Leadership conference 2026

NEOMA Business School, Reims campus, will be hosting an "in-person only" three-day Mini-Conference on Leadership Antecedents and Development in collaboration with Durham University Business Centre for Leadership and Followership

The mini-conference will be kicked off with a methodological workshop.

Two keynote speakers and two invited guests will present their work that corresponds to the topic of the event and help with the development of the invited papers.

The papers will be selected on the basis of their abstract (fit to the conference topic, overall theoretical and methodological quality). Participants whose abstract has been accepted are expected to present their papers at the conference.
The emphasis will be on research projects in the developing stages.

The invited guests and keynote speakers will also help make the selection for the best paper award.

The topic

The question of why one emerges as a leader and how leaders can be developed has been at the centre of leadership research since its very beginning (e.g., Galton, 1891).

This topic is currently even more relevant given that many recruiters struggle with hiring leadership talent (Staff Shortages Impacting Productivity - Quarterly Recruitment Outlook - British Chambers of Commerce, 2022) and majority of the employees, especially younger ones (Wong, 2023), declare that they do not want to become managers (Torres, 2014).

To address these senior staff shortages, human resources professionals often invest in leadership development programmes. However, the majority of leadership trainings do not render expected results and lack a strong evidence-based foundation (Leroy et al., 2023).

Recent work highlights the importance of taking a consumer-centric perspective in leadership development, suggesting that training efforts are more effective when they are aligned with participants’ motivations and organisational context (Seeg et al., 2022). This underscores the need to better understand the antecedents of leadership emergence – such as personality, values, and identity development – in order to design training programmes that are both relevant and impactful.

Thus, more work is needed to uncover the antecedents of leadership and effective leadership development strategies.

The conference topic is relevant as it directly relates to the ongoing debate on the role of leaders in modern organizations. In particular, with the ongoing changes in the workforce, such as increased diversity, broader use of artificial intelligence, and new ways of work, some researchers have argued that leaders need to be more responsive and flexible towards the followers’ needs. They are increasingly seen as responsible not only for team performance, but also for followers’ mental health (Montano et al., 2023), inclusive interactions with other team members (Randel et al., 2018), and employee recovery from work (Volmer et al., 2023). Although certainly warranted, such holistic and romanticized view of leadership (Meindl, 1995) may ultimately contribute to the perception that leadership roles are becoming too complex and too overwhelming.