Direction-Centered Leadership Institute

Research Brief 001

The Direction Gap: Toward a Measurable Construct of Alignment Between Intended and Lived Leadership Direction

Jeff Rybold
Direction-Centered Leadership Institute
Rybold Solutions

Research Status: Conceptual Research Brief
Publication: DCLI Research Brief 001
Research Stage: Construct Development
Date: August 2026
Institute: Direction-Centered Leadership Institute

Abstract

Leadership research has developed increasingly sophisticated ways to examine competencies, behaviors, personality, effectiveness, values, self-awareness, and leader derailment. Yet an important question remains difficult to answer: How closely does the direction a leader says matters correspond with the direction that leader’s repeated decisions and behaviors actually establish?

Direction-Centered Leadership proposes the Direction Gap as a construct for examining that question. The broader Direction-Centered Leadership framework defines the Direction Gap as the distance between where a person currently is and where faithful stewardship calls that person to be. This research brief operationalizes one dimension of that concept for leadership research by examining the distance between a leader’s intended direction and lived direction. Intended direction includes the values, convictions, responsibilities, priorities, and purposes a leader identifies as governing life and leadership. Lived direction describes the patterns produced through actual decisions, behaviors, relationships, commitments, and allocation of attention and resources over time.

Existing research provides important foundations for investigating such a construct. Research has demonstrated that intentions do not necessarily produce corresponding behavior, that relationships between values and behavior vary in strength, that leaders’ assessments of their own behavior can differ from assessments made by others, and that psychological processes can contribute to ethical and behavioral misalignment (Bardi & Schwartz, 2003; Braddy et al., 2014; Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006; Moore et al., 2012; Tenbrunsel & Messick, 2004).

This research brief develops the conceptual foundation for the Direction Gap, places the construct in conversation with these adjacent areas of research, and proposes an initial research model for empirical investigation. It does not claim that the Direction Gap has been validated as a psychometric construct. Instead, it establishes a testable proposition and a research pathway for determining whether directional alignment can be measured reliably and whether such measurement provides useful information about leadership development and drift.

The Problem Behind the Research

Leadership failure attracts attention because its consequences become easy to see after they become serious. A leader loses the confidence of a team. An executive compromises an ethical boundary. An organization discovers that its culture no longer resembles its stated values. A talented leader who once appeared destined for greater responsibility stalls or derails. By the time these outcomes become visible, however, the processes that produced them may have been developing for much longer.

Direction-Centered Leadership describes one form of this process as drift, the gradual separation between intended direction and lived practice. The central concern is not simply that leaders sometimes make poor decisions. Every leader does. The more important concern is whether repeated decisions can gradually establish a direction that differs meaningfully from the values, convictions, responsibilities, priorities, and purposes the leader believes are governing that leadership.

This distinction matters because leadership performance can remain strong while directional alignment deteriorates. A leader may continue producing results, earning promotions, meeting organizational goals, and receiving positive evaluations while becoming less aligned with the convictions or responsibilities that originally governed the leader’s behavior. If researchers and practitioners evaluate leadership primarily through outcomes or self-perception, early directional changes may remain difficult to detect.

The Direction Gap begins with a straightforward proposition: what leaders intend and what leaders repeatedly live are related, but they should not automatically be treated as identical. Existing research in several adjacent fields gives us reason to take that proposition seriously.

The Intention-Behavior Problem

Research on goal pursuit provides one of the clearest foundations for distinguishing intended direction from lived direction. Gollwitzer and Sheeran (2006) examined 94 independent tests in a meta-analysis of implementation intentions and goal achievement. Their work begins from an important behavioral reality: strong goal intentions do not guarantee corresponding goal achievement. Their findings further showed that implementation intentions specifying when, where, and how goal-directed behavior would occur produced a medium-to-large positive effect on goal attainment.

The implications for directional research are significant. A leader can sincerely intend to become more present with people, protect an ethical boundary, delegate responsibility, develop subordinates, repair a damaged relationship, or steward time differently without consistently translating that intention into behavior. The existence of a sincere intention therefore tells us something important about the leader, but it cannot by itself establish the direction the leader is actually living.

The Direction Gap extends this general intention-action problem into the domain of leadership direction. Rather than asking only whether a person accomplished a particular goal, the construct asks whether repeated behavioral patterns correspond with the larger values, convictions, responsibilities, priorities, and purposes that person identifies as governing leadership.

