'Ask and Ye Shall Receive? Linking Leader Development Seeking to Developmental Opportunities', a seminar by Prof Stephen Courtright (Texas A&M)

Ask and Ye Shall Receive? Linking Leader Development Seeking to Developmental Opportunities

by Prof Stephen Courtright

Abstract:

Organizations invest heavily in developing future leaders, yet a fundamental practical puzzle remains: why do some employees receive developmental opportunities while others do not, even when they actively seek them out? The leader development literature has largely assumed that development is driven either by employees or by organizations, offering limited insight into how employees’ requests for development opportunities are interpreted in practice. Addressing this tension, we introduce leader development seeking—employees’ requests for leadership-related developmental opportunities—and examine how such requests are evaluated by decision makers responsible for allocating development. Integrating social exchange theory and implicit leadership theory, we propose that leader development seeking shapes two competing perceptions on the part of supervisors: psychological entitlement and leader prototypicality. These perceptions, in turn, have opposing effects on development allocation: psychological entitlement is negatively associated with employees receiving leader development, whereas leader prototypicality is positively associated with receiving leader development. Results from a field study and an experimental study provide broad support for our model.

About the speaker:

Stephen Courtright is a Professor of Management, a Presidential Impact Fellow, and holder of the Flip and Susan Flippen Endowed Chair at Mays Business School. He earned his BS in Accounting from Brigham Young University–Idaho in 2006 and his Ph.D. in Business Administration from the University of Iowa in 2012. Following an earlier stint at Texas A&M from 2012 to 2020, Dr. Courtright spent five years at the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business, where he held the Henry B. Tippie Professorship of Management, founded the Tippie Leadership Collaborative, and served as Director of Executive Education. He returned to Texas A&M in 2025 to help launch the Flippen Leadership Institute and serve as its inaugural director, shaping programs, events, and research initiatives aimed at developing leaders of character in business and beyond.

Dr. Courtright’s research explores why some leaders inspire, empower, and unite while others control, divide, and harm, and how self-regulation, burnout, organizational practices, family relationships, and faith influence those choices. His work has been published in leading journals, earned international awards, and been cited in nearly 10,000 other research studies. He has been interviewed by NPR, The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and Forbes, and has written for Harvard Business Review, Deseret News, and Diplomatic Courier.