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The emotions of the aspirant leader are underexplored. In this chapter, we detail how aspirants experience the transition from teacher to leader and report on the kinds of emotional labour associated with the transition. This was examined during events of high emotional arousal for 130 school aspirants: when they felt professionally wounded, either by colleagues, leaders, parents or students. During a time of wounding, emotional work and emotional labour hinged on the dissonance between ‘display rules’ of the school and what aspirants’ actually felt. Exploring the wounding stories revealed common display rules, which were often broken. Breaking these rules always had consequences and emotional correlates. The most prevalent form of emotional labour was surface acting. The final discovery was the resilience of the aspirants as they recovered. Invariably, aspirants progressed through an emotion cycle of Regrouping, Recovery and Resolution. The quality of collegial relationships was the key to resolving the woundings.

The purpose of this paper is to debunk myths about soft leadership.

The paper distinguishes soft leadership from other leadership styles.

It calls for companies exploring this new leadership perspective to achieve organizational excellence and effectiveness; and countries to achieve peace and prosperity.

This new leadership perspective can be adopted by leaders for companies and countries.

The social implications of this research suggests that leaders can improve employees’ performance and productivity by treating them as partners.

It defines and explains soft leadership with four OB models. It unfolds that it is the age of partnership, not followership. It unveils that employees prefer to work in an egalitarian set up. They appreciate leaders with an integrative, participative, collaborative, and relationship-oriented leadership mindset.

The Work Foundation has worked with the University of York to deliver a development program for its top 60 leaders designed to address some of the specific challenges faced by a modern university. The program is intended to engage senior leaders in strategic dialogue, to enable them to engage with the complex challenges facing the organization and to embed networks to deliver tangible organizational improvements. This paper seeks to examine this issue.

The program builds on three principles. First, it is deeply integrated into the work environment through the use of strategic improvement idea groups (SIIGs); second, it explores and works with cultural issues; and third, it embraces collective development co‐designed with participants.

The resultant program has helped York win the “outstanding contribution to leadership” award at the 2009 Times Higher Education awards and delivered a host of benefits to individuals and the organization, including a shift in the culture of leadership towards a collegiate community of leaders.

The co‐creation of the program has meant that it has been owned by the university and the participants and allows the program to live what it teaches. The program embraces the multitude of perspectives that exist in organizations to create more robust, novel and sustainable outcomes.

The co‐created program brings academic and support staff together to work on common issues, recognizing the ability of participants to engage with complex challenges and emphasizing the value of the collective in resolving them. The formation of SIIGs delivers a return on investment.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how appointed leaders in Norwegian higher education perceive their role and influence, and their discretion as academic leaders.

The paper applies strategic, cultural and political perspectives on leadership to investigate the understanding and perceptions held by academic leaders regarding their own work. The study applied a qualitative strategy based on a cross-sectional design. The findings are based on semi-structured interviews with 18 purposefully selected academic leaders.

The findings reveal that appointed academic leaders are struggling with traditions and cultures and current governing structures and funding mechanisms on the other. The paper argues that this dilemma limits the potential for academic leaders to instigate change and that leadership perhaps has been overemphasized as a factor driving transformation of higher education.

The paper suggests the heated debates in Norway about whether academic leaders should be elected or appointed has limited relevance for understanding how academic leadership is performed in the actual daily work of leaders. The paper suggest that the current interest in selection of leaders perhaps should be downplayed in favor of a perspective focussing on the cultural factors framing current leadership practices.

The increasingly demanding psychosocial working conditions in Swedish public sector workplaces call for implementation of workplace health promotion (WHP) interventions. There is a need to increase first-line public sector managers’ capacities for health-promoting leadership. The purpose of this paper is to investigate first-line managers’ experiences of participating in an intervention aimed at strengthening health-promoting leadership. More precisely, the aim is to study what obstacles and prerequisites the intervention have for their learning processes to become health-promoting managers.

A qualitative study in Northern Sweden at workplaces in the county council and municipalities was conducted. The data were gathered through individual interviews with 18 participating first-line managers. Inductive-content analysis was used to analyse the data.

The results identify time for reflection and collegial discussions about leadership as prerequisites for learning about health-promoting leadership. Managers experienced the intervention as a confirmation of the leadership behaviours already gained. However, the health-promoting leadership intervention was seen as a contradiction, since organisational prerequisites to implement WHP measures were perceived to be lacking. The managers were not involved in the planning of the intervention and questioned why the organisation did not involve them more when the educational activities were created.

