Quote:
Is it real or just another theory being floated around?
It's real.
The group most well-documented as having executive dysfunction are people with frontal lobe injuries (for example Phineas Gage). The idea of executive functions came about in large part because of noticing that people with frontal lobe injuries show normal function on standard cognitive skills (eg memory, language, spatial skills etc), and yet show significant impairment in everyday life. So they tried to figure out what was going wrong.
Since then, they've found evidence of executive dysfunction in ADHD, autism, schizophrenia and many other neuropsychological conditions. There is controversy about how much executive dysfunction explains about the classical symptoms of those conditions (eg can executive dysfunction explain social impairment?), but the fact that executive dysfunction is present among many of these conditions is not really disputed.
Incidentally, many layperson sources give a whole big list of executive functions, but
this study suggests they boil down to three main skills - inhibition (suppressing inappropriate responses), intentionality (planning/thinking ahead and thinking about thinking) and executive memory (retrieval and control of memory).