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The purpose of this research is to examine leadership in an intermediary organization whose mission is to facilitate collaboration between large corporations and their smaller suppliers, a bridging organization.

A qualitative approach using a single case revelatory method was adopted. Data were collected from a bridge leader as well as 20 executives of companies involved in the collaboration.

The analysis revealed that the successful bridge leader tended: to build personal relations and goodwill as a way of creating personal obligations on the part of the stakeholders he led; championed the cause of the stakeholders and made their mission his/her own; created opportunities for individual and collective goal achievement; relied on symbolic behavior and ceremonies to reify the bridge mission; and engaged in frequent communication with a liberal use of humor and playfulness to make goals embraceable by the stakeholders in the collaboration.

This is a single case study and that limits the generalization of these findings. However, the findings provide some preliminary evidence to show that a lack of control of resources need not be a reason for leader non‐performance.

A bridge leader may substitute other influence strategies to compensate for the lack of direct positional power.

This study is one of the few that explicitly examines leadership in bridging organizations. The paper's understanding of this phenomenon is important because of the importance of bridging organizations to business and social innovation.

There is a significant volume of literature relating to the mentoring needs of new principals and vice/deputy principals, but little is known about the mentoring needs of recently appointed middle leaders in an educational setting. This study explored the mentoring needs of five female middle leaders at a K–12 case study school of 550 students in Perth, Australia.

Each participant had three mentoring sessions, followed by a semi-structured interview using open-ended questions to provide data on the participants' mentoring needs. The research was framed within an interpretive phenomenology paradigm that focussed on the participants' perceived experiences and how they then interpreted these experiences. One of the researchers was active in this research, acting as the mentor (Neubauer et al., 2019; Smith and Osborn, 2021).

The findings of this study revealed the importance of the mentor being a “critical friend”. In addition, the participants referred to leadership identity, leadership from the middle, managing relationships and gender as other important mentoring needs.

This empirical study contributes original findings on the mentoring needs of a previously neglected group of educational leaders who provide an essential bridge between classroom practitioners and senior leadership in Australian schools. This study is unique because it links these mentoring needs to the practice architectures, factors at the case study school that either constrained or enabled middle leading (Kemmis et al., 2014).

The ubiquity of the social web has forced online recruitment to change dramatically. This paper introduces the first e-recruitment network business model, the Private Talent Network© to support the practice of online talent resourcing.

Grounded theory was the research approach adopted, using mixed method data collection and triangulation of results. A study of six FTSE100 companies was conducted from different industries. This was an explorative study into network theories and models in context of e-recruitment.

The key outcome was the identification of a positive candidate experience. This was central to realising cost benefits and candidate quality and was influenced by nine internal and external factors. Theoretically actor network theory provided a flexible and representative framework of the online ecosystem adopted by businesses for talent resourcing.

Limited to UK FTSE100 target group only, the research is presented as a first step in defining a structured e-recruitment business model.

Direct support to enable practitioners to improve or/and initiate e-recruitment initiatives and further this management discipline.

Drawing on actor network theory the Private Talent Network© is proposed as the first e-recruitment network business model.

This paper seeks to highlight the systemic conditions that facilitate the emergence, longevity, and effectiveness of bridge‐builders across organizations.

Researchers conducted longitudinal case studies in six One‐Stop Career Centers across the USA over four years. Interviews were conducted with approximately 20 people in various positions at each of the sites visited. The data analyzed spanned the four years of the study.

Researchers uncovered particular characteristics present in individual bridge‐builders that enabled them to accomplish their goals. This research indicates that, when the right conditions intersected with the right type of person, champions emerged who helped move the organization in new and innovative directions.

This paper provides an outline of the organizational change that can happen in the disability field. By delineating bridge‐builders and the context in which they operate, others can identify the conditions within organizations to help them move forward.

This paper aims to present multidisciplinary, research‐based insights into the challenges of changing behaviors at large‐scale in organizations and articulates practical approaches for leaders.

A literature review of research and practices of social and organizational change was conducted and thematically summarized. The themes were discussed and revised with input from twenty global leaders and a dozen university researchers at a two‐day conference held at Harvard University's Learning Innovation Laboratory.

Supporting changes of practice in organizations depends on a leaders understanding how to best affect collective behaviors. Emerging research from the fields of political science, social networking, and social change suggest that leaders can build three types of bridges that support large‐scale change: emotional bridges by creating strategic narratives, relational bridges by targeting social clusters, and structural bridges by leveraging pre‐existing social associations in organizations.

The themes illustrate practical approaches that leaders can use to diagnose the types of change they wish to support and offer concrete strategies for designing and supporting changes in collective behaviors.

This article aims to present a unique synthesis of emerging, multidisciplinary research on supporting collective change in organizations and offers an intuitive model to support leaders in their actions.

To explore how leadership behavior in Thailand relates to humanistic leadership through indigenous and cross-cultural lenses.

Analogically based and semi-structured interviews were used. The primary focus was on factors associated with expatriate success in leading Thais in a Thai context. As such, the main sample included 24 expatriates. Two local Thai leaders were also interviewed. Qualitative interviews were analyzed inductively using NVivo.

Five interrelated themes emerged from the data: guiding, bridging, emotionally supporting, socializing and indirectly communicating. These themes relate to Asian holistic thinking, Thai culture and humanistic management. Evidence for humanistic leadership was found, albeit in culture-specific ways.

