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Unprecedented transformations to the nature of work and organizations are compelling leadership and organization development scholars and practitioners to reexamine the relevance and utility existing models of leadership potential. While there exist several published leadership potential models, the range and intensity of environmental forces fundamentally changing the nature of work and organizations demands a revision of leadership potential. The purpose of this study is to develop a leadership potential model that reflects the current and emerging nature of work and leadership challenges while also providing organizations a practical tool for talent review processes, succession planning and leadership development practices.

This article presents a field study consisting of semistructured interviews with 45 leaders engaged in a highly complex, volatile and uncertain industry: US healthcare.

Our results illustrate a dynamic two-dimensional model of leadership potential that comprises both cognitive (analytical aptitude and learning agility) and behavioral (people savvy and leadership capability) competencies operating across micro- and macro-levels of influence.

The article concludes with a series of recommendations for how leadership and organization development professionals, executive teams and boards may utilize the model for leader assessment and selection practices, talent review and succession planning and talent development initiatives.

The proposed model of leadership potential offers several advancements to the field's existing theoretical frameworks. The proposed model highlights the criticality of competencies aligned with the changing nature of work, including collaboration skills, divergent thinking, environmental scanning and evaluating data in ambiguous contexts. The model diverges from the existing theory by establishing leader drive as a motivation to serve others and initiate sustainable changes in business operations.

Transorganizational systems (TSs) are a collection of organizations that have agreed to work interdependently to accomplish a task too large in scope for a single organization. TS are organizational structures capable of addressing large-scale problems, and are vitally important. However, relative to the stand-alone organization, TS theory is under-developed and currently no comprehensive diagnostic model exits for managing TS change. Theoretically constructed diagnostic models are essential ingredients of any planned change effort. The purpose of this paper is to propose a comprehensive model for diagnosing TS.

In this paper a comprehensive model for diagnosing TS is proposed. In constructing the model existing literature is integrated with the enduring organization development work of Cummings and Worley (2015). These authors developed a comprehensive model to diagnose organizations at three levels: individual, group, and organization. This paper proposes adding a fourth, higher order level – the TS level.

The resulting diagnostic model offers theorists and practitioners a comprehensive framework for use in diagnosing TS functionality and performance.

The results of quality diagnosis are essential in managing change leading to improved TS effectiveness.

Currently no comprehensive diagnostic model is available for managing higher order change in TS. This paper aims to fill this void.

This research investigates the relationship among a team's emotional intelligence, the team leader's emotional intelligence, and team performance. Twenty‐six customer service teams and their leaders were studied using the three components of Salovey and Mayer's (1990) conception of emotional intelligence: Understanding emotion, managing emotion, and identifying emotions. Team members and two corporate directors assessed team performance using customer service, accuracy, productivity, and continuous improvement as performance indicators. Of the three components of emotional intelligence (EI) studied, only understanding emotion and managing emotion positively correlated with some measures of team performance. However, no correlations occurred between identifying emotions and any performance measure. Of the six positive correlations between team EI and team performance, three were between EI and customer service. No EI components correlated with productivity or continuous improvement performance measures. Study results also indicate that team leader EI has a neutral to negative relationship with team performance from the team members' perspectives. The data show, overall that a negative relationship exists between team leader EI and team performance as rated by individuals. The only positive correlation was between team leader understanding emotion scores and customer service, as rated by managers. This result is consistent with the findings stated previously that team EI positively correlates with customer service.

This chapter explores the evolution of a network, initially based on providing sustainable seafood through Loblaw’s supply chain, to a network that is collectively working to improve ocean health. It describes the role of the CEO and key managers, the internal changes taken by Loblaw to become a more sustainable organization, and the external partnering that resulted in a more coherent network with shared goals.

The chapter describes models and theories of sustainable organizations, issue nets, and collaboration and then applies the concepts to understand Loblaw’s sustainability journey and the creation of a network.

