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The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the challenges facing leaders in health care, to explore the impact of these on the choices available to healthcare leaders, and to re-visit the nature of leadership in general. It identifies a distinction between care that is a set of auditable transactions and care that is also a covenant, and suggests that leadership too can be practised in these distinctively different ways. It draws on a three year learning set of senior practitioners in the NHS in England.

This paper draws on the authors own observations over 25 years of educating and developing clinical leaders, and also on the insights of a learning set of senior NHS practitioners over a three period.

The paper provides empirical insights about how both health care and leadership have changed over the last 30 years, and proposes that treating either of them as a set of auditable transactions in a market place results in dissatisfied leaders as well as practitioners, and that a covenant of both care and leadership needs to be understood and established.

Observations have been limited to the NHS in the UK although there are indications that the issues are of wider applicability.

The paper includes implications for the behaviours of those leading health care organisations, those being led, and those influencing the context.

This paper challenges prevailing definitions of leadership and prevailing explanations for difficulties in health care organisations.

Decision-making rationality is said to be bounded by managers’ cognitive capabilities. Recent studies indicate that accounting functions evolved to augment the cognitively bounded human brain in handling complex economic exchanges. The neuroscience discipline suggests that human brains have the ability to implement “automatic” processes of positive versus negative emotional stimuli to make rational decisions. Neuroscientific evidence shows that the activations in the ventral striatum decrease with negative emotional information/motives and increase with positive emotional information/motives. The authors, hence, argue that our understanding of the decision-making rationality in financial and managerial decisions could be enhanced by using a functional neuroimaging approach.

Decision-making rationality has been focal in debt covenant violation and earnings management research. The contracting theory predicts a relationship between managers’ decisions and the proximity of violating debt covenants. However, no prior research has investigated brain activities associated with the evaluation of debt covenant violation and earnings management. Meanwhile, in another strand of research, there is an extensive prior literature concerning the consequences of managers’ decisions and the use of accounting information in relation to their evaluative style, i.e., supervisory style. The authors argue that the relationship between the proximity to debt covenants violation and earnings management incentives is contingent upon managers’ supervisory style. However, no previous research has examined the impact of the supervisory style on earnings management in the context of the proximity to debt covenants violation and other earnings management incentives.

In this research note, we argue that neuroaccounting could be relied on to examine the relationship between the proximity to debt covenants and earnings management, contingent upon managers’ supervisory style, by capturing brain activities. The adoption of the neuroscience functional neuroimaging approach in this field should contribute to the understanding of managers’ behaviors and provide implications for research and practitioners. The goal of this research note is to provide a new avenue for future research in this field.

To examine control and accountability in an expressive organisation.

The paper was based upon a longitudinal case study of events in the Church of England from 1994 to 2001 and was based on documents, debates in the governing body, conversations and interviews and participants' observation.

As a response to a financial crisis a group of financiers from within the Evangelical theological tradition (which places stress on headship and control) proposed the creation of a new church governance body (a national council) with strongly integrated central control and severely diminished conciliar participation. This group described the complex church organisations and structures (disparagingly) as “a cats cradle of autonomous and semi autonomous organizations”. This conflicted with the values of the other covenant traditions (Anglo‐Catholic and Liberal). The new body was created, but the proposed centralised control was unraveled, the existing constitution and governance was maintained, the “cats cradle” was enriched within the ground metaphor of autonomy. The case shows how the loosely coupled nature of this expressive institution with its multiple theological (value and belief) stances and multiple organisations, relationships and accountabilities was almost impervious to the attempt to shift them into an ordered and controlled hierarchy.

The great complexity of an ancient Church constrains the researcher to a limited account.

Change in expressive organisations happens by emergent negotiation and cannot be directed because the various value positions infuse everything.

The conception of control and accountability as being constructed and reconstructed in the interplay of the constructs of covenant, constitution and contract. This theorising may have a wider application both to expressive, public institutions and private organisations.

Research confirms that leaders continue to struggle in earning followers’ trust, commitment, and organizational citizenship. The purpose of this paper is to explain the importance of the relationship between leader and followers as a covenant and to identify five roles of the leader that are necessary to be effective in creating the required relationship with followers to earn their trust in an increasingly competitive and complex market.

The approach of this paper is to present a summary of the nature of psychological contracts and to identify seven testable propositions about covenantal leadership and its ability to build trust and honor duties implied in psychological contracts of employees.

The authors explain how the five roles of the covenantal leader increase trust and examine each of these roles in identifying the importance of covenantal leadership in serving the modern leader.

This research reaffirms the importance of leaders understanding the often unarticulated perceptions of their employees in imposing moral duties and obligations on leaders and organizations.

The practical value of this paper lies in its insights about the importance of leaders understanding and honoring implied as well as stated duties, and in recognizing employee perceptions about their needs and the often unaddressed obligations of leaders and organizations.

The underlying assumptions of this paper are that leaders who seek to create greater commitment and higher performance can do so by seeking out, understanding, and honoring the implicit and explicit assumptions and expectations of their employees.

Covenantal leadership is a relatively new leadership model introduced by Moses Pava (2003) and the five roles of covenantal leadership have rarely been addressed as a leadership perspective in the scholarly and practitioner literature.

Leadership cannot exist without followership. The phenomenon of direction and guidance, coaching and mentoring, has at least three components: the leader, leadership, and followers. With each component, the composition of purpose and goals, ethics and morals, rights and duties, and skills and talents is critically important. While the leader is the central and the most important part of the leadership phenomenon, followers are important and necessary factors in the leadership equation. Leaders and followers are engaged in a common enterprise: they are dependent upon each other; their fortunes rise and fall together. Relational qualities define the leadership–followership phenomenon. A major component of such a relationship is how the leaders create and communicate new meaning to followers, perceive themselves relative to followers, and how the followers, in turn, perceive their leader. This mutual perception has serious ethical and moral implications – how leader uses or abuses power, and how followers are augmented or diminished. This chapter features the essentials of ethical and moral, corporate executive leadership in two parts: (1) the Theory of Ethical and Moral Leadership and (2) the Art of Ethical and Moral Leadership. Several contemporary cases such as inspirational leadership of JRD Tata, Crisis of Leadership at Infosys, and Headhunting for CEOs will illustrate our discussions on the ethics and morals of corporate executive leadership.

Compiled by K.G.B. Bakewell covering the following journals published by MCB University Press: Facilities Volumes 8‐18; Journal of Property Investment & Finance Volumes 8‐18; Property Management Volumes 8‐18; Structural Survey Volumes 8‐18.

Index by subjects, compiled by K.G.B. Bakewell covering the following journals: Facilities Volumes 8‐18; Journal of Property Investment & Finance Volumes 8‐18; Property Management Volumes 8‐18; Structural Survey Volumes 8‐18.

Compiled by K.G.B. Bakewell covering the following journals published by MCB University Press: Facilities Volumes 8‐18; Journal of Property Investment & Finance Volumes 8‐18; Property Management Volumes 8‐18; Structural Survey Volumes 8‐18.

Compiled by K.G.B. Bakewell covering the following journals published by MCB University Press: Facilities Volumes 8‐18; Journal of Property Investment & Finance Volumes 8‐18; Property Management Volumes 8‐18; Structural Survey Volumes 8‐18.