Dyer-The Intersection of Resilience and Global Leadership in a VUCA World

Αρετή (Arete) Journal of Excellence in Global Leadership | Vol. 1 No. 1 | 2022

Global Leadership Resilience, A New Framework The ability to overcome adversity, also known as resilience, enables leaders to position themselves for success in an ever-changing world where they can positively affect change and persevere through challenging times (Breen, 2017). Understanding the relationship between leaders and resilience during disruptive times will increase the body of understanding of resilience knowledge as it intersects with global leadership, providing insight into the depth of competencies, providing potential new applications. VUCA occurrences such as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, the war in Ukraine, and the rise of the information age, create an unchartered territory for research exploration, opening new pathways for studying global leadership resilience. The Global Leadership Resilience Model (GLR) The body of resilience knowledge has yet to be fully understood or defined, leaving gaps in the research and application possibilities (Singhal, 2021). Various resilience surveys have been developed to measure levels of resilience for a wide range of situations and fields, which enable researchers to study, understand, and fill in the knowledge gaps surrounding leadership resilience (Ojo et al., 2021). These models are survey tools which vary in purpose, with some being better suited for the areas of human development, human relations, psychology, or the medical field, while others can help us better understand leadership, yet none consider global leadership resilience in the face of the VUCA world (Elkington & Breen, 2015). Could global leadership, resilience, and the VUCA world be connected and intertwined as part of one fluid, transformative, and transmutable concept? Change Theory and Disruption Theory stop short of addressing how these concepts inform the change process as applied to the field of global leadership, prompting the consideration of a new way of looking at the concepts in an interlocking pattern. The author offers a new framework for understanding the complex relationship between these constructs, the Global Leadership Resilience Model (GLR). This new model is offered as an illustrative framework for examining the interconnectedness between the constructs of global leadership, resilience, and the VUCA world as we consider the following question: What is the relationship between leadership and resilience following significant times of global disruption? The proposed GLR Model in Figure 1 provides the opportunity to look at the joined, yet fluid nature of global leadership resilience in the VUCA world as a reconfigured disruptive change framework that incorporates the simplicity of Disruption Theory while moving beyond the finite boundaries called for in Change Theory.

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