Search results

Despite the practice of dual leadership in many organizations, there is relatively little research on the topic. Dual leadership means two leaders share the leadership task and are held jointly accountable for the results of the unit. To better understand how dual leadership works, this study aims to analyse three different dual leadership pairs at a Danish hospital. Furthermore, this study develops a tool to characterize dual leadership teams from each other.

This is a qualitative study using semi-structured interviews. Six leaders were interviewed to clarify how dual leadership works in a hospital context. All interviews were transcribed and coded. During coding, focus was on the nine principles found in the literature and another principle was found by looking at the themes that were generic for all six interviews.

Results indicate that power balance, personal relations and decision processes are important factors for creating efficient dual leaderships. The study develops a categorizing tool to use for further research or for organizations, to describe and analyse dual leaderships.

The study describes dual leadership in the hospital context and develops a categorizing tool for being able to distinguish dual leadership teams from each other. It is important to reveal if there are any indicators that can be used for optimising dual leadership teams in the health-care sector and in other organisations.

The purpose of the study is to determine whether one leader set-up is better than the others according to interdisciplinary cooperation and leader legitimacy.

The study is a qualitative study based on semi-structured interviews at three Danish hospitals.

The study found that the leadership set-up did not have any clear influence on interdisciplinary cooperation, as all wards had a high degree of interdisciplinary cooperation independent of which leadership set-up they had. Instead, the authors found a relation between leadership set-up and leader legitimacy. In cases where staff only referred to a leader from their own profession, that leader had legitimacy within the staff group. When there were two leaders from different professions, they only had legitimacy within the staff group from their own profession. Furthermore, clinical specialty also could influence legitimacy.

The study shows that leadership set-up is not the predominant factor that creates interdisciplinary cooperation; but rather, leader legitimacy also should be considered. Additionally, the study shows that leader legitimacy can be difficult to establish and that it cannot be taken for granted. This is something chief executive officers should bear in mind when they plan and implement new leadership structures. Therefore, it would also be useful to look more closely at how to achieve legitimacy in cases where the leader is from a different profession to the staff.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of some pressing but under-researched aspects of public leadership. Ten propositions about public leadership are set out and these are intended to be thought-provoking and even controversial in order to stimulate researchers to design research which addresses key theoretical and practical questions about leadership in the public sphere. They will also help practitioners navigate an increasingly complex leadership context.

This invited essay uses ten propositions about public leadership, selected from three sources: the leadership literature, the author’s own research and from collaborative research discussions with academics, policy makers and practitioners.

The first proposition argues for distinguishing public leadership from public service leadership given that the former is about leadership of the public sphere. Other propositions concern context; purpose; conflict and contest at the heart of public leadership; leadership with political astuteness; dual leadership; leadership projections; fostering resilience; leadership, authority and legitimacy; and the challenge to researchers to use research designs which reflect the complexity and dynamism of public leadership.

While this essay is primarily addressed to researchers, there are many ideas and concepts which practising leaders will find insightful and useful in their work.

This essay draws on deep experience in undertaking high-quality academic research about public leadership which draws from and feeds into policy and practice. It utilises organisational psychology, public management and political science to create synergies in order to enhance the understanding of public leadership.

This research aims to comprehensively investigate when and how cognitive conflict benefits team innovation in cross-functional project teams (CFPTs), by exploring the moderating role of knowledge leadership and dual mediation mechanisms of elaboration of task-related information/knowledge and affective conflict.

All hypotheses have been empirically tested by using structural equation model to analyze the quantitative data from a questionnaire survey covering 73 CFPTs in China.

Results indicate that knowledge leadership positively moderates the relationship between cognitive conflict and CFPT innovation. This moderating effect is directly or indirectly revealed by the dual mediating roles of task-related information/knowledge elaboration and affective conflict, which are two processes manifesting whether cognitive conflict can or cannot be incorporated into team innovation.

