Arts-based methods in leadership development: Affording aesthetic workspaces, reflexivity and memories with momentum

There is a growing cry for ways of approaching management and leadership development that embrace the complex, dynamic, chaotic and highly subjective, interactional environments of contemporary organisational contexts. One response has been the use of arts-based methods for management and leadership education. Although a community of research has grown around these practices, there remains a lack of empirically grounded work focusing on the underlying, situated, experiential learning processes of such methods. Working from the concept of experiential learning as knowledge creation through the transformation of experience, I develop a three-stage theoretical model that explores experiential learning processes of arts-based methodologies. This study is based on an inductive, grounded theory approach in analyzing descriptive essays written by Executive MBA students on their experiences of a choral conducting masterclass. The model describes how arts-based learning environments afford aesthetic workspaces where participants engaged in aesthetic reflexivity to create memories with momentum to inform their future leadership practice. This model builds an interdisciplinary bridge to the theory of affordances and the concepts of aesthetic workspaces and aesthetic reflexivity found within cultural sociology, a discourse with a focus on the reflexive use of the arts for self-configuration, regulation and development.