The field of leader development has recently begun to focus more on the role of pre-adult leadership experiences in shaping leader development. However, research has largely neglected to account for children’s and adolescents’ agency in shaping their own leader development, instead focusing on external drivers of such development (e.g., parents, schools). This integrative conceptual article provides a model for leader development from childhood through adolescence, drawing on insights from the cognitive and social child development literature. This model focuses on the reciprocal influences of agency, early leadership experiences, and foundational socio-cognitive skills, including theory of mind, metacognition, self-regulation, and autobiographical reasoning, to foster growth and complexity in leadership skills and mindsets. In addition, the enabling forces that influence the early development and expression of agency, socio-cognitive skills, and leader mindsets are described.

Despite conclusive evidence about the positive impact of working relative to unemployment for psychological well-being, there remains much uncertainty about why working relates to improved well-being. Two theoretical perspectives that have often been contrasted in examinations of this question are the latent deprivation model and the agency restriction model. The former emphasizes (latent) psychological benefits of work (time structure, collective purpose, social contact, social status, and enforced activity), asserting that lower well-being in unemployment is due to the deprivation of access to these benefits. The latter emphasizes the monetary (manifest) benefit of work, asserting that it is the financial strain caused by lacking income that is primarily responsible for restricting agency and lowering well-being in unemployment. Here, we integrate these theories with a meta-analysis based on 90 primary studies/sources, 1147 effect sizes, and 69,723 people. Results support a unified account of these theories: employment provides access to all of these psychological and monetary benefits of work, and each benefit is significantly associated with lower psychological distress and higher life satisfaction. The monetary benefit was especially strongly related to life satisfaction. Meta-analytic structural equation modeling revealed that the benefits (except for enforced activity) fully mediated the effect of employment status on psychological distress; in contrast, only collective purpose, social status, and financial strain partially mediated the effect of employment status on life satisfaction. We discuss the implications of these findings for future research and for individuals, organizations, and policymakers to improve the experience of employment and mollify the harms of unemployment.

The necessity of work for psychological well-being is a topic that has generated much research. Two dominant perspectives on this issue are the agency restriction model, which posits that it is the manifest (i.e., financial) function of work that is most necessary for well-being, and the latent deprivation model, which instead points to the latent functions of work as most necessary. These two models suggest that work's absence in unemployment is pernicious for different reasons. Thus, the current meta-analysis examines the question of work's importance for well-being according to these two models, examining the difference in access to the latent and manifest functions between persons who are unemployed versus employed as well as the association between the functions and well-being. We find that unemployment indeed deprives persons of access to each function, and, moreover, the deprivation of these functions is associated with decreased well-being. However, the results of this meta-analysis suggest that both perspectives must be considered together rather than separately. We discuss further implications of these results.

Given the consistently high viewership of television (TV) by youth, the social, behavioral, developmental, and psychological impact of such viewing has been studied for decades. Yet, little research has focused on the connections between youth, the TV shows to which they are exposed, and the characterizations of leadership presented to them. This study examines the type of leadership behaviors and orientations presented through youth TV shows in the United States across a continuum of viewership age targets. Shows were selected through purposeful sampling from the most popular youth TV shows in the United States, and episodes were chosen based on synopsis, selecting for the greatest possibility of leadership scenarios. Researchers identified three shows for each viewer target age group and five episodes for each TV show, for a total of 75 episodes. The findings include the discovery that show-prescribed viewer target age group positively predicted leadership behavior such as direction-setting-i.e., gathering information, organizing information, sense-making, and forecasting. Additionally, as viewer target age range increased, shows presented with a decrease in communal leadership-characterized as caring, warm, trustworthy, empathetic, helpful, and/or friendly. Such findings suggest that the representations of leadership depicted in popular youth TV shows are transmitting potentially counterproductive messages to future leaders, deprioritizing crucial leadership elements.