Lessons From Her Story: An Interpretative Phenomenological Study of a Woman’s Leadership Identity Evolution in Higher Education

Abstract

This interpretive phenomenological inquiry was an exploration of how a woman executive in higher education made sense of her leadership identity. As a single participant case, this study was a deep inquiry into how the participant made sense of her (a) leadership experiences in relationship to her identity, (b) the accounts she created and shared to explain her leadership identity evolution, and, (c) how she understood the role of positive emotions and adversity in her leadership identity evolution. Personal experiential themes, which provided the most aggregated level of project analysis, emerged from a series of interviews using Seidman’s (2006) protocol. Leadership insights included (a) a focus on results, (b) chaos, (c) success as a double-edged sword, (d) gender impacts, (e) the nature of relationships, and (f) the foundations of elite athletic training. This project also explored the use of organizational metaphor to provide additional insight into the participant’s leadership perspective. Finally, this dissertation provided a framework for leadership coaching and a scholarly reflection that outlines a conceptual framework for the researcher’s personal learning cycle.