The Self-Leadership Wheel of Becoming: A Theory-Informed Exploratory Study of Collaborative Capability Development Among Norwegian Union Representatives

Abstract

Collaboration is increasingly treated as a core capability in contemporary working life, yet leadership-development research suggests that developmental efforts often remain too generic, weakly contextualized, and insufficiently connected to the conditions under which participants must learn and perform. This theory-informed exploratory study examines how Norwegian union representatives define, operationalize, and reflect on collaborative capability development within a semester-long university course. The study adopts a qualitative document design based on 25 written course reports produced by Parat union representatives enrolled in the course Collaboration for the Future Working Life at Kristiania University of Applied Sciences in autumn 2025. The reports are analyzed as structured reflective development documents using cross-case thematic analysis. Conceptually, the article draws on collaboration research, leadership development, self-directed learning, self-leadership, and job demands–resources theory. The findings indicate that participants conceptualized collaborative capability as a multidimensional professional capability combining dialogic competence, trust-building, psychological safety, role-based bridge-building, assertive boundary-setting, and self-regulation under pressure. Development was typically organized through iterative practice cycles of self-evaluation, feedback, goal setting, monitoring routines, micro-practices for attention and stress regulation, environmental redesign, implementation, reflection, and adjustment. At the same time, the reports suggest that collaborative development was constrained by time pressure, emotional exposure, cumulative role demands, and fluctuating energy. Reported outcomes were typically incremental, including clearer communication, increased awareness of triggers, stronger boundary-setting, more sustainable role professionalism, and improved presence under strain. The article contributes a bounded, context-sensitive account of collaborative capability development as a self-directed, self-regulated, and resource-sensitive process of professional becoming. It further develops two connected practical–theoretical models: the Performance Pyramid, which clarifies the developmental architecture from identity awareness to energy and capability regulation and performance enactment, and the Self-Leadership Wheel of Becoming, which functions as an operational scaffold for self-evaluation, goal setting, feasible program design, implementation, reflection, and revision. Rather than presenting these models as universally validated, the article positions them as heuristic and processual contributions for understanding and supporting capability development in collaboration-intensive roles.

1. Introduction

Across advanced economies, accelerated technological change, hybrid work arrangements, and growing cross-boundary interdependence have intensified demand for capabilities that enable people to work constructively with others under conditions of uncertainty and change (OECD, 2018; WEF, 2025). Work is increasingly digital, hybrid, and learning-intensive, which raises the developmental demands placed on employees and representatives who must collaborate, adapt, and regulate themselves under changing conditions. In this landscape, collaboration is increasingly framed not as a peripheral interpersonal strength but as a core capability for coordinated action, learning, adaptation, and sustainable performance (Thornhill-Miller et al., 2023). At the same time, leadership-development research has become more critical of generic development programs that are insufficiently contextualized, weakly evaluated, or disconnected from the real developmental demands participants face in everyday work (Leroy et al., 2024; Yemiscigil et al., 2023).

This challenge is particularly visible in representative roles. Union representatives are expected to collaborate across employee, management, and institutional boundaries while navigating disagreement, procedural rules, role ambiguity, and limited formal authority. In such settings, collaboration cannot be reduced to interpersonal smoothness or generic teamwork. It requires dialogic competence, trust-building, conflict navigation, role clarity, boundary-setting, and the capacity to remain constructive under emotional and organizational pressure (Hetland, 2015; Stensaker et al., 2023). Yet despite the practical importance of such capability, research still says relatively little about how collaboration is articulated and developed in institutionally embedded representative roles. The present study responds to that gap by examining collaboration not only as a desired outcome, but as a capability that must be built, sustained, and enacted under real contextual constraints.

A second gap concerns self-leadership. Although the concept remains influential, recent scholarship suggests that self-leadership research still needs stronger integration with broader leadership and organizational debates. Reichard et al. (2025) argue that the field has matured substantially, but that future progress depends on stronger theoretical integration, clearer contextualization, and more explicit boundary conditions. Similarly, Tenschert et al. (2025) show in their systematic review that self-leadership and mindfulness training can support self-regulation, stress resilience, job satisfaction, and leadership-related functioning, while also emphasizing the importance of sustained and well-designed developmental processes. A broader perspective of self-leadership is especially relevant in contexts where people must develop capabilities gradually under pressure rather than simply perform well in isolated situations. That point is particularly important for the present article, because collaborative capability development among union representatives appears to involve exactly such longer-term processes of reflection, adjustment, persistence, and role-sensitive learning.

The present study examines a bounded and practice-based setting: 25 written development reports produced by Norwegian Parat union representatives attending the course Collaboration for the Future Working Life at Kristiania University of Applied Sciences (Oslo, Norway). Rather than treating these reports as strong empirical evidence of objective training effects, the article interprets them as structured reflective development documents that make participants’ developmental reasoning visible. They show how participants defined ideal collaborative capability, assessed gaps, designed routines of self-directed practice, anticipated barriers, and reflected on progress and setbacks over time. In this sense, the reports are analytically valuable because they provide access to collaborative capability development as an enacted and interpreted process rather than as a decontextualized training variable.

The study is theoretically anchored in four strands of literature. First, it draws on research conceptualizing collaboration as a multidimensional capability rather than a single interpersonal trait (Hao et al., 2016; O’Leary et al., 2012). Second, it uses self-directed learning to understand how participants structure developmental processes through diagnosis, goal setting, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation (Boyer et al., 2014; Ellinger, 2004). Third, it mobilizes self-leadership as a micro-level lens for how individuals attempt to regulate attention, motivation, emotion, and behavior during practice (Bjerke, 2024; Neck & Houghton, 2006; Stewart et al., 2011), while also treating self-leadership as part of a broader developmental logic rather than as a narrow self-management device. Fourth, it uses job demands–resources (JD-R) theory to explain why capability enactment and developmental persistence are often constrained by workload, emotional exposure, and fluctuating resource conditions (Bakker & Demerouti, 2017; Demerouti et al., 2001).

In line with recent arguments on theory development, the contribution of this study is intended at a contextual level: to clarify how collaborative capability development appears to be understood and enacted in a specific Norwegian union-representative context, and how context-sensitive self-leadership may function within that process (Homer & Lim, 2024). Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to explore how union representatives conceptualize, operationalize, and reflect on collaborative capability development through iterative self-directed practice, and how such development appears to be shaped by self-leadership and contextual demands.

The study is guided by the following research questions:

• RQ1: How do union representatives describe their ideal images of collaborative capability?
• RQ2: How do they operationalize collaborative development targets in their own practice?
• RQ3: What contextual demands and barriers constrain the enactment and development of collaborative capability?
• RQ4: What developmental outcomes, adjustments, and learning claims are reported across iterative practice cycles?

The remainder of the article proceeds as follows. Section 2 develops the theoretical framing by integrating current research on collaboration, leadership development, self-directed learning, self-leadership, and JD-R theory. Section 3 then explains the Norwegian course context, the document-based dataset, and the qualitative analytic strategy. Section 4 presents the cross-case themes, followed by a discussion of the article’s theoretical, practical, and policy implications and a separate future research agenda.

2. Literature Review

2.1. Collaboration as a Future-Oriented Capability and a Leadership-Development Concern

The growing emphasis on collaboration in contemporary working life is often discussed within future-skills discourse, but this framing can remain too descriptive unless it is linked to a more explicit development problem. The issue is not simply that collaboration is important. The more pressing question is how collaboration capabilities can be developed and sustained in demanding, institutionally embedded, and digitally mediated work contexts (OECD, 2018; WEF, 2025). This question becomes especially significant when viewed through current leadership-development debates, where scholars increasingly argue that development programs fail when they are generic, weakly contextualized, or poorly connected to the actual conditions under which participants must learn and perform (Leroy et al., 2024; Yemiscigil et al., 2023).