Values Matter, but Values and Behavior Are Not Identical

Values research provides another important foundation. Bardi and Schwartz (2003) examined relationships between values and common recurring behaviors across three studies. Their findings demonstrated meaningful relationships between values and behavior, but the strength of those relationships varied across values. Some values related strongly to behaviors that expressed them, others showed moderate relationships, and still others demonstrated only marginal relationships.

That distinction is particularly important for leadership research because organizations and leaders frequently describe themselves through values. Integrity, service, courage, excellence, respect, accountability, compassion, and trust may all appear in organizational statements or personal leadership philosophies. The presence of those values matters, but professing a value does not establish how consistently that value governs actual behavior.

Direction-Centered Leadership therefore distinguishes between the values a leader identifies and the behavioral patterns through which those values become visible. Intended direction includes the convictions the leader believes should govern behavior. Lived direction asks what repeated decisions reveal about what is actually governing behavior. The Direction Gap is concerned with the distance between those two patterns rather than assuming they correspond perfectly.

The Problem of Self-Perception

Measuring that distance introduces another challenge. If researchers ask leaders to describe both their intended direction and their lived direction, the same person becomes the sole reporter of both sides of the construct. Leadership research suggests that this may provide an incomplete picture.

Braddy et al. (2014) examined task-oriented and relationship-oriented leader behaviors, career derailment potential, rating source, and self-other agreement. Their analyses found differences among ratings supplied by leaders themselves, direct reports, peers, and supervisors. Particularly relevant to the Direction Gap, self-ratings contributed less than peer ratings in predicting career derailment potential in their relative-weight analyses.

These findings do not establish the Direction Gap, nor do they demonstrate that leaders necessarily misunderstand their own direction. They do, however, provide good reason to question whether self-report alone will adequately measure lived direction. A leader may sincerely believe that listening, integrity, development, presence, accountability, or trust characterize everyday leadership while people who regularly experience that leadership observe a different pattern.

A mature Direction Gap methodology may therefore need to distinguish between self-perceived lived direction and observed lived direction. Future research should examine whether multisource measurement involving peers, direct reports, supervisors, spouses, team members, or other appropriate observers improves the reliability and validity of the construct.

Ethical Fading and the Development of Drift

Behavioral ethics research helps explain how separation between intended and lived direction might develop without a leader consciously deciding to abandon a conviction. Tenbrunsel and Messick (2004) described ethical fading as a process in which the ethical dimensions of a decision recede from view. Their analysis identified mechanisms of self-deception including euphemistic language, perceptual errors, representations of the self, and what they describe as a slippery slope in decision-making.

This research is particularly relevant to the DCL concept of drift. Directional misalignment does not require a leader to wake up one morning and deliberately reject everything previously believed. Small exceptions can become precedents. Pressures can change how a decision is framed. Language can make an uncomfortable choice sound acceptable. A desired outcome can gradually receive more weight than the conviction that once governed how the outcome should be pursued.

From a Direction-Centered Leadership perspective, the important issue is cumulative direction. An isolated exception and an established pattern are not the same thing. Yet repeated exceptions can gradually become a pattern, and a pattern sustained over time can establish a different direction even when the leader continues to describe the original conviction as important.

Moral Disengagement and Behavioral Misalignment

Research on moral disengagement strengthens this concern. Moore et al. (2012) developed and evaluated a measure of adults’ propensity to morally disengage and then examined its relationship with unethical organizational behavior across additional laboratory and field studies. They found that propensity to morally disengage predicted several forms of unethical behavior, including self-reported unethical behavior, decisions involving fraud, self-serving workplace decisions, and unethical workplace behavior reported by supervisors and coworkers.

These findings suggest that directional misalignment cannot always be understood as a simple lack of knowledge. People may know the standard they claim to hold while psychological mechanisms allow behavior to move away from that standard. The ability to maintain a favorable understanding of oneself while behaving inconsistently with one’s professed convictions creates a particularly important problem for any instrument intended to measure directional alignment.

The Direction Gap should therefore avoid treating discrepancies merely as evidence of hypocrisy. Misalignment may arise through self-deception, competing priorities, organizational pressure, fear, habit, inadequate self-regulation, changing incentives, moral disengagement, or other processes that require empirical investigation. The construct should measure the presence and magnitude of a gap before attempting to explain why that gap exists.

