Reimagining leadership development for BME leaders: Harnessing peer learning to advance an environment–individual leadership development programme
通过集体自我民族志，研究五位英国高校的BME女性领导者在参与专门项目前后如何构建领导知识，发现非线性的U型轨迹，同伴学习帮助她们重构矛盾，为设计包容性领导力项目提供依据。
Past studies of leadership development programmes (LDPs) largely focus on how specific leadership knowledge outcomes can be secured, often treating leadership learning as a linear and environment-independent process. They overlook the longitudinal and situated nature of leadership knowledge construction as participants move through changing organisational, programme, and relational environments. This gap is particularly significant for Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) leaders in higher education institutions (HEIs), whose leadership learning is shaped by how they interpret—and are interpreted by—their environments over time. With a collective autoethnography, this study examines how five BME women working in UK HEIs construct leadership knowledge before, during, and after participating in a BME-specific LDP. Integrating situated learning theory with research on organisational texts, we conceptualise leadership development as an environmentally endogenous, textually mediated process rather than a linear transfer of skills. The analysis reveals a non-linear, U-shaped trajectory of leadership knowledge construction across three environment–individual nexuses: organisational constraints, LDP dissonance, and peer learning; transitions between nexuses are triggered by embedded agency and belonging paradoxes. The study shows how peer learning enables BME leaders to reframe these paradoxes as dilemmas, supporting exploration and exploitation of leadership knowledge and informing the design of inclusive, BME-specific LDPs.