This perspective is relevant here because the course examined in this study did not simply ask participants to discuss collaboration in abstract terms. It required them to define ideal capability targets, assess their current level, identify goals, design a program and barriers, implement developmental action, and reflect on outcomes and learning. The article is therefore relevant not only to self-leadership but also to broader questions of how capability-focused leadership development can be designed and studied in practice. Recent work on leadership development and adult learning supports this orientation by emphasizing reflective practice, contextual grounding, developmental realism, and whole-person growth rather than one-off content delivery (Lee & Burman, 2026; Scholtz, 2023; Solbakken et al., 2026).

A useful implication for the present study is that collaboration should not merely be introduced as a desirable interpersonal quality. It should be treated as a developable professional capability whose development must be studied in relation to context, learning process, and implementation conditions.

2.2. Self-Leadership as an Evolving but Still Insufficiently Integrated Construct

Self-leadership has long been understood as a process of self-influence through which individuals regulate their thinking and behavior to achieve desired goals (Manz, 1986; Neck & Houghton, 2006). The classic literature remains foundational, particularly the emphasis on behavior-focused strategies, natural reward strategies, and constructive thought patterns (Neck & Houghton, 2006; Stewart et al., 2011). However, contemporary self-leadership research has moved well beyond these foundations.

Recent review work shows that self-leadership has entered a more mature phase of conceptual development, but also that the field still needs stronger theoretical integration, sharper contextualization, and clearer elaboration of boundary conditions. Reichard et al. (2025) explicitly argue that future self-leadership research should connect more directly with adjacent organizational and leadership literatures. This is especially important for the present study because it confirms that self-leadership should not be treated as a self-contained subfield detached from broader leadership-development and organizational debates.

Recent systematic review evidence also indicates that self-leadership is highly relevant to developmental processes. Tenschert et al. (2025) found that self-leadership and mindfulness training can improve self-regulation, stress resilience, sleep, job satisfaction, burnout-related functioning, and broader leadership-related outcomes. At the same time, their review shows that developmental impact depends on sustained practice and design quality rather than on one-off exposure. This is directly relevant to the current article because the participants’ reports are built around repeated cycles of self-evaluation, practice, monitoring, and adjustment rather than isolated insight or content delivery.

This broader interpretation is especially relevant in contemporary work contexts characterized by continuous change, digitalization, and growing developmental demands. Self-leadership is no longer best understood only as a mechanism for momentary self-regulation, self-efficacy or personal effectiveness. It is increasingly relevant as a developmental capability through which individuals direct their own learning, adaptation, and sustainable functioning over time. Recent work reinforces this shift by showing that self-leadership is linked not only to performance and motivation, but also to more adaptive and context-sensitive forms of functioning, including adaptive performance, flow, and broader well-being-related outcomes (see, e.g., Leão et al., 2026; Ștefan & Vîrgă, 2025; Vargas et al., 2025). For the present study, this broader interpretation is useful because collaborative capability development among union representatives is not limited to isolated acts of self-control, but appears as a longer-term developmental effort involving reflection, adjustment, persistence, and role-sensitive adaptation.

2.3. Beyond the Individual: Self-Leadership as Socially Embedded

Older self-leadership writing can sometimes sound overly individualistic, as if effective self-regulation were mainly a matter of personal discipline detached from the work environment. More recent research challenges this assumption. Bracht et al. (2024), based on interviews with job newcomers, show that self-leadership is shaped by the social work environment, especially the support, guidance, and collaborative relationships provided by managers and coworkers. Their findings reframe self-leadership as socially embedded rather than purely self-generated.

This insight is highly relevant to union-representative work. Representatives do not develop collaborative capability in a social vacuum. Their developmental efforts are shaped by organizational communication patterns, relationships with members and managers, time constraints, conflict exposure, and access to feedback. It therefore makes more theoretical sense to treat self-leadership here as a self-regulatory mechanism embedded in a social and institutional ecology rather than as a purely intrapsychic variable.

This relational framing also strengthens the article’s fit with collaboration research, because collaboration itself is inherently relational and context sensitive. If self-leadership development depends partly on the social environment, then organizations or unions that want to strengthen collaborative capability cannot focus only on individual mindset or personal discipline. They must also consider the relational and structural conditions that help development become sustainable. Studies on communication visibility, exploitative leadership, and team or educational contexts similarly suggest that self-leadership is shaped by wider relational and environmental conditions rather than existing in isolation (Jian et al., 2024; Park & Byon, 2024; Wang et al., 2025).

2.4. Collaboration as a Multidimensional Capability Rather than a Generic Trait

A central problem in both research and practice is that “collaboration” is often used loosely, sometimes referring to attitudes, sometimes to outcomes, and sometimes to underlying capabilities. This lack of precision makes development difficult, because it becomes unclear what exactly should be practiced, observed, or evaluated.

For the present study, collaboration is better conceptualized as a structured bundle of capabilities including dialogic competence, trust-building, role-based bridge-building, constructive conflict navigation, assertive boundary-setting, and self-regulation under interactional load (Cherbonnier et al., 2025; Hao et al., 2016). This multidimensional view is more compatible with representative roles than simplistic ideas of teamwork or interpersonal harmony. It also helps explain why the participants’ reports focused on concrete micro-practices such as listening, clarifying, preparing, pacing, and protecting emotional steadiness rather than on abstract ideals alone.

Recent work on collaboration-skill training further supports this capability perspective. Cherbonnier et al. (2025), in a systematic literature review, show that collaborative skills can be developed through structured training and digitally supported learning designs, but that effects depend on instructional quality, practice, and integration into meaningful interactional contexts. Earlier work on design collaboration similarly emphasizes that collaboration skills are developable and behaviorally structured rather than fixed traits (Kleinsmann et al., 2012). In summary, these studies strengthen the case for treating collaboration as something that can be intentionally developed through practice-based methods.

2.5. Why Job Demands–Resources Theory Is Central to This Study

A central assumption of this article is that collaborative capability development is resource sensitive. Even where participants know what constructive collaboration requires, actual enactment may weaken under pressure if time is scarce, emotional exposure is high, or cumulative role demands reduce attentional and emotional capacity. JD-R theory helps explain why capability enactment is not only a matter of knowing what to do but also of having the resources to do it sustainably (Bakker & Demerouti, 2017; Crawford et al., 2010).

This more conditional view is consistent with recent self-leadership research emphasizing that the field should move beyond generalized positive associations and pay greater attention to how, when, and why self-leadership contributes to favorable outcomes in practice (Knotts et al., 2022). This is particularly relevant here because collaborative capability is unlikely to depend on self-regulation alone, but also on the resource conditions under which such regulation can be sustained.

This theoretical move is supported by more recent self-leadership research. Naveed et al. (2026) show that higher job demands were associated with greater burnout, that burnout impaired in-role performance, and that self-leadership buffered the negative effects of job demands on burnout. While the present study does not test such relationships, it does align conceptually with the idea that self-leadership may operate as a personal resource where sustained role performance depends on regulating internal states under pressure. Related research on work pressure, and sustainable management points in the same direction by showing that self-leadership becomes especially salient when work arrangements intensify demands or blur boundaries (Junça-Silva et al., 2024; Karivalis & Ohana, 2025).