Direction Gap, Drift, and Derailment

The Direction Gap should also remain conceptually distinct from leadership derailment. Braddy et al. (2014) define career derailment potential in terms of leader behaviors that may limit career advancement through outcomes such as demotion, termination, or career plateau. Direction-Centered Leadership asks an earlier and somewhat different question: Can meaningful separation between intended and lived direction be identified even when conventional indicators of failure or derailment have not yet appeared?

That distinction creates an important research possibility. Derailment describes an outcome or potential outcome. Drift describes a process of directional movement. The Direction Gap describes the proposed measurable distance associated with misalignment. These concepts may relate to one another, but they should not be treated as interchangeable.

A leader could theoretically possess a measurable Direction Gap without experiencing career derailment. In some circumstances, organizational incentives might even reward behaviors that widen the gap between professed convictions and actual practice. Conversely, identifying a Direction Gap does not establish that derailment will occur. Longitudinal research would be required to determine whether particular forms or magnitudes of directional misalignment predict later leadership, relational, ethical, or organizational outcomes.

Defining the Direction Gap

The canonical Direction-Centered Leadership framework defines the Direction Gap broadly as the distance between where a person currently is and where faithful stewardship calls that person to be. Within leadership research, this brief proposes a narrower operational definition:

The Direction Gap is the measurable distance between a leader’s intended direction and lived direction across defined domains of leadership and stewardship.

This definition requires both sides of the proposed construct to remain distinguishable. Intended direction describes what the leader identifies as governing direction. It includes stated values, convictions, responsibilities, priorities, purposes, commitments, and desired patterns of stewardship. Lived direction describes patterns revealed through decisions, behaviors, relationships, commitments, use of time, allocation of resources, and responses to pressure over a defined period.

The construct does not assume perfect alignment is possible or even desirable as a psychometric expectation. Human beings demonstrate inconsistency, change priorities, make mistakes, encounter competing responsibilities, and operate under changing circumstances. The research question is not whether any discrepancy exists. The more useful question is whether directional alignment can be measured with enough reliability and validity to distinguish ordinary variation from meaningful patterns of misalignment.

A Preliminary Measurement Model

An initial Direction Gap instrument could measure intended and lived direction across matched domains. Instead of asking only whether a respondent values integrity, for example, the instrument could first measure the importance assigned to integrity as a governing leadership commitment and then separately assess behaviors through which that commitment would reasonably become visible. The difference between those scores could provide one component of a directional alignment measure.

The same structure could apply across other domains such as relationships, stewardship of people, ethical decision-making, mission, time, responsibility, development of others, accountability, personal formation, and resource allocation. The goal would not be to create an arbitrary score of “good leadership.” It would be to determine whether a meaningful and statistically defensible measure can capture alignment between what a leader identifies as governing and what patterns of behavior indicate is being lived.

Multisource data could strengthen later versions of the model. Leaders might report intended direction while both leaders and appropriate observers assess lived behavioral patterns. Comparing self-ratings with observer ratings could help distinguish between an actual directional discrepancy and a discrepancy in self-awareness. Braddy et al.’s (2014) findings concerning rating source and self-other agreement provide a useful methodological precedent for investigating this possibility.

Initial Research Propositions

At this stage, the Direction Gap should be treated as a proposed construct rather than a validated assessment. The first task is therefore not to prove the model but to make its claims sufficiently precise that they can be tested. The conceptual argument developed here supports several preliminary propositions.

First, measurable differences will exist between intended direction and lived direction across leadership domains. Second, the magnitude of those differences will vary among domains within the same individual. Third, self-assessments of lived direction will not always correspond with assessments provided by relevant observers. Fourth, larger or persistent Direction Gaps may associate with indicators of leadership drift, relational strain, ethical risk, reduced trust, or derailment potential. Fifth, repeated measurement may reveal directional change before conventional performance outcomes indicate a significant leadership problem.

These propositions remain hypotheses for future investigation. The existing literature makes them plausible enough to study, but it does not establish them as facts.

Research Agenda

Construct development should begin with qualitative and content-validity work before large-scale psychometric testing. The Institute should first refine the conceptual boundaries of intended direction, lived direction, Direction Gap, drift, alignment, and derailment. Expert review can then evaluate whether proposed domains and items adequately represent those concepts.

