Addendum: Vision and Mental Models – A Decade Later

The work of Bass (1985), House (Shamir, House, & Arthur, 1993), and others (e.g., Conger & Kanungo, 1998), points to a fundamental conclusion. Vision, the development and articulation of an image of an idealized future, is critical to outstanding leadership or leadership beyond expectations. Recognition of this point led Mumford and Strange (2002) to propose a model of the vision formation process. This model held that leader visions are found in case-based or experiential knowledge with this knowledge being used, through processes such as causal search, goal search, self-reflection, and forecasting or refinement, to formulate a prescriptive mental model and articulate viable visions. Over the last decade, two streams of research based on this model of vision formation have been initiated. One stream has examined basic process and the other stream has examined styles of vision formation. In the present effort we will attempt to provide a summary of the findings emerging from these two streams of research.