Elevating the Case for Leadership Development Programs: Return on Investment Evaluations

• Published date: 01 March 2021
• Author: Gordon Abner,Bill Valdez,James L. Perry
• Date: 01 March 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13284

Elevating the Case for Leadership Development Programs 291

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 81, Iss. 2, pp. 291–294. © 2020 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13284.

Elevating the Case for Leadership Development Programs:

Return on Investment Evaluations

Abstract: Competent leadership is essential to helping achieve agency missions. While governments around the globe

invest in leadership development, most struggle to calculate the return on their investment (ROI). The lack of ROI

evaluations makes it difficult to maintain leadership development budgets during financial crises and political

changes. In this article we outline three methods for assessing ROI for leadership development.

Evidence for Practice

• A lack of return on investment evaluations makes it difficult to maintain leadership development budgets

during financial crises and political changes, resources may be allocated inefficiently, and governments may

be producing leaders ill-suited for the challenges they face.

• Governments can draw upon a variety of proven methods to provide more rigorous assessment of leadership

development programs.

• The improving availability of data at all levels of government increases capacity to calculate return on investment.

Public executives and managers broadly agree

that effective leaders improve organizational

performance through competencies such as

leading change, providing organizational vision, and

managing organizational resources efficiently. Effective

public organizations spend a great deal of time and

resources on leadership development programs they

hope will produce a pipeline of leaders who are

aligned to the organization’s needs.

While a growing body of research demonstrates that

government agencies can deliver effective leadership

development programming, scholars have also found

that government agencies are struggling to collect

systematic data regarding how much they spend on

leadership development programming and are having

difficulty calculating the overall return on investment

(GAO,2014; Abner et al.2019; Getha-Taylor et

al.2015; Seidle, Fernandez, and Perry2016). Several

factors account for the data deficiency and lack of

return on investment (ROI) evaluations, but they center

on poor data collection procedures, lack of budgets and

expertise for ROI evaluations, and little interest in the

academic community for this type of research.

The absence of ROI evaluations has three primary

consequences:

• It is challenging for governments to maintain

their budgets for leadership development

programs during times of financial crisis and

changes in political leadership.

• The lack of ROI data means that governments

may be allocating their resources inefficiently

by over-spending on low-impact programs and

under-spending on high-impact programs.

• Most significantly, governments may be

unintentionally producing leaders who are ill-

suited for twenty-first century challenges, such

as rapid technological and demographic changes

and increasing instability domestically and

abroad.

Our viewpoint in this article can be summarized

in three statements. First, based on our experience

and recent field research on leadership development

programs, governments take seriously the effectiveness

of their leadership development programs (Abner

et al.2019). Second, governments are in a stronger

position today than ever to take the leap toward

more rigorous assessment of leadership development

programs. Finally, governments can gain a great

deal by assessing return on investment, even when

methods and data fall short of what is done in the

private sector.

Leadership Development Assessment Today

Many years ago, Donald Kirkpatrick(1979)

proposed a model for evaluating training that remains

influential today. Kirkpatrick distinguished between

Gordon Abner Bill Valdez

James L. Perry

The University of Texas at Austin American University

Indiana University Bloomington

James L. Perry is Distinguished Professor

Emeritus in the Paul H. O’Neill School of

Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana

University, Bloomington. From 2012 through

2017 he was Editor in Chief of

Public

Administration Review

(

PAR

). He is editor

of

Public Service and Good Governance for

the Twenty-First Century

(U. of Pennsylvania

Press, 2020) and author of

Managing

Organizations to Sustain Passion for Public

Service

(Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Email: perry@indiana.edu

Bill Valdez was most recently the President

of the Senior Executives Association, and

prior to that served from 1994–2014 in the

Federal government, managing complex

science and technology programs. He was

the co-editor of the

Handbook of Federal

Government Leadership & Administration

(ASPA Series in Public Administration and

Public Policy, 2016) and is an adjunct

faculty member at American University.

Email: billvaldez777@hotmail.com

Gordon Abner is an assistant professor

of public management at the LBJ School of

Public Affairs at the University of Texas at

Austin. His research has appeared in the

Review of Public Personnel Administration

,

Nonprofit Management and Leadership

,

and

Public Performance & Management

Review

. Email: gordon.abner@austin.

utexas.edu

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