This perspective is particularly useful here because union representatives often deal with emotionally demanding cases, role conflict, competing expectations, and limited formal authority. Under such conditions, collaboration is not simply a matter of willingness or interpersonal skill. It depends on whether individuals can preserve energy balance, attentional capacity, emotional steadiness, and role-consistent behavior under strain.

2.6. Self-Directed Learning and Self-Leadership as Complementary Process Theories

Self-directed learning helps explain how individuals structure development through diagnosing needs, setting goals, selecting methods, implementing routines, monitoring progress, and evaluating outcomes (Boyer et al., 2014; Ellinger, 2004). Self-directed learning alone does not fully explain developmental persistence. Participants may know how to define goals and plan routines, but still struggle when energy drops, work intensifies, or emotional exposure increases.

This is where self-leadership adds explanatory value. Self-directed learning explains the architecture of development, while self-leadership helps explain the self-regulatory engine that makes that architecture livable in practice (Nesbit, 2012; Ross, 2014). Sustaining routines under fatigue, conflict, and time pressure requires more than planning. It requires regulating emotion, protecting energy, maintaining motivation, and adjusting effort when reality interferes.

This integration also fits current leadership-development thinking. Practice-based development is more likely to succeed when it is linked to lived work challenges, supported by reflection and feedback, and sustained over time (Leroy et al., 2024; Scholtz, 2023; Yemiscigil et al., 2023). In this sense, self-leadership can be understood not only as self-regulation in the narrow sense, but as part of a broader developmental logic through which individuals direct their own growth over time. For the present study, this is particularly relevant because collaborative capability development appears to involve more than regulating immediate thoughts and behaviors. It also involves diagnosing developmental needs, building routines, monitoring progress, revising strategies, and sustaining learning under demanding conditions. Theoretically, this allows self-leadership to be interpreted as a developmental bridge between self-directed learning and role-relevant capability formation.

2.7. The Contextual Contribution of the Present Study

Despite growing interest in self-leadership, collaborative capability, and leadership development, three issues remain underexplored. First, self-leadership research still needs stronger integration with broader leadership-development and contextual theories (Reichard et al., 2025). Second, collaboration is often examined either as a generic teamwork virtue or as an outcome variable, leaving less understanding of how it is articulated and practiced in institutionally embedded representative roles (Hao et al., 2016; O’Leary et al., 2012). Third, leadership-development theory increasingly values bounded, context-sensitive contributions, yet representative work in Nordic labor-relations contexts remains underexamined as a site of capability development (Homer & Lim, 2024; Stensaker et al., 2023).

The present study addresses these issues by examining how Norwegian union representatives define and reflect on collaborative capability development within a structured university course. The article offers a theory-informed exploratory account of how collaborative development is framed, enacted, and constrained in a specific institutional context, and uses that account to refine the Self-Leadership Wheel of Becoming as a contextualized developmental scaffold rather than a universal model.

3. Methodology

3.1. Research Design and Analytical Purpose

This study applies a theory-informed exploratory qualitative document design using a multiple-case logic (see, e.g., Bjerke, 2024; Saeidzadeh et al., 2021; Travers et al., 2015). The aim is to examine how union representatives participating in a structured university course articulated, operationalized, and reflected on collaborative capability development over time. Accordingly, each submitted report is treated as one case, and the cases are compared systematically to identify recurring themes, contrasts, and developmental patterns across participants.

This framing is important because the empirical material consists of written course reports from one bounded cohort. The reports provide rich access to participants’ developmental reasoning, such as how they defined an ideal collaborative self, identified gaps, selected methods, anticipated pitfalls, and interpreted progress linking self-leadership, self-directed learning, and an institutional context.

3.2. Context: Norwegian Working Life, Union Representation, and the Parat Course Setting

The study is situated in a Norwegian labor-relations context and focuses on union representatives affiliated with Parat. This context is analytically important because representative work in Norway is shaped by institutionalized cooperation, formal and informal dialogue structures, and a two-party or tripartite governance logic in which collaboration frequently occurs across role boundaries and without full formal authority. In such settings, collaboration is not merely a matter of interpersonal style. It involves balancing employee voice, procedural legitimacy, constructive dialogue, and sustainable role performance under pressure (Brigden & Kaine, 2015; Rubinstein & McCarthy, 2016).

The empirical material derives from the course Collaboration for the Future Working Life at Kristiania University of Applied Sciences, delivered in autumn 2025. The participants were Parat union representatives from different parts of Norway and with varied workplace backgrounds. The cohort reflected a broad national spread and consisted mainly of mid-career adults combining union responsibilities with professional and private obligations. This context matters methodologically because the participants were not responding to an abstract survey instrument; they were completing a structured developmental assignment grounded in their ongoing roles and workplace realities.

3.3. Data Material: Structured Reflective Development Documents

The dataset consists of 25 submitted written reports, each representing one case. One enrolled participant did not submit a report. Some reports also included appendices such as self-evaluation matrices, development logs, weekly implementation schedules, or other planning tools. The reports were produced as the course assessment and followed a common assignment brief. That brief required participants to combine theory and practice by discussing future working-life conditions and by carrying out a structured self-development project aimed at strengthening their collaborative capability through self-leadership and reflection.

The assignment asked participants to do several things in sequence: describe a theoretical basis for collaboration and working-life change; define important ideal collaborative skills; conduct a self-evaluation, potentially supplemented by input from others; identify barriers and pitfalls; formulate development goals and a timeline; design a training or self-development program; and reflect on implementation, outcomes, and learning after a period of practice. Because this assignment structure was shared across the cohort, the reports are comparable in a way that many naturally occurring reflective texts are not.

Because the course assignment itself invited participants to describe ideal capabilities, self-evaluation, barriers, implementation plans, and reflections, the analysis does not treat the overall developmental sequence as fully emergent. Instead, the analytical focus is on how participants populated, adapted, and made sense of this structured developmental architecture in relation to collaborative capability development.

Analytically, the reports are best understood as structured reflective development documents. They are valuable because they make visible how participants themselves framed ideal capability targets, diagnosed problems, and narrated learning over time. However, they should not be treated as equivalent to interviews, ethnographic observation, or validated performance measures. The study therefore examines participants’ developmental accounts and learning claims rather than verified behavioral effects.

3.4. Why a Qualitative Document Approach Was Appropriate

A qualitative document approach was chosen because the study’s primary interest lies in developmental meaning-making and process articulation. The reports provide direct access to how participants described collaboration, how they understood their own strengths and weaknesses, what methods they believed were useful, and how they interpreted barriers, setbacks, and progress. Since the material is text-based, reflective, and sequentially organized, it is well suited to close qualitative analysis (Saeidzadeh et al., 2021; Travers et al., 2015).

Because the corpus is relatively small, highly structured, and analytically focused on developmental meaning rather than large-scale textual pattern detection, close thematic analysis was considered the most appropriate primary strategy (Clarke & Braun, 2017). At the same time, future research could productively combine thematic analysis with NLP-assisted methods such as topic modeling, lexical clustering, semantic network analysis, or sentiment analysis in larger or comparative datasets (Hopkins & King, 2010).

3.5. Analytic Strategy: Cross-Case Thematic Analysis

The reports were analyzed through cross-case thematic analysis. The analysis proceeded in several stages. First, the reports were read in full to gain familiarity with the structure, tone, and developmental logic of each case. Second, meaningful passages were identified and provisionally coded. Third, the codes were grouped into broader categories that reflected both the structure of the assignment and the analytical interests of the study. These included ideal images of collaborative capability, self-evaluation and gap assessment, barriers and contextual constraints, development methods, regulation strategies, and reported outcomes or learning claims. Fourth, the cases were compared systematically to identify recurring patterns and important contrasts across participants.

