Back to Persons: On Social-Cognitive Processes and Products of Leadership Development Experiences

We agree with McCall that experience is critical to successful leadership development. In this commentary, we stress that an analysis of experience is necessary, but insufficient, for understanding leadership development. What matters most is whether experiences become internalized. In that regard, McCall does not go far enough. He takes two conceptual steps on a path that naturally has three. At the outset, McCall (2010) notes that the heritability of interindividual differences in leadership is minimal—about 30% for the trait ‘‘leadership role occupancy.’’ This empirical result motivates a highly valuable Step #1: A step away from a ‘‘fixed personal factors’’ approach to leadership. Having turned away from fixed qualities of persons, McCall moves to the logical alter-