Leadership education – an abductive design

Jens Mergenthaler

Leadership is one of those phenomena that is sometimes more and sometimes less fashionable, that is sometimes discussed more on the sidelines or obsessively, but that never seems to completely lose its appeal. It is therefore not surprising that countless things have been and are being thought, discussed and written about “leadership”. On the one hand, there is no lack of scientific knowledge about the “phenomenon of leadership”, let alone practical advice. And on the other hand, there is no lack of pedagogical insights and didactic concepts for leadership education. Nonetheless, this paper (again) asks fundamental questions: What is this “phenomenon of leadership” actually? And how could education be designed to enable people to underlie the “phenomenon of leadership” as a principle and cause? The aim of this paper is to create a paradigmatic concept for “leadership education”. The vehicle for this is abduction, that creative process of theory building. Such an approach explicitly does not mean that the concept created in this work is better, more correct, more appropriate than another. This work is therefore of course not a conclusion to the discussion on the “phenomenon of leadership”. Rather, the present work is intended to serve as a renewed(er) starting point for the educational-scientific and educational-practical preoccupation with the “phenomenon of leadership”, which is both convincing and desirable.

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