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Pygmalion and charisma are mutually compatible leadership constructs that beg integration. They share some basic assumptions about human nature, about how leaders lead, and about how they could lead more effectively. Nevertheless, for the most part these constructs are discussed in disparate academic literatures. The present treatise integrates these somewhat divergent yet partially overlapping approaches to leadership and management. The differences between Pygmalion and charismatic leadership, and the commonalities that they share, are explicated. The aim is to understand better how leaders affect followers and how they can exert their influence with greater effectiveness. Some ideas for further research and for more effective management practice based on integration of Pygmalion and charisma constructs are presented. The result is a description of “charismatic Pygmalion,” an integrated management style that embodies both leadership constructs.

In this chapter, we will be exploring the role of leadership within small businesses. Leadership is an essential element in the management of any organisation and is even more crucial when it comes to small businesses. In particular, both the structure and the specific stage of development of small businesses determines the need for an evolving style of leadership. Unlike their counterparts at larger organisations, small business leaders usually have a higher level of hands-on involvement across multiple areas of responsibility, including strategic decision-making and financial management, as well as team leadership and motivation.

Some key leadership skills, such as having a clear vision, communicating successfully across all business levels, leading by example and keeping the team engaged, are shared by all enterprises, regardless of size and nature. It is critical for small business leaders to understand that each stage of an organisation’s lifecycle brings with it different opportunities and challenges that should be dealt with by adopting different leadership techniques. A ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach will not work, and could even become detrimental in the long term.

During an organisation’s early days, a leader’s main role is to inspire the individuals they work with by sharing their vision and purpose without the need for formal management processes. In this chapter, we will be exploring the above issues in relation to the role of leadership within small businesses in greater depth.

The current era is characterized by hyperturbulence, population growth, attention to food security, the need to identify sustainable strategies to reduce pollution and poverty, and the disparity between developed and undeveloped economies. These circumstances force a global paradigm shift based on sustainable practices and processes that put people and the environment at the core of each activity, contributing to sustainable, social, and economic development and promoting well-being in the community.

In this spirit, a strong impulse can derive from the practices of Green Technology, considered here as that set of processes aimed at eco-sustainability that acquire undisputed relevance, especially for emerging economies.

This chapter focuses on the role that Green technology practices exert in generating local well-being in the world's fifth-largest country: Brazil. Dynamic growth and effective social policies lifted millions of people out of poverty in the 2000s, even if socio-economic development varies widely across the country. Brazil is a leading global agricultural, minerals, and oil producer. The natural environment represents the primary source of Brazil's development that deserves to be protected and push firms and citizens to find new sustainable solutions based on green policies. Drawing inspiration from a Brazilian case study, this chapter proposes a set of building blocks that foster sustainable business practices in emerging countries.

The chapter is organized as follows: the first part introduces the concept of green technology practices; the second highlights the opportunities of green technologies; the third focuses on a single case study.

Incentives are effective at enhancing productivity, but research also suggests that performance incentives can have “unintended negative consequences” including increases in hazard/injuries, increases in errors, and reduction in cooperation, prosocial behaviors, and creativity. Relatively overlooked is whether, when, and how incentives can be designed to prevent such negative consequences. The authors review literature in several disciplines (construction, healthcare delivery, economics, psychology, and [some] management) on this issue. This chapter, in toto, sheds a generally positive light and suggests that, beyond productivity, incentives can be used to improve other outcomes such as safety, quality, prosocial behaviors, and creativity, particularly when the incentives are thoughtfully designed. The review concludes with several potential fruitful areas for future research such as investigations of incentive-effect duration.

Positivist deductive research on transformational leadership brings along with it 25 years of researcher presuppositions. Such research not only suggests that a transformational leader’s influence is unidirectional but also that transformational leadership theory is a universal theory. In this chapter, I inductively seek to examine board-executive director interactions, free from the shackles of existing theory.

The current chapter uses an inductive research approach to the collection and analysis of the empirical material. By being open to surprises in the empirical material, I am able to explore behaviors and relationships, while analyzing a specific context – the nonprofit board-executive director relationship.

The current study finds evidence that individualized consideration in a governance model frequently occurs in the opposite direction. Despite organizational documents promoting a hierarchical structure, evidence of top-down, collegiality, and bottom-up individualized consideration suggests hierarchical boundaries are commonly crossed in the decision making process.

