Use of XR Technologies for the Assessment and Training of Leadership Skills

Abstract Currently, in the context of leadership, there is an important compromise between training activities and evaluation methods with training focused on the skills of the 21st century (such as tenacity, resilience, social empathy, and creative problem-solving) while the evaluation continues to focus on 20th-century methodologies. As regards leadership training and assessment methods, they could be optimized using methodologies and techniques from organisational neuroscience (ON), which uses implicit measures of brain activity to gain a better understanding of the disciplines of organizing behavior and human resource management. One of the challenges of the ON is how to create complex social situations in controlled laboratory conditions that produce ecological organizational behaviors. One way is to use digital learning environments to reproduce problems that can occur in performance-based assessments. Extended reality technology (XR) scenarios can offer significant assessment playgrounds, providing students with situations that require the application of various skills. XR is increasingly used to reproduce natural events and social interaction. The advantage of XR is that it offers interactive, sensory, and multimodal stimuli. In this chapter, we will examine the latest developments in XR technology and organizational sciences. In it, we emphasize that XR is a very important tool for leadership research in particular to assess and train complex skills. This can create a new conceptualization of leadership biomarkers, called extended reality-based behavioral biomarkers (XRBBs), which can be obtained for the evaluation of leadership skills using a neuroscientific organizational paradigm based on implicit brain processes measured through psychophysiological signals and the behavior of subjects exposed to complex social conditions replication using virtual reality interfaces.