Thomas Kowalewski (2015): Personal Growth in Organizational Contexts: The Effectiveness of a Personal Growth Training for Employees and Leaders

personalgrowthAmong the many approaches that are available when organizations seek to enhance the performance of their workforce, the focus on self-improvement, personal development, or personal leadership has gained increasing prominence throughout the last decades. These approaches regard personal growth as a necessary requirement to increase general effectiveness at the workplace and are applied to both leaders and employees alike. 

Whereas there is a variety of anecdotal evidence on the usefulness of personal growth trainings readily available to the interested reader, scientific research on these techniques is scarce. Critics state that the self-improvement industry is an unregulated sector and that even though the products marketed by this industry are popular and widely used, they are often neither backed up by evidence nor are they built systematically on scientific research. In response to this lack of sound knowledge, numerous scholars have pointed out the importance of working towards evidence-based management methods in organizational contexts to avoid the risk of unintended consequences and to assure that investments result in the achievement of desired outcomes.

At the hand of the popular personal growth training ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’ by Stephen R. Covey, Thomas Kowalewski’s dissertation investigates the usefulness of personal growth trainings as a tool for employee and leader development within organizations.

Supervisors: Rafael Wittek, Siegwart M. LindenbergGabriël Anthonio (Stenden University of Applied Sciences, Leeuwaarden)

Defended: February 2, 2015

The complete thesis can be downloaded here.

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