Results of this exploratory study suggest that in a governance context, hierarchical actors do not fit neatly into the boxes defined by 30 years of research on transformational leadership theory, suggesting that the leadership process is more complex than portrayed by current dichotomizations. The findings provide support for recent criticisms of transformational leadership theory.

The findings of this chapter provide evidence of the benefits of eliciting input from organizational actors at multiple hierarchical levels. The empirical evidence provides practitioners with a fresh perspective on board roles and relationship, diverging from the traditional structural prescriptions.

New Ways of Working seems to change the leadership agenda. Activity-based working and home-based work lead to different behaviors of employees. Supervising styles will change from command-and-control toward goal-setting-and-trust. This chapter describes the trend and provides new data on the actual use and effectiveness of these new supervision styles. It appears to be a mix of different leadership styles, such as leading by vision, setting targets and control on output, providing trust.

This study aims to analyze the effect of top management team (TMT) expertise on real earnings management (REM) and accrual earnings management (AEM) activities in companies in Indonesia by examining a hand-collected secondary data from non-financial publicly listed companies in Indonesia in 2016 and 2017. The expertise of TMT members is measured by possession of a master’s degree, understanding and experience of managed core functional areas, and possession of accounting certifications such as CA or CPA. The results of the study show that the expertise of the members of the TMT has no influence on the activity of AEM in companies in Indonesia. Meanwhile, understanding and experience on the managed core functional areas have a positive influence on REM activities through abnormal cash flows. Possession of accounting certification has a positive influence on REM activities in companies that are in accordance with managerial entrenchment effects, as well as a negative influence on REM activities in companies through abnormal discretionary expenses that are in line with incentive-reduction effects.

Talking about smart cities also entails talking about new ways of mobility. Various concepts compete for reimagining future mobility, most prominently connected cars, robo taxis, and other forms of shared mobility. New digital technologies, changing customer requirements, but also new competitors are dynamically affecting previous market logics. To stay future-proof in this new world of mobility, the automotive sector, which is an important nucleus for developing such mobility solutions, is currently undergoing fundamental digital transformation processes. Established car manufacturers have to find their path to choose out of the many possibilities on the rise. Against this backdrop, they face the major challenge to find an answer to the question: Who are we and who do we want to be in the future? Therefore, we argue that organizations’ digital transformation is highly entangled with questions on organizational identity and discuss digital transformation as a potential identity threat for established organizations.

We begin this chapter by introducing the concept of organizational identity. Afterward, we will continue with applying it to the practical context of car manufacturers: After depicting the major trends of digitalization in the mobility and automotive sector, we will focus on the digital transformation processes of established automotive companies and discuss their impact on organizational identity. Empirical illustrations of the Volkswagen case depict our theoretical considerations.

We provide theoretical ideas for better understanding the impact of digital transformation on organizational identity, as well as suggestions for practitioners concerned with organizations’ digital transformation processes.

Through an inductive approach, I examine the process in which autonomy is exercised in the board-executive director relationship. A further contribution of the current study is the exploration of the antecedents of the delegation process.

Utilizing the benefits of semi-structured critical incident interviews, and analysis of organizational documentation, I study the process in which autonomy is exercised in the board-executive director relationship.

Evidence is found within organizations of times when it is clear that board members understand that there are boundaries to their role, respecting this autonomy, and times when board members overstep their role. Next, in the current study, I explore the antecedents of the delegation process, including identification of role boundaries, role clarity, clear expectations, trust in the executive director, and trust in the governance control systems.

Autonomy has historically been examined within seemingly paradoxical frameworks; this has included investigating autonomy as part of the definition of laissez faire leadership, as a key feature of transformational leadership and as one component of the jobs characteristics model, while others have characterized it as a stream of shared leadership. In the current project, the process of providing autonomy takes on characteristics consistent with both vertical leadership and distributed leadership. The executive director similarly plays a role in maintaining previously defined role boundaries, which is evidence of bidirectional influence. However, the board plays a disproportionately larger role in delineating and maintaining role boundaries – characteristics I demonstrate as being consistent with transformational leadership.

In this chapter, I provide a refreshing divergence from typical board prescriptions, in that I examine the board-executive director relationship through a behavioural lens. A clear understanding of the mutual influence and antecedents of autonomy are important to practitioners seeking to enhance performance through the delineation of roles.