainability.

Finally, future research may also explorewhether curricula designed to personalize learn-ing provide a venue for “identity control” (Alvesson& Willmott, 2002) by fostering compliance with theideal of the “self-aware leader,” or whether, con-versely, they support emancipation by allowingstudents to critically examine the social influencesthat shape their experience and ambitions. In ourstudy, the latter appeared to be most often thecase, as the PDE maintained a subversive appealamong students. Future studies, however, mayclarify the conditions in which such courses arecoopted for the purpose of conformity or resistanceto insecurity-provoking social structures and dis-courses (Collinson, 2003; Coutu, 2002; Gagnon,2008).


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Gianpiero Petriglieri ([email protected]) is associate professor of organiza-tional behavior at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France. He holds an MD with specialization inpsychiatry from the University of Catania Medical School, Italy. His areas of interest includeleadership development, group dynamics, and experiential learning.

Jack Denfeld Wood ([email protected]) is professor of leadership and organizational behav-iour at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland. He received his PhD in organizational behavior fromYale University. His areas of interest include leadership, the structure and dynamics ofgroups, and ideology.

Jennifer Louise Petriglieri ([email protected]) is a postdoctoral fellow in organizationalbehavior at the Harvard Business School. She received her PhD in organizational behaviorfrom INSEAD. Her current research explores identity dynamics in organizations and profes-sions in crisis, the social function of business schools, and the dynamics of identity develop-ment in management education.


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