Date of Award

4-2026

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Leadership Studies

First Advisor

Dr. Elizabeth Goryunova

Second Advisor

Dr. Dami Alegbeleye

Third Advisor

Dr. Elizabeth Turesky

Keywords

women’s leadership, domestic violence, intersectionality, Intimate Partner Violence (IPV), autoethnography, Adaptive Silhouette Leadership Model, Systemic Fluency Leadership Competencies

Abstract

This dissertation explores one woman’s leadership persistence, decline, and reemergence under the assault of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV). About 30% of women worldwide (World Health Organization [WHO], 2025) and over 42 % of U.S. women (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2022) have experienced physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner. IPV has impacts that reverberate through communities and harm the leadership potentials of women leaders. Women’s leadership parity has increased, then halted, and even shrunk in some sectors, even in woman dominated fields (United Nations, 2025). This coincides with an uptick in IPV since COVID (Uzoho et al., 2023). Effective leadership requires high performance levels to inspire followers (Bennis, 2007). IPV undermines women’s ability to maintain high level functioning, introducing multiple serious effects (CDC, 2016). Extant research has yet to explore the damage IPV causes leaders, or how to rebuild leadership traits in the leader during or after IPV or its escape. This Analytic Autoethnography (Anderson, 2006) explores the trajectory of a female leader experiencing IPV. Using a Critical Feminist lens, I examine personal records and documents (Jackson & Parry, 2018). This includes assessing the relationship between changes in my leadership and concurrent IPV through official records, personal writing, art (Snyder & Turesky, 2023, Crowley, 2022, McNiff, 2007), and interviews with informants providing insights, variance, and co-construction of a new lexicon to enable identification and conversation. This study introduces four distinct phases of leadership disruption and reemergence and maps the Adaptive Silhouette Leadership Model, and its resulting Systemic Fluency Leadership Competencies evolving from post IPV introspection and knowledge fusion.

Comments

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of

Philosophy with a concentration in Leadership

Download

Share

COinS