Selected Papers from the Symposium "Artful Leadership Development Research"

Dear Colleagues,

Interest into the link between arts and leadership development is quickly growing. Driven by the increasing challenges of the twenty-first century society where leadership grounded in rationality is not enough; the arts, and arts-based practices, are becoming increasingly important to enable different ways of relating to an increasing complex world. Within organizations, arts and an art-based approach can help to let different answers emerge, it can be a catalyst, a lever, and a trigger to support and driver of organizational change.

For this Special Issue, we are looking to bring together a group of articles that together provide an overview of current thinking, empirical research and practice of the leadership development through and with arts. We welcome papers that are purely conceptual, test theoretical models with quantitative survey data, or are grounded in qualitative data. Papers that are accepted for inclusion within this special issue will be published free-of-charge.

The current Special Issue is directly linked with the upcoming final conference of the Artful Leadership Project on June 6–7th 2018, Porto, Portugal (for more information see: http://www.artfulleader.eu/artful-conference.html). We encourage authors considering submitting a paper to this special issue to join us for this conference.

We are looking in particular for articles that reflect the growing attention for arts in leadership development as it is supported by arts-based learning methods and deployed through different methods and techniques (e.g., digital storytelling, visual art, design thinking, etc.). The goal of arts-based learning is not to teach people to be artists, but to create intense immersive learning experiences through artistic processes that facilitate new insights and perspectives about business challenges, hence contributing to individual and organizational learning and development.

Possible topics may include: Artistic capabilities and leadership capabilities, Artistic creation processes and leadership, Art as a metaphor for business and leadership, Leadership using art (e.g., storytelling, imagery…) as a way of communication, Inspiration from leadership as depicted by art, Design thinking for leadership processes, the leadership mindset and the artist mindset.

During the conference on June 7th, we will organize during the day a parallel symposium with presentations. For more information on submission guidelines for the conference, see http://www.artfulleader.eu/call-for-papers.html. Additionally, we also welcome submissions to the special issue from people that are unable to join us in Porto.

Submission for this Special Issue opens 1 September 2018.

For more information on this special issue or on the conference, do not hesitate to contact us.

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Administrative Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.