Leadership style matters: The deployment of leadership skills in developing an organizational context-for-learning capability

The competence perspective requires deploying various organizational resources, skills, and capabilities in creating organizational-level skills. Of particular interest in organizational behavior is the effect of leaders on developing skills. This paper examines an emergent organizational capability, the Context-for-Learning, using virtual experiments and an agent-based model. In examining the developmental paths of this skill, we found that both the organization's composition and the leader's leadership style had very different effects on the developmental paths. The set of followers in an organization and the leader's leadership style are both critical in determining the developmental paths of the organizational skill, the Context-for-Learning. However, the leadership style of a highly skilled leader with a high set of followers did not matter.