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Introduction
Leadership development is becoming an increasingly critical and strategic imperative for organizations in the current business environment. Recent historical events and emerging trends emphasize the need to invest in the active development of leaders. Despite the fact that executives are increasingly expressing the need to focus on such initiatives, few are actively growing organizational leaders as part of their business strategy. These findings are apparent in one study that found that while almost all of the organizations surveyed indicated the need to develop leaders, only 44 percent actually had a formalized process to do so ([34] Giber et al. , 2000). As a result, these organizations may not be adequately prepared to compete in the ever-changing business environment. IBM learned this lesson the hard way and associated their loss in market leadership with the fact that they stopped focusing on leadership development in the 1980s ([63] Ready and Conger, 2003). It is evident that organizations with a passion for growing the right leaders, appropriate organizational structures and culture, and a strategic plan to implement leadership programs will be better prepared for future challenges ([30] Fulmer, 1997; [57] Miller et al. , 2001). The key purpose of this paper is to systematically review the literature on leadership development and offer organizational leaders practical advice on effective approaches to this issue.
Recent tragic events such as the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, and the Asian tsunami disaster have shed light on the fact that the contributions of organizational leaders can be quickly terminated and organizations must be in a position to appoint replacement leaders for the organization to continue to move forward. Many organizations lost key executives who were on the planes or who worked out of New York's World Trade Center at the time of the terrorist attack, including Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems, Oracle and AON Insurance. Cantor Fitzgerald, a bond-trading firm, lost about 700 out of its 1,000 World Trade Center workers, including many top executives ([22] Davis and Lucchetti, 2004; [39] Greengard, 2001). The New York Fire Department lost over 350 of its employees, but its leadership succession plan helped it to replace many of its top leaders within days. In a less dramatic instance, McDonald's Corporation faced...