Leadership worldwide is in crisis. The VUCA world is rendering leaders incompetent and unwise. Ethical misconduct by leaders, as well as toxic leadership, are on the rise. There are more frequent public demonstrations/ revolts against leaders. Trust in leaders is eroding, and followers increasingly are disengaged.
Our contention is that the answer to the current directionless, clueless, and opportunistic leadership, is leaders who are in pursuit of moral, worthy, and inspiring quests, making a true value-adding, lasting difference, in this way countering the growing leadership crisis. A literature review unveiled that the concept of a leadership quest has not been systematically researched. The closed concept is 'calling', which has received some attention.
Our research investigated the overarching postulate that leaders who pursue a worthy quest aimed at serving others, arising from their authentic selves, will be able to mobilise followers to join them in the relentless pursuit of worthy causes for the betterment of their communities, society, and humanity. Our research set out to: firstly, construct; and, secondly, validate a model regarding the discovery and pursuit of a leadership quest. Because of the lack of such a model, we opted for a qualitative research approach, specifically grounded theory, underpinned by a social constructivist philosophy.
The purpose of our research paper is to present our validated, leadership quest model, and to take the first step towards the development of a fully-fledged leadership quest theory by proposing a set of hypotheses derived from our validated model. The following topics are covered: first, defining the concept 'leadership quest', and the related concept 'calling'; second, explicating our adopted research design; third, discussing our validated model; fourth, proposing a set of hypotheses to trigger the construction of a leadership quest theory; and, lastly, outlining the theoretical and practical contributions of our research.