Practically wise leadership: toward an integral understanding

This paper presents a model of practical wisdom that integrates various dimensions of experience and multiple levels of analysis, providing a meta‐theoretical framework through which to understand wise leadership practice in contemporary organizations. Drawing on phenomenological accounts of embodiment and emotion, we seek to overcome limitations in organizational research due to methodological individualism, exclusively cognitivist assumptions about human knowledge, and a lack of sensitivity to the complexity and dynamism associated with wisdom as it unfolds in organizations. In an effort to enact the processual aspect of wisdom in relation to the community of leadership scholars and practitioners, we additionally discuss various stages and lines of development relevant to wise leadership practice in organizations.