Item development should produce parallel or appropriately matched measures of intended and lived direction while avoiding wording that makes the socially desirable response obvious. Cognitive interviews and pilot testing can identify ambiguity, redundancy, and respondent interpretation problems before a larger field test.

A subsequent validation study could examine factor structure, internal consistency, test-retest reliability where appropriate, convergent and discriminant validity, criterion relationships, and measurement invariance across relevant populations. Researchers should also test whether discrepancy scores provide meaningful information beyond measuring intended direction and lived behavior separately, since difference scores can introduce psychometric complications if they are adopted without careful analysis.

Longitudinal research would eventually provide the strongest test of the theory. If Direction-Centered Leadership argues that small patterns of misalignment can precede visible drift or derailment, then researchers should examine leaders across time rather than infer directional movement from one cross-sectional assessment. Only repeated observation can determine whether changes in the proposed Direction Gap precede, accompany, or follow meaningful changes in leadership outcomes.

What This Research Does and Does Not Claim

Research Brief 001 does not claim that existing scholarship has discovered or validated the Direction Gap. Gollwitzer and Sheeran studied implementation intentions and goal achievement. Bardi and Schwartz studied values and behavior. Braddy and colleagues studied leader behavior, derailment potential, rating source, and self-other agreement. Tenbrunsel and Messick examined ethical fading and self-deception. Moore and colleagues examined moral disengagement and unethical organizational behavior. Each contributes evidence concerning a neighboring phenomenon. None tested the Direction Gap as defined here.

The contribution of Direction-Centered Leadership is therefore not the discovery that intentions and behavior sometimes differ. That proposition already has substantial intellectual precedent. The proposed contribution is to examine whether directional alignment itself can be operationalized as a meaningful leadership construct, whether the distance between intended and lived direction can be measured reliably, and whether changes in that distance provide useful information about leadership formation, alignment, drift, and course correction.

That is a narrower claim than declaring the Direction Gap a validated leadership construct, but it is also a stronger scholarly starting point because it creates a proposition that can fail. If the Direction Gap cannot demonstrate adequate reliability, construct validity, discriminant validity, or practical usefulness, the Institute should revise or reject the measurement model. Research should test Direction-Centered Leadership rather than merely provide evidence for conclusions already assumed.

Conclusion

Leadership development usually becomes most visible when people improve skills, produce better results, or assume greater responsibility. Those outcomes matter, but they do not fully answer the question Direction-Centered Leadership places beneath them: Where is this leader actually headed?

Existing research gives us good reason to distinguish between what people intend and what they consistently do. Intentions do not automatically produce achievement. Values and behavior relate imperfectly. Leaders and observers can perceive leadership behavior differently. Ethical dimensions of decisions can fade from awareness, and moral disengagement can predict unethical organizational behavior. Together, these findings establish a credible empirical landscape in which the Direction Gap can now be investigated.

The next step is measurement. The Direction-Centered Leadership Institute should develop the construct carefully, invite scrutiny, test competing explanations, and allow evidence to determine whether the Direction Gap adds something meaningful to the study and practice of leadership. If the construct proves valid, it may provide leaders and researchers with a way to identify meaningful misalignment before that misalignment becomes visible derailment. If it does not, rigorous research will tell us where the model needs to change.

Either outcome advances the purpose of the Institute because meaningful research does not exist to protect an idea. It exists to pursue what is true.

References

Bardi, A., & Schwartz, S. H. (2003). Values and behavior: Strength and structure of relations. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29(10), 1207–1220. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167203254602

Braddy, P. W., Gooty, J., Fleenor, J. W., & Yammarino, F. J. (2014). Leader behaviors and career derailment potential: A multi-analytic method examination of rating source and self-other agreement. The Leadership Quarterly, 25(2), 373–390. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2013.10.001

Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1

Moore, C., Detert, J. R., Treviño, L. K., Baker, V. L., & Mayer, D. M. (2012). Why employees do bad things: Moral disengagement and unethical organizational behavior. Personnel Psychology, 65(1), 1–48. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2011.01237.x

Tenbrunsel, A. E., & Messick, D. M. (2004). Ethical fading: The role of self-deception in unethical behavior. Social Justice Research, 17(2), 223–236. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:SORE.0000027411.35832.53