Identifying the pattern of antecedents and results of leadership self-development in organizations

 This research is aimed at identifying the pattern of antecedents and results of leadership self-development in organizations. Most organizations believe that a well-trained workforce is the key to success. Over the past century, training and development has evolved under the influence of changes in the nature of work, and professionals have made increasing demands on their ability to deal with uncertainty, adapt quickly to new information, and solve increasingly complex problems. The future requires a culture of continuous learning. 21st century learners must learn intrapersonal skills such as learning strategies to be able to determine and direct their own learning content. Formal learning programs are not only costly but also time-consuming, while informal learning programs reduce costs and save time. Also, it seems that employees who voluntarily participate in training activities have more learning than mandatory trainings, as a result, the focus on self-development as an alternative to formal trainings is increasing. Leaders as the tip of the arrow in the advancement of organizations must be able to quickly adapt to the rapid changes that occur in the demands of customers and the global economy. One of the approaches that today has many fans among various organizations and researches for the development of leadership capacity is leadership self-development.
In the present research, the method of Meta-synthesis has been used. Therefore, the research approach is qualitative and its method is Meta-synthesis research. n this research, it was done through its various stages, namely setting the research question, systematic study of literature, selection of suitable researches, extracting information from researches, analysis and combination of findings, quality control of findings and presentation of findings. In this research, the statistical population of the research includes researches and studies conducted in the period of 1970 to 2021 in the field of  leadership self-development with the keywords self-development / self-directed learning / leadership development / leadership self-improvement / leadership self-help / distance learning / self-leadership development /Self-directed development/Self-directed leadership in databases (SID; Noormags; Magiran; Ganj; CIVILICA; Sciencedirect; DOAJ; scopus; ProQuest; Jstore; EBSCOhost; sage; Wiley; Springer; Emerald; PubMed; ERIC; Semantic Scholar & Google Scholar) were collected and a total of 2995 studies were selected and analyzed. Among the examined studies, after several stages of screening, 131 study units were selected and examined based on the review of the title, abstract and content of the research respectively. In conducting this screening, CASP helped a lot to check the quality of researches. . Related sources were coded by open, central and selective three-step coding. In order to check the quality of coding, reliability, verifiability and reliability were used for the findings, and Cohen's kappa coefficient for agreement between evaluators was obtained as 0.72.
  The identified antecedents for leadership self-development were classified into three categories: 1. Individual factors (including 19 components), 2. Organizational factors (including 5 components) and 3. Environmental factors (including 2 components). Also, the results and consequences identified for leadership self-development include two categories: 1. Individual results (including 8 components) and 2. Organizational results (including 7 components).
Despite the studies that have been conducted in the field of leadership self-development, there is still no comprehensive model of the antecedents that are required for the implementation of leadership self-development and the results obtained from this implementation. For this reason, it was decided to review and combine past studies in a systematic review and provide a model that is more comprehensive and complete than the models presented for the antecedents and results of leadership self-development. By knowing the results obtained from this research, various organizations can get acquainted with the factors that are needed for leadership self-development in addition to recognizing the benefits of leadership self-development; When recruiting and promoting leaders, organizations can consider the individual factors required for leadership self-development as one of the criteria for recruitment and promotion, and the environmental and organizational factors required for leadership self-development in order to achieve results. They provided leadership self-development for the individual and the organization.