The analysis was theory-informed but not fully deductive. Existing concepts from self-leadership, self-directed learning, collaborative capability research, and JD-R theory informed the analytic lens, but subthemes were allowed to emerge from repeated engagement with the reports (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Clarke & Braun, 2017; Hsieh & Shannon, 2005; Saldaña, 2015). This combination helped preserve openness to participants’ own formulations while also strengthening theoretical coherence.

3.6. Trustworthiness, Limitations, and Ethics

Several steps were taken to strengthen trustworthiness. First, the shared assignment structure improved comparability across reports because all participants addressed broadly similar developmental tasks. Second, coding and categorization were documented through a codebook and analytic summaries, which improved traceability from raw text to theme development. Third, the analysis relied on systematic cross-case comparison rather than anecdotal interpretation. Fourth, the study is explicit about the status and limits of the material, which is a key part of qualitative rigor (Lacy et al., 2015; Morrow, 2005).

The study nevertheless has important limitations. The sample is bounded to one course cohort and one Norwegian institutional setting. The material is self-reported and reflective rather than observational. The design does not allow causal inference or strong claims about actual behavioral effects. The findings therefore illuminate how participants framed and interpreted collaborative development, not whether such development objectively occurred in a verified and durable way.

Participation in the research use of the reports was voluntary and based on informed consent from the students. The analysis was conducted after grading was completed to reduce the risk of perceived coercion linked to the dual-role context of teaching and research. The reports were anonymized during analysis and reporting, and direct quotations were presented without identifying details.

4. Findings

The findings are presented according to the four research questions. Across the dataset, collaborative capability development was described as a self-directed and self-regulated process in which participants first defined an ideal collaborative capability, then translated that ideal into routines and methods, encountered barriers related to capacity and context, and finally reflected on outcomes and continued learning. The reports depict development less as a completed training result and more as a continuing process of professional becoming.

4.1. Ideal Images of Collaborative Capability (RQ1)

Across the reports, participants described collaborative capability as a multidimensional bundle that combined interpersonal and intrapersonal dimensions. Five recurring themes were especially prominent as ideal images: dialogic competence, trust and psychological safety, role-based bridge-building, assertiveness and boundary-setting, and self-regulation under pressure (see Appendix A,

Table A1. Codebook summary with themes, subcodes, data source, and illustrative excerpts.

Theme (RQ1)	Subcodes	Analytic Definition	Data Source	Illustrative Excerpts
1. Dialogic competence	Active listening; clarity/conciseness; adaptation to recipient/context; summarising/clarifying	Collaboration is framed as the quality of dialogue: listening, concise messaging, and adjusting communication to the counterpart and situation.	Report; attachment	“Active listening… helps reduce misunderstandings… strengthens trust and collaboration.” (C5) “Communication—be better at listening, be brief and clear, align/clarify… to ensure we mean the same.” (C9) “Adapt your communication to how the other prefers to communicate… mirroring… another important thing is active listening.” (C1)
2. Trust and psychological safety through emotional competence	Psychological safety; openness; emotional recognition; tolerance of discomfort	Collaborative skill is linked to felt safety, openness, and emotional recognition as enabling conditions for constructive disagreement and joint problem-solving.	Report	“When the parties experience safety in the collaboration, information flows more easily… it becomes easier to express disagreement and propose improvements.” (C6) “The parties must acknowledge each other’s feelings and standpoint—this will build trust and contribute to constructive solutions.” (C6) “Tolerating discomfort… being clear about needs and boundaries without being aggressive… builds a safer relationship by addressing root causes.” (C9)
3. Role-based bridge-building and institutional competence	Bridge-builder identity; role clarity; influencing through relationships; legal/collective agreement literacy	Skills are prioritized with an explicit “for whom” lens (leaders, employees, members), positioning the union representative as a relational and institutional intermediary.	Report	“Union representatives function as the link between employees and management… influence occurs through relationships and dialogue… role clarity is important to avoid role conflict.” (C6) “A union representative is a safe bridge-builder… creating solutions through trust and dialogue.” (C3) “Good collaboration… presupposes understanding laws and agreements, balancing rights and duties.” (C6)
4. Assertiveness and boundary-setting as collaboration	Saying no; expectation management; needs language (“I-statements”); professional firmness	Collaboration includes the ability to set limits, clarify expectations, and maintain role-consistent boundaries under pressure.	Attachment; report	“I’ve become aware that I’m actually incredibly poor at setting boundaries… too often I say yes when I really want to say no.” (C9) “Be clearer about what I can and will do… manage expectations… stand by my choices.” (C9) “Standing in discomfort… being clear about needs and boundaries… strengthens collaboration over time.” (C9)
5. Self-regulation for sustainable role performance	Emotion regulation; calmness under pressure; non-reactivity; perspective-taking	Collaborative excellence is understood as sustaining dialogue and relational quality under strain by regulating emotions and reactions.	Report	“The ability to remain calm under pressure, meet negativity without escalating, and communicate clearly without becoming defensive is central for collaboration.” (C7) “When I have many tasks… I can become more results-oriented than relationship-oriented… lose patience and be less receptive to others’ views.” (C14)

).

Dialogic competence was consistently presented as central. Participants emphasized active listening, clear and concise communication, asking clarifying questions, adapting communication to the counterpart, and checking mutual understanding. Dialogue was not framed as a generic interpersonal virtue but as a practical capability that reduced misunderstandings and strengthened trust.

Participants linked collaboration to trust and psychological safety. Effective collaboration was described as requiring openness, emotional recognition, and a climate in which disagreement could be expressed without relational threat. Emotional steadiness and the capacity to acknowledge the other party’s perspective were treated as functional enablers of collaboration rather than optional relational niceties.

Also, collaboration was framed in role terms as bridge-building across institutional boundaries. Participants repeatedly described the union representative as a link between employees, members, managers, and other actors. In this sense, collaborative capability included not only interpersonal skill but also role clarity, legitimacy, and institutional literacy.

Assertiveness and boundary-setting were treated as integral to collaboration. Several participants emphasized that collaboration required the ability to say no, manage expectations, and communicate limits clearly without escalating conflict. Boundary-setting was therefore not positioned as the opposite of collaboration but as a way of protecting sustainable and credible role performance.

Participants highlighted self-regulation under pressure. Collaboration was described as vulnerable to fatigue, emotional activation, and time pressure. Consequently, calmness, non-reactivity, perspective-taking, and the ability to remain role-consistent under strain were treated as central components of collaborative capability.

Overall, the reports suggest that participants did not understand collaboration as interpersonal harmony alone. Rather, they conceptualized it as a capability bundle involving dialogue, trust, legitimacy, firmness, and self-regulation.

4.2. Operationalizing Collaborative Development Targets (RQ2)

Participants translated these ideal images into methods and practice through a recurring implementation logic: identifying a target capability, operationalizing it into behaviors or routines, creating a structured practice cycle, and incorporating feedback or self-monitoring (see Appendix A,

Table A2. Methods used (and method → goal logic).

