Impact of a pharmaceutical company's leadership development program on participant leadership behavior

This mixed-methods study measured the impact of a leadership development program on participants' behavior. Using a retrospective degree-of-change survey, 24 middle managers received 360° feedback on ten leadership competencies approximately twelve months after participating in an internally-sponsored six-month leadership development program. Follow-up interviews with 17 of these managers provided insight into the leadership development tactics attributed to the positive change in leaders' behavior as well as transfer factors enabling or blocking the associated learning.Twenty-two of twenty-four managers experienced "slight positive change" or greater (3.00) in at least one of ten competencies which composed the Johnson & Johnson global leadership profile competency model. In aggregate, two of the ten competencies had statistically significant change (p < 0.05) while individually nine of the ten competencies had mean change at least of 3.00 (slight positive change). Nine leadership development tactics were attributed to positive behavior change. Seven learning transfer factors were found to have a positive impact on learning while four were found to block learning.