Wisdom and Leadership: A Constructive-Developmental Perspective

How leaders experience wisdom is important to our overall understanding of leadership. This work explores qualitative findings that may advance academic discourse and research between leadership, wisdom, and constructive-developmental theories. The present study examined executive leaders who assessed at the conventional and post-conventional stages of adult development and how they experience wisdom. It is significant in that it addresses a gap in the literature between wisdom and constructive-developmental theory. Contrary to research that defines and operationalizes wisdom as the integration of the cognitive, affective, and reflective domains of wisdom, findings indicate that participants experience wisdom in one or more of the domains of wisdom. Participants were assessed for their meaning-making capacity to determine their stage of development using the SCTi-Map instrument.