Campus Location
Dallas Campus (Online)
Date of Award
7-2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Department
Organizational Leadership
Degree Name
Doctor of Education
Committee Chair or Primary Advisor
Jim Adams
Second Committee Member or Secondary Advisor
Heather Rasmussen
Third Committee Member or Committee Reader
Mary Christopher
Abstract
A challenge in cross-cultural church planting is developing leaders. Cross-cultural church-planting organizations like Latin American Mission (LAM; pseudonym) that lack a leadership development strategy struggle to form lasting leaders, sending missionaries with Biblical training but not leader development training. Additionally, developing leaders in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environment creates specific challenges that missionaries must address. The purpose of this qualitative, Delphi method study was to investigate the leadership development perceptions and experiences among existing LAM missionaries in the regions of Latin America (Colombia, Cuba, Mexico City, Peru, Brazil, and Ecuador) to provide suggestions for improving effective leadership development within a VUCA environment. Understanding the LAM missionaries’ perceptions and experiences provided insight into best practices and strategies for developing leaders. Thus, the problem was that LAM needed to further understand the realities of their missionaries to better equip them to effectively train new church leaders for a VUCA environment. Concepts of positive leadership, vertical leadership development, cross-cultural leadership, followership, and coaching influenced this investigation. This qualitative Delphi method study proved effective in gathering collective wisdom, using consensus data from a panel of experts within a context. Using a three-round modified Delphi method, a panel of 17 participants who lived and worked as missionaries in a Latin American context with the LAM church-planting organization provided wisdom for best practices in leadership development within a VUCA context. Five themes emerged from the panel’s experience that endorsed many tenets of the conceptual framework, specifically within positive leadership, vertical leadership development, and coaching. The panel confirmed that a VUCA environment affected their experience in developing leaders. Other themes included influences vi on leader development like positive organizational climates, both the developer’s and new leader’s mindset, trusting relationships between developers and new leaders, and positive feedback. The conclusions were that missionaries desiring to develop new leaders in a VUCA world could use the key tenets of positive leadership and vertical leadership development; also, coaching was an effective development tool for a VUCA context.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Davis, Jeremy, "Effective Leader Development Within a Church-Planting Organization for a Changing and Chaotic World" (2023). Digital Commons @ ACU, Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 640.
https://digitalcommons.acu.edu/etd/640
Included in
Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Human Resources Management Commons, Latin American Studies Commons, Leadership Studies Commons, Missions and World Christianity Commons, Nonprofit Administration and Management Commons, Organizational Behavior and Theory Commons, Organization Development Commons, Quantitative, Qualitative, Comparative, and Historical Methodologies Commons