The model of the evolution to a sustainable organization is extended to include the journey to sustainable issue or domain networks. What Loblaw and the partnering organizations were able to create suggests that there are increasing levels of collaboration around changing a domain, if there is the courage to take a leap of faith and increase an organization’s time horizon beyond immediate financial demands.

The findings of this chapter will help senior executives with responsibility for shifting supply chains to become more sustainable. In addition, this case provides a new level of detail in describing the journey to sustainability, shifting from a company focus to an issue focus.

Seeks to undertake research of Generation X women in high technology in order to determine what type of corporate environment would support their needs for professional success, personal fulfillment, and sustain longer‐term employment.

This qualitative study looked at high‐potential Generation X women (born between 1965‐1980) within the high‐technology industry and explored their relationship with work which means how they interact with bosses, peers, subordinates, and the corporate culture.

The study found that, for Generation X women, personal fulfillment was intrinsically connected to professional success, and that they wanted support from their companies in terms of mentors for guidance and development, opportunities to excel, recognition for efforts, relationships, and flexibility to achieve work/life balance.

The sample size was small and, while the research applies to the high‐technology industry, care would need to be taken in wholesale application to all industries. The way Generation X women perceive the importance of work/life balance carries implications for corporations in terms of training, development, promotional practices and corporate culture.

If companies can provide a cultural environment to support attainment of professional success and personal fulfillment as defined by these women, it may provide a link to longer‐term employment, reduced employee turnover, and improved bottom line corporate performance.

Organizations are currently striving to become more sustainable, as resources dwindle and social desirability for sustainability increases. This is important in public sector organizations as well as private, and exemplars are needed. Therefore, this chapter provides a description of how a public housing authority in pursuit of a social mission parlayed an energy performance contract into a triple bottom line sustainability journey. The Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority's (CMHA) sustainability journey has been shaped most significantly by the commitment of CMHA leadership to collaboration (internal and external) as a core strategy. The chapter provides a rich description of CMHA's emergent partnerships with various organizations in their environment; focusing first on energy and later encompassing social, ecological, and economic sustainability. It describes and analyzes the leadership that emerged which played an essential role in supporting the complexity of increasing collaborative involvement. New theories of leadership, most specifically Complexity Leadership Theory (Uhl-Bien & Marion, 2008), emergent leadership (Goldstein et al., 2010), and adaptive leadership (Heifetz, 1994) are used to make sense of the leadership philosophy and actions that worked in the sustainability journey.

Hilary Bradbury-Huang is professor in the Management Division of Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU). Her research, scholarly activism, and teaching focus on the human and organizational dimensions of creating healthy communities. At OHSU she teaches in the healthcare MBA and physician leadership development programs. She also develops the action research approach to community based participatory research for health.

The large number of publications about sustainability and sustainable development that have been published during the past decade has dealt largely with the science of sustainability, the content of sustainability initiatives, and increasingly with the need to more closely link the economic, environmental, and social purposes and operating logic of the firm. Recent literature stresses the inherent social nature of the challenges to aggressively moving to more sustainable ways of operating for the well-being of our planet, society, economy, organizations, and humans. Despite rich case examples, guidance on how to organize to achieve the triple bottom line is limited. We take stock of the current state of knowledge, using an adaptive complex system perspective to articulate the challenges of organizing for sustainable effectiveness. Most of the global economy and the knowledge upon which it is predicated carry a logic of resource abundance even in the face of increasing competition for scarce resources, and a singular focus on economic outcomes. We argue that the development of new capabilities to address triple bottom line sustainability requires a change in that logic and requires new rules of interaction, new organizational and interorganizational designs, and new ways of learning. The premise is that systems can build on their inherent capabilities to learn and to act collectively in order to adapt. We argue that by working together to collaboratively explore how to organize for sustainability, academics and practitioners can accelerate knowledge generation and progress. This chapter provides the theoretical framing context for the chapters to come.