Theme (RQ2)	Subcodes	Analytic Definition	Data Source	Illustrative Excerpts
1. Multi-source feedback to reduce blind spots	Triangulation; colleague/leader feedback; friend/family input; cross-context comparison (work vs. private)	External feedback is used to calibrate self-evaluation, reduce blind spots, and refine what to practise.	Report	• “Methodologically, my self-evaluation is based on three main sources: … feedback from colleagues and leaders … and … friends and family … This triangulation has helped reduce blind spots …” (C7) • “In this work, I therefore combined self-reflection with feedback from colleagues, friends and family … objective feedback can make blind spots visible.” (C13) • “Friends and family … pointed out that I tend to say yes too quickly and take on tasks I do not really have capacity for …” (C13)
2. Survey-based self-evaluation	Quantitative survey; rating scales; optional comments; summary tables; baseline for later comparison	Structured measurement is used to locate development areas and create a baseline for subsequent reflection and adjustment.	Report; attachment	• “As part of my self-development process, I conducted a small quantitative survey … respondents could give me scores from 1–6 … In addition, there was an option to provide comments …” (C8) • “Results from the survey based on the given scores …” (C8) • “Week 42: Created a questionnaire … Week 43: Received responses to the survey …” (C15; week-by-week log)
3. Micro-practices for attention, stress reduction, and relational availability	Mindfulness/app; micro-breaks; breathing protocols; somatic check-ins; 25/5 focus cycles; movement micro-breaks	Regulation practices are positioned as enabling collaboration (less stress/activation → better dialogue, presence, and non-reactivity).	Report; attachment	• “I downloaded an app called ‘Aware’ … and systematically took 5-min breaks every hour …” (C15) • “Breathing technique: 2 min 4 × 4 breathing …” (C3) • “Divide the work into sessions of 25 min, and 5 min’ break … Check in with the body … learn a breathing technique that lowers pulse …” (C6; training program)
4. Environmental/behavioral redesign to support collaboration practice	Turning off notifications; reducing interruptions; structuring work blocks; logging off email; availability boundaries (Teams/email)	Removing distractions and redesigning the workday increases self-regulation and consistency of practice execution.	Report; attachment	• “By turning off notifications on my phone … turning off sound and visual email alerts … and limiting my availability on the office phone … I removed external influence …” (C15) • “I am always ‘connected’ to Teams and email on my phone … Create routines to switch off notifications … Set boundaries for availability …” (C3) • “Log off email during particularly demanding tasks to keep focus … I must switch off myself and set boundaries …” (C6; training program)
5. Planning + monitoring routines (logs/matrices)	Daily reflection notes; weekly scoring matrix; mid-point review; time log; interruption log; energy planning; priority lists; end-of-day evaluation	An iterative self-leadership cycle (plan → practise → document → adjust) produces patterns that guide refinement and consolidation.	Report; attachment	• “Daily reflection note (2–3 lines) … weekly scoring matrix … mid-term evaluation after four weeks … final assessment …” (C11) • “Create a time log of what I actually do all day … interruption log … energy planning (1–10; morning/lunch/afternoon) …” (C6; training program) • “Start the day by writing down the three most important tasks and make a priority list … Create focus zones …” (C3)
6. Weekly training/implementation program as attachment evidence	Week-by-week program; adherence tracking; ‘what worked/next step’; adaptive adjustments; implementation intensity (‘dose’)	Attachments operationalize method intensity and continuity, documenting adherence, learning, and adjustments over time.	Attachment	• “Week 42 … downloaded the ‘Aware’ app … turned off all phone notifications … Week 43 … 2× relaxation exercises daily … bed by 23:00 …” (C15; week-by-week log) • “Week 46 … took two breaks with conversation and tea … Breaks worked! …” (C15; week-by-week log) • “The goal is not to try to change everything overnight, but start with observation and awareness … then implement the program gradually …” (C6; training program preface)

).

One prominent method family involved multi-source feedback. Participants sought input from colleagues, leaders, friends, or family to reduce blind spots and strengthen the credibility of their self-evaluation. In these cases, external feedback was not merely supportive but diagnostic, helping participants refine what should be trained and why.

A reoccurring strategy involved survey-based or structured self-evaluation. Some participants used rating scales, qualitative comments, or summary tables to identify patterns and create a baseline for later comparison. This translated abstract developmental aims into more concrete priorities.

Micro-practices for stress reduction, attentional control, and relational availability represented a cluster of methods. Participants described breathing techniques, short breaks, app-based relaxation, bodily check-ins, and focus routines as ways of reducing inner activation and increasing readiness for dialogic collaboration. These practices were often justified not as self-care for its own sake but as conditions for listening better, reacting less impulsively, and remaining more available to others.

Also, a cluster involved environmental and behavioral redesign. Participants described turning off notifications, structuring work blocks, reducing interruptions, and setting digital availability boundaries to protect focus and reduce overload. This suggests that development was not only pursued through inner effort but also through changes to the surrounding environment.

Developmental tools consisted of planning and monitoring routines, such as logs, matrices, daily reflection notes, time-use tracking, interruption tracking, and periodic reviews. These tools made the developmental process more explicit and allowed participants to observe whether practice occurred.

Finally, many participants attached weekly implementation programs showing that development had been approached as an ongoing and staged process rather than a one-time reflection exercise. These attachments strengthened the impression that the developmental work had a real practice architecture, even if its outcomes remained self-reported.

In sum, the reports suggest that participants operationalized collaborative development through a mix of diagnostic calibration, self-regulatory micro-practices, environmental redesign, and iterative monitoring.

4.3. Demands, Barriers, and Contextual Constraints (RQ3)

Barriers were framed primarily as capacity and context constraints rather than as a lack of motivation (see Appendix A,

Table A3. Barriers/conditions shaping collaborative skill development and regulation strategies.

Theme (RQ3)	Subcodes	Analytic Definition	Data Source	Illustrative Excerpts
1. Capacity constraints: energy depletion and stress reactivity	Low energy; sleep loss; cognitive overload; reduced patience/nuance; stress-triggered reactivity	Barriers were frequently framed as capacity constraints that narrow attention and reduce dialogic availability, making it harder to listen actively, regulate affect, and stay reflective in disagreement.	Reports	“Barriers act both directly and indirectly… low energy and stress reduce available mental capacity for active listening, empathy, and problem solving.” (C11) “If I react emotionally, it can hinder objective listening and understanding… if I am mentally tired, it can be difficult to think clearly.” (C6)
2. Cumulative load: work intensity and role accumulation	High tempo; travel; multiple roles (union/leadership/study); deadline pressure; sustained demands	Participants located barriers in demanding life structures where accumulated roles and deadlines raise baseline strain and increase vulnerability to defensive or abbreviated collaboration behaviors.	Reports	“My workday is at times stressful… with high tempo and a lot of travel… The sum of these demands… can… affect the quality of collaboration with others.” (C5)
3. Social friction and resistance: conflict exposure and emotional spillover	Repeated conflict exposure; others’ frustration; criticism sensitivity; emotional labour; limited decision authority	Several reports described the union role as emotionally demanding, with repeated exposure to conflict and others’ frustration. This emotional labour was experienced as depleting resources needed for subsequent collaborative encounters.	Reports	“Repeated exposure to conflicts… and others’ frustration… insufficient processing… reduced my capacity in subsequent collaboration situations.” (C2)
4. Resource and feasibility constraints: time pressure, routines, and dependency on others	Time scarcity; program seen as extra work; discipline demands; feasibility; organizational constraints; disrupted measurement/follow-up	Feasibility barriers included time scarcity and the perception that training routines add ‘extra work’. In some cases, organizational constraints limited opportunities to test or follow up development activities.	Reports	“Time challenges… difficult to prioritise… often the training program was what got deprioritized.” (C4) “Implementation challenges are that this can feel like extra work… requires discipline… courage to say no.” (C6)
5. Regulation strategies: energy management and restorative routines	Sleep hygiene; pauses; movement; exercise; nutrition; screen limits; “energy-giving” activities	Energy management was positioned as a prerequisite for collaborative performance. Participants proposed restorative routines to stabilize energy and reduce reactivity in meetings and negotiations.	Reports	“Energy management and recovery… sleep hygiene… planned breaks… physical activity…” (C11) “Plan… an activity that fills you with energy… 2 min of 4×4 breathing.” (C3)
6. Regulation strategies: boundary-setting, micro-steps, and reflective adjustment	Boundary-setting; prioritisation; micro-experiments; reframing; self-compassion; support seeking	To protect limited resources, participants described boundary-setting and ‘micro-steps’ that embed practice into everyday work. Strategies also included reflective recalibration, social support, and accepting non-linear progress.	Reports	“A central strategy is boundary-setting… prioritising tasks and expectations regarding one’s own effort and capacity is essential.” (C10) “It is important to think small… practise one thing at a time rather than taking on too much.” (C4)

).