When the organisation understands how and when its managers learn, what they need and want to learn about WHP, and what they already know, tailored participatory interventions can be facilitated that consider the unique prerequisites for the particular organisation.

Previous research has emphasized how leadership style and collegial relationships can foster creativity in the workplace; in a related sense, understanding how support from leaders and coworkers affect the creativity process is critical too. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to seek a deeper understanding of how leadership support and coworker support influence employee creativity.

A quantitative study was conducted among 299 employees working at eight organizations in a non-western country.

The results of this research revealed that both leadership support and coworker support exert positive influences on employee creativity, moderated by several additional variables. Specifically, employee engagement and tenure both strengthen the relationship of leadership support with employee creativity. Furthermore, individual creativity has a positive impact on job performance.

These findings offer theoretical and practical implications, as well as directions for further research

This research examined the impacts of leadership support and coworker support on employee creative behavior and individual performance. To better understand the nature of these impacts, the authors introduced two moderators such as employee engagement and tenure. To the best of our knowledge, there are no empirical evidences regarding whether and how leadership support and coworker support interact with employee engagement and tenure to influence employee creative behavior and individual performance.

Public schools operate in a changing and dynamic environment evident in technological innovations, increased social heterogeneity and competition, all contributing to school leaders’ uncertainty. Such changes inevitably influence schools’ inner dynamic and may therefore undermine schools’ organizational health. School leaders have a crucial role in buffering these external influences and promoting schools’ organizational health. The purpose of this paper is to assess the role transformational school leaders play in mediating the relationship between perceived environmental uncertainty and schools’ organizational health in a context characterized by uncertainty and instability which follow political instability.

The researchers administered questionnaires to 954 teachers coming from 191 randomly sampled public elementary schools in Israel.

Results indicate a negative impact that perceived environmental uncertainty has on schools’ organizational health evident in the degree of academic emphasis and staff affiliation with the school, in the school’s institutional integrity, and in the principal’s ability to both secure resources for the school and demonstrate collegiality toward teachers. Findings also show that transformational school principals are able to moderate the negative impact environmental uncertainty has on schools’ organizational health.

The findings validate the growing uncertainty characterizing the environment in which public schools operate. They further strengthen existing knowledge on the transformational leadership style in light of its unique capacity to buffer negative external influences imposed on schools and maintain their organizational health.

Faculty study groups offer one means for encouraging teachers to lead other teachers. As a popular staff-development delivery model, faculty study groups can promote school success while encouraging a climate of teaching and learning leadership to be fostered. At issue, however, are issues of choice and empowerment with respect to teachers’ readiness to embrace imposed initiatives. This site-based investigation reports teachers’ perceptions of the benefits and disadvantages of the mandated study-group process. Mixed results with respect to compulsory professional development are described in the areas of growth and collegiality, student achievement, emotional support, time restraints, and personality conflicts.

Effective leadership in any organization is a crucial component of overall organizational success. While many aspects of management and leadership are common to most organizations, colleges and universities present special challenges in both their fundamental character and in practice. The presence of faculty and non‐academic personnel in leadership roles in the same organization can create ambiguity and confusion. This is particularly an issue when units of the institution seek to achieve the highest possible level of performance, cooperation and mutual trust among and between them. This article looks at the challenges involved and seeks to provide guidelines for leadership decisions and practices that can be effective in institutions of higher learning.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between secondary school teachers' perception of principal leadership style (specifically transformational and transactional leadership styles) and school climate.

The Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire was used to assess the transformational and transactional leadership styles of principals. Climate data were obtained using the School Level Environment Questionnaire. The theoretical framework of this study is derived from Theory of Leadership Style. The authors surveyed 141 teachers from 17 urban secondary schools in northern Malaysia.

It was found that transformational leadership has an effect on four aspects of school climate (affiliation, innovation, professional interest, and resource adequacy) whereas transactional leadership only effects participatory decision making.

Whereas school climate impacts student achievement and is an important element of effective schools, it was not the focus of this study. It is recommended to use a larger sample using teachers and administrators from multiple school districts to see if similar findings would occur.

Educational leaders must realize the impact of principal leadership behaviour on teachers and students in their journey to improvement and create a school climate that is conducive for students to achieve at expected levels.

There is currently increased pressure at national, state, and local levels for all students to perform at superior standards. Both teachers and school principals are under increasing demands to improve their school's climate.

This study offers school boards and superintendents some insight into how the principal's leadership style may enhance the school climate.