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This paper draws on African anti-colonial thought and Black consciousness to propose critical conscious leadership (CCL) as a decolonising leadership approach appropriate for pursuing emancipation, social justice and innovation in a new African university.

I utilised the method of critical discourse analysis to study Ihron Rensburg’s language as he reflected on his leadership at the University of Johannesburg (UJ). The study engaged with Rensburg’s writings and texts on his account of leading the merger and transformation of UJ. The primary text draws from his book “Serving Higher Purposes” (2020).

Through the construction of CCL, the paper proposes alternative tenets for leading transformation towards a new African university. CCL grounds a decolonised and pluriversal new African university’s character premised on a consciously revitalised alternative thinking that will carry the communitarian spirit of Africa in knowledge production, dissemination and consumption in humanising all and serving the greater good. And it operates within the dialectical tensions of the social and economic purpose of higher education (HE), African and global relevance, African and Western paradigms, excellent performance and attainment of social justice.

The proposed CCL offers an alternative leadership approach that responds to the call to “Dethrone the Empire” by centring Blackness in HE leadership, which is crucial for authentic transformation and decolonisation.

This paper aims to examine the influence of the interplay between servant leadership behaviors and Machiavellianism on leader effectiveness.

Drawing on trait activation theory and motivation to lead theory, the authors hypothesize that the effect of servant leadership behaviors on perceived leadership effectiveness is manifested differently in teams with high-Machiavellian vs. low-Machiavellian leaders. In teams with low-Machiavellian leaders, servant leadership behaviors are expected to be associated with a cooperative way of handling team conflicts, which enhances employees' leader effectiveness ratings. In contrast, in teams with high-Machiavellian leaders, this mediation role vanishes due to the incongruency between Machiavellian traits and the cooperative context. The authors conducted a two-wave survey-based study and tested the hypotheses with a matched supervisor-employee sample from 310 employees and their leaders in 91 teams.

The results showed that servant leadership behaviors positively impact leadership effectiveness and that this effect takes place through cooperative team conflict management (TCM) without controlling for leaders' Machiavellian trait. Further analysis shows this mediation mechanism is only strong and significant in teams led by low-Machiavellian leaders, but not high-Machiavellian leaders.

To the authors’ best knowledge, this is the first study that examines the interplay of servant leadership behaviors and Machiavellianism on perceived leader effectiveness.

本文旨在探討僕人式領導行為與馬基雅維利主義之間的相互作用會如何影響領導效能。

我們根據特質激活理論和領導動機理論、建立了一個假設，這個假設就是： 僕人式領導行為對感知的領導效能所產生並顯示出來的影響、是會視乎團隊是高/強馬基雅維利主義，還是低/弱馬基雅維利主義而有所分別的。若團隊的領導者是低/弱馬基雅維利主義的話，僕人式領導行為大概會與使用合作的方式去處理團隊衝突有相互之關聯，這會提高僱員對領導效能的評分。與此相反，若團隊的領導者是高/強馬基雅維利主義的話，這調節作用和角色將會因馬基雅維利主義的特質與合作的環境之間存在著不協調而消失。我們進行了一個兩波的、以及基於調查的研究，在這研究中，我們利用管理者和員工相應的樣本來測試各個假設;這些樣本包括91個團隊內的310名員工及其領導者。

研究結果顯示、僕人式領導行為對領導效能會產生積極的影響，而這影響是透過以合作方式管理團隊衝突而產生的，亦沒有對領導者的馬基雅維利主義特質加以管控。我們進一步的分析顯示、這調節機制只會在由低/弱馬基雅維利主義的領導者領導的團隊內顯得強烈和顯著，但若領導者是高/強馬基雅維利主義的話，情況就不一樣了。

盡我們所知，本研究為首個研究、去探討僕人式領導行為與馬基雅維利主義之間的相互作用會如何影響感知的領導效能。

With the growing need for employees to be innovative, public-sector organizations are investing in employee training. This study aims to examine the effects of a combined Lean Six Sigma and innovation training, using action learning, on public-sector employees’ creative role identity and innovative work behavior.

The authors studied a public service agency in Singapore in which a five-day Lean Innovation Training was implemented, using a combination of Lean Six Sigma and Creative Problem-Solving tools, with a simulation on day one and subsequent team-based project coaching, spread over six months. The authors administered pre- and postintervention surveys among all the employees, and initiated group interviews and observations before, during and after the intervention.

Creative role identity and innovative work behavior had significantly improved six months after the intervention, enabled through senior management’s transformational leadership. The training induced managers to role-model innovative work behaviors while cocreating, with their employees, a renewal of their agency’s core processes. The three completed improvement projects contributed to an innovative work culture and reduced service turnaround time.

Starting with a role-playing simulation on the first day, during which leaders and followers swapped roles, the action-learning type training taught all the organizational members to use various Lean Six Sigma and Creative Problem-Solving tools. This nimble Lean Innovation Training, and subsequent team-based project coaching, exemplifies how advancing the staff’s creative role identity can have a positive impact.

This literature review aims to explore the various aspects of psychological capital (PsyCap), including its theoretical foundations, measurement methods, and the factors directly associated with PsyCap.

The approach employed in this study is scientific document synthesis, with a specific emphasis on scholarly articles published between 2001 and 2023. The selection of articles is limited to those published in internationally renowned journals that are indexed by reputable databases, including ISI (WoS) and SJR (Scopus).

Psychological capital is closely linked to other concepts at different levels. Scholars are investigating various factors associated with PsyCap, including health, project success, service marketing, banking services. It is important to note that different research areas have varying conceptualizations and scales when it comes to PsyCap.

This literature review of related studies reveals a growing global interest among researchers in the concept of positive psychological capital. The research results have shown significant interest in the items related to PsyCap, and and the factors directly associated with it, including antecedents, mediators, moderators, and outcomes.

Are there smart ways to find heuristics? What are the common principles behind heuristics? We propose an integrative definition of heuristics, based on insights that apply to all heuristics, and put forward meta-heuristics for discovering heuristics.

We employ Herbert Simon’s metaphor that human behavior is shaped by the scissors of the mind and its environment. We present heuristics from different domains and multiple sources, including scholarly literature, practitioner-reports and ancient texts.

Heuristics are simple, actionable principles for behavior that can take different forms, including that of computational algorithms and qualitative rules-of-thumb, cast into proverbs or folk-wisdom. We introduce heuristics for tasks ranging from management to writing and warfare. We report 13 meta-heuristics for discovering new heuristics and identify four principles behind them and all other heuristics: Those principles concern the (1) plurality, (2) correspondence, (3) connectedness of heuristics and environments and (4) the interdisciplinary nature of the scissors’ blades with respect to research fields and methodology.

We take a fresh look at Simon’s scissors-metaphor and employ it to derive an integrative perspective that includes a study of meta-heuristics.