One theme involved energy depletion and stress reactivity. Participants described how low energy, insufficient recovery, cognitive overload, and emotional activation reduced their patience, listening capacity, and ability to remain reflective in demanding interactions. In this sense, collaborative difficulties were often understood as partly resource based.

Another theme concerned cumulative load and role accumulation. Participants referred to work intensity, travel, leadership tasks, union responsibilities, study demands, and family obligations as sources of sustained strain. The total load across roles made development harder to maintain and collaboration harder to enact consistently.

Also, a barrier theme involved conflict exposure and emotional spillover. Several participants described the representative role as emotionally demanding because it involved repeated exposure to others’ frustration, conflict cases, or criticism. This emotional labor was experienced as depleting and as affecting later collaboration situations.

Lastly, a theme concerned feasibility constraints, especially time pressure. Some participants described the development program itself as something that could become “extra work” in an already demanding everyday context. This highlights a key point in the study: developmental effort is not detached from ordinary work realities but must compete with them.

Against these constraints, participants described two broad families of regulation strategies. The first involved energy management and restorative routines, such as sleep hygiene, breaks, physical activity, and short recovery practices. The second involved boundary-setting, prioritization, micro-steps, and reflective adjustment. Participants frequently emphasized that sustainable development required thinking small, revising plans, lowering intensity, or protecting limited capacity rather than trying to change everything at once.

Overall, the reports suggest that collaborative capability development was experienced as highly resource-dependent and context-shaped. Development was not framed as a linear matter of effort alone but as something that had to remain feasible under real demand conditions.

4.4. Reported Outcomes, Adjustments, and Learning (RQ4)

Reported outcomes were typically incremental rather than final (see Appendix A,

Table A4. RQ4—Reported outcomes and learning from collaborative skill development.

Theme (RQ4)	Subcodes	Analytic Definition	Data Source	Illustrative Excerpts
1. Increased dialogic quality: clearer, more disciplined communication	Clearer messaging; preparation scripts; deliberate expression; structured contributions	Participants reported changes in everyday interaction that reflect strengthened dialogic competence, including clearer expression and more deliberate communicative preparation.	Reports	“I have… decided before a meeting that ‘today I will highlight this case, and I will state it clearly’… practising communication… in advance.” (C4)
2. Greater self-regulatory awareness: recognising triggers and the energy–collaboration link	Noticing stress signals; reduced emotional reactivity; bodily check-ins; breathing/pause behaviors	A core outcome was increased awareness of how fatigue, stress, and emotional triggers shape collaboration, alongside intentional pause strategies to remain reflective rather than reactive.	Reports	“Emotional regulation… become aware of what triggers my feelings and the impulse that follows.” (C6) “Low energy… reduces tolerance and patience in interaction with others.” (C3)
3. Boundary-setting and role professionalism: clearer expectations and sustainable performance	Saying no; expectation management; role boundaries (work/union/private); delegation	Several participants described boundary-setting as both a coping mechanism and a professional collaborative behavior that stabilizes role performance under pressure.	Reports	“Boundary-setting… be clear about what is okay and not… what I can contribute—work, roles, children…” (C9) “Further development… concerns better boundary-setting, clearer prioritisation and increased delegation… crucial to safeguard… sustainability and… collaboration.” (C2)
4. Improved capacity for collaboration under load: more presence and endurance in demanding periods	Higher mental surplus; recovery routines; deliberate pauses before meetings; social support	Some cases emphasised that strengthening physical and recovery routines increased mental surplus and presence, enabling calmer and more constructive participation in collaboration settings.	Reports	“I experience increased mental surplus and greater endurance… better prerequisites to meet collaboration situations with calm, concentration and presence.” (C5)
5. Adaptive learning through program revision: making practice feasible	Simplifying tools; integrating into routines; ‘good enough’ implementation; adjusting tracking systems	Participants described learning-by-doing, revising overly complex systems, and adapting tools to fit a realistic workday—often described as key to sustaining practice over time.	Reports	“The program was… simplified and transferred to a Word-based form… more feasible in a busy everyday life.” (C12) “Time pressure… integrate exercises into the workday and realise that a little is better than nothing.” (C4)
6. Ongoing ‘becoming’: non-linear progress and continued development needs	Setbacks; imperfect adherence; continued practice intentions; acceptance of non-linearity	Alongside positive changes, participants highlighted that development is non-linear and that sustained collaborative capacity requires ongoing iteration, particularly when work intensity increases.	Reports	“Development takes time, and it is not a straight line… self-development is more like a winding country road.” (C4)

).

One outcome cluster involved clearer and more disciplined communication. Participants described speaking more clearly, preparing more deliberately for conversations or meetings, and becoming more attentive to alignment and misunderstanding.

Also allied concepts involved greater self-regulatory awareness. Participants often described becoming more aware of triggers, stress signals, emotional impulses, or the connection between energy and collaboration quality. This awareness was not presented as merely personal insight but as role-relevant learning.

A reoccurring outcome concerned boundary-setting and role professionalism. Several participants reported clearer expectation management, more willingness to say no, better prioritization, and stronger protection of role boundaries. These shifts were often interpreted as improving both sustainability and collaboration quality.

Improved capacity for collaboration under load emerged as an outcome cluster. Some participants described increased calmness, presence, or endurance in demanding periods, suggesting that collaboration had become somewhat less vulnerable to pressure.

Adaptive learning through program revision characterized students’ learning processes. Rather than describing development as linear adherence to a fixed plan, many participants highlighted how they simplified tools, adjusted routines, or revised ambitions when their original design proved too demanding. Learning was therefore often embedded in the management of feasibility rather than only in skill enactment itself.

Finally, participants frequently framed development as ongoing becoming rather than completed mastery. Setbacks, imperfect adherence, and continued practice needs were normal features of the reports. This final theme is especially important: collaborative capability development was typically understood as a continuing, non-linear, and revisable process.

5. Discussion and Implications

This study examined how Norwegian union representatives articulated, operationalized, and reflected on collaborative capability development within a semester-long university course. Read cautiously and in line with the study’s revised methodological framing, the reports do not provide strong evidence of training effectiveness in a causal sense. Rather, they reveal how participants themselves understood collaboration, how they translated developmental intentions into practice routines, what barriers they encountered, and what kinds of learning they believed emerged over time. This is analytically valuable because leadership-development research increasingly emphasizes that developmental processes should be examined not only through end-state outcomes but also through the structure and realism of the developmental work itself (Leroy et al., 2024; Yemiscigil et al., 2023). The present material is therefore most useful not as proof of program effects, but as evidence of how collaborative capability development is framed and worked on in practice.