Researchers may benefit from studying local, indigenous leadership practices and determining if and how they fit etic concepts such as humanistic leadership. Limitations of this study include a small sample from only one country.

To be successful, leaders should engage in humanistic leadership practices that fit the Thai context. Human resource departments may wish to focus their talent recruitment, selection and development on these behaviors.

This paper adds to the nascent literature on humanistic leadership by providing an indigenous as well as cross-cultural lens to understanding humanistic leadership in the context of Thailand.

The purpose of this paper is to explore leadership styles and patterns in India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and the USA in order to contribute to a greater understanding of global leadership.

The paper uses cultural mythologies as a lens (Kessler and Wong-MingJi, 2009a) to extract the most favored leadership traits within selected countries. In doing so, the paper explores historical trajectories and core values of each country to identify their distinctive characteristics. Additionally, leadership styles of well-known business leaders in each culture are examined to develop a comparative discussion of global leadership patterns and styles.

The paper finds that leaders may share same characteristics across countries, however, their behavioral expressions tend to unfold differently within each context. The paper argues that without context, meanings embedded in cultural mythologies and behaviors often become lost. The paper concludes that a comparative analysis of selected countries reveals a more complex and rich array of cultural meanings, thus offering support to a contextual view of leadership.

Examination of cultural mythologies on leadership makes important theoretical contributions by illustrating that cultural mythologies indeed shape the values, behaviors, and attitudes of global leaders, and provide three important functions that are identified as: cultural bridging, meaning making, and contextual nuancing.

Understanding comparative leadership patterns is critical in international business. The paper offers cultural mythologies as a tool for leaders who seek to cross-cultural boundaries in developing long term and high-quality productive international business relationships.

The value of the study lies in developing a comparative analysis of leadership patterns in three Southeast Asian countries and the USA with the help of cultural mythologies. The paper urges that scholars to move beyond quantification of cultural dimensions to a more contextualized understanding of leadership.

Virtual communities of practice (VCoPs) supported educators during the COVID-19 pandemic and the resurgent movement for racial justice that arose in 2020. Four VCoPs offered a venue for practitioners and researchers to develop social capital in the face of pandemic and persistent institutional racism.

Researchers conducted semi-structured interviews with organizers of four VCoPs and collected supporting documentation from those organizers.

VCoP organizers created opportunities to develop bridging and bonding capital of equity- and justice-focused educators.

The analysis points toward the affordances of VCoPs in crisis response and equity leadership.

This original analysis extends work on communities of practice, generally, virtual communities of practice, and equity leadership development.

Drawing on the political theory of leadership and the input‐process‐output model the purpose of this paper is to examine the link between leader political skill and team performance by focusing on the mediating role of team communication and the moderating role of team task interdependence.

The authors collected three waves of data from 80 teams across four business units and employed hierarchical regression modeling and the moderated path analysis approach suggested by Edwards and Lambert to test the moderated mediation model.

Leader political skill was found to positively influence team performance via promoting the quality of team communication. Moreover, team task interdependence moderates the relationship between leader political skill and team communication, such that the relationship is stronger when team task interdependence is high rather than low.

First, the paper adopts the measuring scales developed in the western organizational context to investigate the relations and phenomena existing in the Chinese organizational context. Future research should adopt the indigenous measuring scales to investigate the relations and phenomena existing in the Chinese organizational context. Second, both political skill and team performance were reported by the team leader, which might lead to common source bias. Future research should allow team members to rate leaders' political skill and the team leaders' supervisors to provide evaluation of team performance.

Owing to its importance to team performance, political skill is one of the critical skills that leaders should make efforts to develop. When companies recruit leaders for work teams, they should put more attention on the political skills of the candidates. Moreover, companies should cultivate a cooperative team climate to facilitate team communication.

Although Ahearn et al. suggested that leader political skill has positive effect on team performance, they did not empirically examine the specific process and mechanism through which the positive effect occurs. This study argues team communication is a critical mechanism that bridges leader political skill and team operations and outcomes as well. The study adopts longitudinal research design and collects multi‐source data to test the authors' model. The study also complements past research by investigating both the mediating and moderating mechanisms in the leader political‐team performance linkage.

Secondary school leadership provides multiple challenges in terms of the diversity of tasks, multiple demands on time, balancing communities and attending to instructional programming. An emerging scholarship suggests the importance of a distributed instructional leadership approach to high school leadership. However, what has been less thoroughly explored is how secondary school leadership is distributed leaders across a school district. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the social structure and positions urban high school principals occupy in the district system.

This study was conducted in one urban fringe public school district in southern California serving diverse students populations. The data were collected at three time points starting in Fall 2012 and ending in Fall 2014 from a district-wide leadership team including all central office and site leaders. All leaders were asked to assess their social relations and perception of innovative climate. The data were analyzed through a series of social network indices to examine the structure and positions of high school principals.

Results indicate that over time high school principals have decreasing access to social capital and are typically occupying peripheral positions in the social network. The high school principals’ perception of innovative climate across the district decreases over time.

This longitudinal study, one of the first to examine high school principals from a network perspective, sheds new light on the social infrastructure of urban high school principals and what this might mean for efforts at improvement.