An insight is that participants did not treat collaboration as a generic interpersonal virtue. Instead, they described it as a multidimensional professional capability combining dialogic competence, trust-building, role clarity, bridge-building across stakeholder groups, boundary-setting, and self-regulation under pressure. This strengthens the conceptual precision of the article because it distinguishes collaboration as a capability from collaboration as a desirable outcome (Hao et al., 2016; O’Leary et al., 2012). In the reports, successful collaboration was rarely described in purely relationally positive terms. More often, it was framed behaviorally and processual: listening actively, clarifying expectations, remaining calm, tolerating discomfort, and balancing firmness with openness. That pattern supports the view that collaborative capability is not a diffuse interpersonal trait, but a trainable and role-relevant capability bundle.

Also, an understanding is that collaborative capability development appeared highly resource sensitive. Across the reports, collaboration was repeatedly linked to energy, time, emotional strain, and cumulative role demands. Participants often described breakdowns in collaboration not as simple skill deficits but as consequences of overload, reactivity, low recovery, or insufficient mental availability. This pattern supports a stronger integration of JD-R theory into the article (Bakker & Demerouti, 2017; Demerouti et al., 2001). Collaboration emerges not only as “what one knows how to do” but as “what one is able to enact reliably under strain.” This interpretation is also consistent with newer self-leadership research suggesting that the field should move beyond generalized positive associations and pay more attention to how, when, and why self-leadership works under specific conditions (Knotts et al., 2022). In that sense, the present findings contribute to a more conditional understanding of collaborative capability development: self-regulatory effort matters, but so do the resource conditions under which such effort must be sustained.

A finding concerns the role of self-leadership itself. The revised theoretical framing argued that self-leadership should not be treated as a purely individual and decontextualized capacity, and the findings support that move. Participants’ developmental efforts were not simply internal exercises in self-discipline. They were shaped by feedback from others, by organizational communication patterns, by role conflict, by workload, and by feasibility constraints in their everyday work. This suggests that self-leadership may be best understood here as a context-embedded self-regulatory mechanism that helps participants remain developmentally engaged within a wider social and institutional ecology (Bracht et al., 2024). This interpretation is strengthened further by broader developmental perspectives on self-leadership, in which the construct is understood not only as a micro-level performance tool, but also as a capability through which individuals direct their own development over time. That broader interpretation fits the current study well, because the participants’ accounts point toward collaborative development as an ongoing process of adaptation, revision, and sustained effort rather than isolated self-control episodes.

An important contribution is that the reports reveal a recognizable practice-based developmental architecture. Participants described repeated sequences of defining an ideal collaborative self, assessing current gaps, identifying barriers, creating routines, documenting implementation, and revising plans. This sequence closely resembles self-directed learning logic, but the findings suggest that self-directed learning alone does not fully explain developmental persistence. Participants often knew what they wanted to develop, yet still struggled when energy dropped, work intensified, or emotional exposure increased. Here, self-leadership adds explanatory value by helping explain how participants attempted to sustain attention, regulate emotion, protect energy, and continue acting toward developmental goals (Nesbit, 2012; Ross, 2014; Tenschert et al., 2025). This is theoretically important because it strengthens the developmental logic of the present article without broadening the study beyond its empirical focus.

The interpretation is intentionally modest. The study does not show that the course objectively changed participants’ collaboration capability in verified or lasting ways. What it does show is that, within this Norwegian union-representative context, participants consistently framed collaborative capability development as a self-directed, self-regulated, and context-sensitive process of professional becoming. This self-leadership-based developmental process is the article’s most defensible and useful contribution.

5.1. Theoretical Implications

The study’s main theoretical contribution is not to propose a new general theory of self-leadership. Instead, it offers a bounded and context-sensitive integration of four literatures: collaboration as a multidimensional capability, leadership development as a practice-based learning process, self-directed learning as a developmental architecture, and self-leadership as a self-regulatory mechanism operating under resource constraints. In this way, the article contributes a process-oriented understanding of collaborative capability development in which identity awareness, energy regulation, capability-building routines, contextual feasibility, and performance enactment are treated as interdependent elements.

The article contributes to self-leadership research by responding to calls for stronger theoretical integration. By linking self-leadership to leadership development, JD-R theory, and collaboration research, the study shows how self-leadership may function in a representative role context rather than in an abstract individual-performance frame (Reichard et al., 2025). More specifically, it positions self-leadership as relevant not only to immediate task performance, but also to longer-term adaptation, monitoring, self-regulation, and role-sensitive learning.

This study also contributes to leadership-development theory by focusing on developmental process visibility rather than program evaluation alone. The value of the study lies partly in showing how a developmental process can be unpacked through participants’ own practice documents: how they move from ideal capability images to routines, how reality disrupts those routines, and how revision becomes part of learning (Leroy et al., 2024; Scholtz, 2023). This makes the article relevant not only to self-leadership scholars, but also to researchers interested in adult learning, reflective development, and practice-based capability building.

Furthermore, this article adds knowledge through its contextual specificity. Its value lies not in claiming what self-leadership or collaboration always are, but in showing how collaborative capability development appears to be understood in a Norwegian representative setting shaped by institutional cooperation, relational complexity, role strain, and resource constraints (Homer & Lim, 2024). This is consistent with the argument that theory development can be strengthened through bounded and context-sensitive contributions rather than through overly broad universal claims.

Finally, the findings support a refined understanding of the Self-Leadership Wheel of Becoming. The wheel should not be presented as a universal developmental model validated by the current dataset. A stronger formulation is that it functions as a contextualized developmental scaffold distilled from the course architecture and the participants’ enacted practice. Its theoretical value is heuristic and processual rather than universally predictive. Together with the performance pyramid, the wheel offers a potentially novel articulation of self-leadership-based capability development: the pyramid clarifies the developmental architecture from identity awareness to energy and capability regulation and performance enactment, while the wheel specifies the cyclical process through which participants define, evaluate, implement, reflect on, and revise their development over time.

5.2. Practical Implications

The practical contribution of the article becomes stronger when it moves beyond general statements and specifies what unions, educators, and organizations can do differently. The findings suggest that collaborative capability development should be framed as a behaviorally specific capability-building process rather than as an appeal to “better communication.” Participants’ reports indicate that development became more tangible when they defined precise targets such as listening more actively, clarifying expectations, tolerating discomfort, setting boundaries, preparing for difficult conversations, or remaining calm under pressure. Development designs should also include structured self-evaluation and feedback loops. In the reports, participants often used multi-source feedback, surveys, reflection notes, matrices, logs, or periodic reviews to make blind spots visible and track progress. This finding suggests that practical development efforts should incorporate regular diagnosis, monitoring, and revision, not only aspirational goal setting.

Programs should build feasibility into the developmental design from the start. One of the clearest lessons from the reports is that developmental ambition often collided with time pressure, emotional exposure, cumulative role demands, and ordinary workload fluctuations. Developmental routines therefore need to be realistic enough to survive everyday work conditions. Micro-practices, shorter routines, staged implementation, and explicit adjustment mechanisms may be more effective than overly ambitious programs that collapse under real-life constraints (Tenschert et al., 2025; Yemiscigil et al., 2023). Organizations and unions should also treat energy management, recovery, and boundary-setting as collaboration enablers, not as optional wellness extras. Participants repeatedly described collaboration quality as dependent on mental availability, patience, attentional control, and emotional steadiness. These descriptions imply that interventions seeking to improve collaboration should consider workload rhythms, recovery opportunities, prioritization, and role-boundary clarity as part of the developmental infrastructure.

Figure 1 translates these practical implications into a performance-pyramid logic. The model suggests that collaborative capability development should not begin directly with performance demands, such as “communicate better” or “collaborate more effectively.” Instead, development should be built from the bottom up. The identity platform requires participants to clarify their role understanding, values, relational habits, emotional triggers, and ideal image of collaborative capability. The energy and capability platform emphasizes the self-regulatory resources, routines, and skills that make development sustainable, including recovery, boundary-setting, prioritization, feedback, micro-practices, and dialogic competence. The performance platform represents the enactment of collaborative capability in real role situations through active listening, expectation clarification, trust-building, bridge-building, assertiveness, emotional steadiness, and adaptive learning.

Within this broader architecture, Figure 2, the Self-Leadership Wheel of Becoming, functions as the operational tool or scaffold. Whereas the performance pyramid explains the developmental logic from identity awareness to energy and capability regulation and finally to collaborative performance, the wheel specifies how participants can work through this logic in practice. It guides the learner or practitioner through a cyclical process of defining an ideal collaborative self, evaluating current capability, identifying gaps and barriers, setting goals, designing a feasible development program, implementing routines, documenting reflection, and revising the process when needed. Used together, the two models provide both a conceptual and practical contribution: the pyramid shows what needs to be developed and why the levels are interdependent, while the wheel shows how the development process can be structured, monitored, and adjusted over time.

Although developed in the context of Norwegian union representatives, the combined model may also be relevant for other workplace roles where collaborative capability, self-regulation, and role performance are central. For managers, professionals, employees, educators, or students, the pyramid can be used to clarify the relationship between identity, energy, capability, and performance, while the wheel can function as a practical assessment and development scaffold. In this sense, the models are not limited to union work but offer a broader framework for self-leadership-based capability development in complex organizational settings.

5.3. Policy Implications

At the organizational level, the findings suggest that representative and collaboration-intensive roles may benefit from policies that treat collaboration as a capability requiring both developmental support and resource protection. Such policies should protect preparation time, clarify representative boundaries, normalize psychologically safer dialogue practices, and reduce unnecessary interruption pressure in high-stakes collaboration work. Policies that assume collaboration is simply a matter of interpersonal goodwill may be less effective than those that recognize how collaborative performance depends on identity clarity, energy regulation, feasible routines, feedback, and sufficient role capacity.

The Performance Pyramid and the Self-Leadership Wheel of Becoming also suggest that organizational policies should support development as a structured and cyclical process rather than as a one-off training activity. This may involve allocating time for self-evaluation, feedback, reflection, implementation, and revision, as well as ensuring that development programs are realistic enough to be sustained alongside ordinary work demands. In this sense, policies for representative development should not only ask individuals to become better collaborators but also provide the conditions under which such development can be enacted.

At the sectoral or governmental level, the study suggests that leadership and representative-development initiatives may be strengthened by encouraging practice-based, role-sensitive, and context-sensitive developmental models rather than relying mainly on short, generic training events. In labor-market systems that depend on cooperation, dialogue, and institutional trust, strengthening representatives’ dialogic, self-regulatory, and boundary-setting capabilities may contribute to more sustainable workplace governance and more resilient forms of institutional collaboration. Policy initiatives should therefore recognize collaborative capability development as part of the broader infrastructure for constructive employee representation, workplace democracy, and cooperation-based labor relations.

6. Conclusions

This study explored how Norwegian union representatives described and reflected on collaborative capability development within a structured university course. The findings suggest that participants did not understand collaboration as simple interpersonal harmony, but as a multidimensional professional capability involving dialogic competence, trust-building, bridge-building across stakeholders, boundary-setting, and self-regulation under pressure. The reports also indicate that participants approached development through iterative cycles of self-evaluation, feedback, goal setting, routine design, implementation, monitoring, reflection, and revision, while remaining strongly shaped by workload, emotional exposure, role strain, and feasibility constraints.

The article’s contribution is therefore best understood as theory-informed and exploratory. It does not claim verified causal effects, lasting behavioral change, or broad generalizability. Instead, it offers a bounded account of how collaborative capability development is framed and worked on in a Norwegian union representative context. The study contributes by conceptualizing collaborative capability development as a self-directed, self-regulated, and context-sensitive process of professional becoming.

This contribution is expressed through two connected models. The Performance Pyramid clarifies the developmental architecture by showing how collaborative performance rests on identity awareness and energy and capability regulation. The Self-Leadership Wheel of Becoming functions as an operational scaffold within this broader architecture, specifying how participants can define an ideal collaborative self, evaluate current capability, identify barriers, design feasible routines, implement action, document learning, and revise the process over time. Together, the models suggest that collaborative capability development requires both individual self-leadership and supportive contextual conditions.

In this sense, the article refines the Self-Leadership Wheel of Becoming as a contextualized developmental scaffold rather than a universal model. This narrower contribution is consistent with recent calls for context-sensitive theory development and stronger integration of self-leadership with broader leadership-development and organizational research (Homer & Lim, 2024; Reichard et al., 2025). Future research should examine whether and how this combined framework can be applied, adapted, and tested in other collaboration-intensive roles, organizational settings, and developmental programs.

Future Research Agenda

Future research should examine the transferability of the combined Performance Pyramid and Wheel of Becoming framework across other populations, such as managers, project leaders, healthcare staff, students in professional education, cross-functional teams, and other collaboration-intensive roles. Such studies could clarify whether the framework is specific to representative work or whether it can be adapted to broader forms of role-based capability development or other capability and skills development. Future research should examine whether the pyramid’s three-level architecture—identity awareness, energy and capability regulation, and performance enactment—remains useful across different occupational contexts, and whether the Wheel of Becoming provides a practical scaffold for developing capabilities beyond collaboration, such as communication, conflict management, ethical judgment, resilience, or relational leadership.

Future studies should also use longitudinal and mixed methods designs. Interviews, observational data, repeated surveys, peer or supervisor assessments, and follow-up measurements would make it possible to examine whether the developmental patterns described in reflective reports correspond to sustained behavioral changes over time. Such designs would directly address the limitations of the current document-based study by moving from participants’ reported learning processes to more robust evidence of enactment, transfer, and durability.

A third avenue is to examine contextual moderators more directly. Future work could investigate how psychological safety, workload, communication climate, supervisory support, role ambiguity, institutional trust, and recovery opportunities influence whether capability development is sustained (Bracht et al., 2024; Naveed et al., 2026). This would further develop the article’s argument that self-leadership-based development does not occur in isolation but is shaped by the resource conditions and relational environments in which participants attempt to enact new capabilities.

A fourth avenue involves combining qualitative analysis with NLP-assisted methods. Larger datasets of reflective reports, journals, feedback documents, or development logs could be analyzed using topic modeling, lexical clustering, semantic networks, sentiment analysis, or other computational text-analysis techniques. Such approaches would not replace close interpretive reading but could extend it by showing whether computationally detected patterns converge with manually generated themes and whether developmental trajectories are more common across larger samples.

Finally, the current qualitative material offers a basis for measurement development. Future research could generate item pools linked both to the Performance Pyramid and to the Wheel of Becoming. Pyramid-related items could assess identity clarity, energy regulation, capability confidence, and perceived performance enactment. Wheel-related items could assess ideal capability clarity, self-evaluation quality, barrier anticipation, feasibility planning, routine adherence, reflective adjustment, and end-of-cycle learning integration. These measures could later be tested psychometrically and linked to outcomes such as role-specific capability development, collaborative effectiveness, role sustainability, perceived efficacy, well-being, and burnout risk.