Despite the external validity of results limited by convenient sampling method, the findings offer implications for promoting CFPT innovation. This can be achieved by developing competent knowledge leadership into team sensegiver, dissent reconciler and facilitator to accentuate benefits of cognitive conflict in information/knowledge elaboration and attenuate the likelihood of escalating to affective conflict.

This study advances the understanding of why cognitive conflict has an equivocal effect on team innovation in the context of CFPT by originally revealing how leaders’ role in information/knowledge management acts as a contingency and suggesting the dual mediating mechanisms that reflect the contingent impact. Project-based teams or organizations, characterized by cognitive clashes, can enhance innovation performance by shaping the meaningfulness of information/knowledge activities triggered by cognitive conflict.

In previous research, Friend and Hasbrouck theorized that managerial insiders (officers and directors) have a personal incentive to cause the firm to use less than the optimal amount of debt in its capital structure. They suggested this occurs because officers and directors have a large proportion of their personal wealth invested in the firm in the form of common stock holdings and firm‐specific human capital. This makes managerial insiders reluctant to use the optimal amount of debt financing for the firm because of the additional bankruptcy risk higher levels of debt engender. I test FH’s theory and find evidence that supports it. Specifically, the amount of debt in our sample firms’ capital structures declines as the percentage of the firm’s common stock held by the CEO and other officers and directors increases. A direct relationship is found between blockholder share ownership and our sample firms’ debt/equity ratio. This suggests that monitoring by blockholders is effective in controlling the suboptimal debt usage agency problem. Further, for any given level of blockholder share ownership, the greater the number of blockholders a firm has the less effective blockholders are in raising the amount of debt in the firm’s capital structure. Lastly, some weak evidence was found suggesting that a dual leadership structure was effective in increasing the amount of debt in a firm’s capital structure.

As there is inclusive evidence on relationship between board characteristics and firm performance in the Thai context, and mixed findings of this relationship are usually reported from previous studies, this study tries to clarify a reason for the mixed finding by determining the impact of board structures on different quantile levels of firm performance. Building on extant literature and using a developed econometric technique, the Quantile Analysis, on a sample of 446 listed firms in Thailand for a 15-year period ranging from 2000 to 2014, empirical evidence is provided which is consistent with prior studies that some characteristics of the board as the core mechanisms of corporate governance, i.e., board independence, board size, board meeting frequency, and dual role leadership on board, have significant influence on performance of Thai firms. In particular, when considering different quantile levels of firm performance, board structures are found to have different effects across quantile of performance distribution. Board independence and dual role leadership on board are found to have a significant influence on only moderate-performing firms, while board size and board meeting frequency are revealed as having significant impact on only firms with high-performance which need more effectiveness of the board in overseeing and supervising decision-making of the executives. Thus, these findings indicate that considering different quantile levels of firm performance for the board structures and performance relationship should be a reason of previous mixed findings. Moreover, the findings should be important information in encouraging better understanding an optimal governance system in Thailand for related stakeholders such as policymakers, corporate firms, and investors.

The roles that one single leadership style plays on motivating employees have been studied. However, in reality, an individual may exhibit more than one type of leadership style. This study aims to reveal how zhongyong leadership can lead to employees’ thriving at work in China, with a glance at ethical leadership as a moderator. The intrinsic motivation of employees is also considered as a mediator to show the specific path that bridges employees’ perceived leadership styles and their thriving at work.

Using three-period data from a sample of 346 employees working in Chinese companies, this study performs regression and bootstrap analyzes in PROCESS macro to test the hypotheses. By adopting the Johnson-Neyman technique, this study further identifies the specific moderating range within which ethical leadership makes a difference.

The positive correlation between zhongyong leadership and employees’ thriving at work only withstand scrutiny when the level of ethical leadership is sufficiently high and employees’ intrinsic motivation plays a mediating role. Specifically, when the ethical leadership level is higher than 6.022 (on a seven-point scale), zhongyong leadership can significantly increase the intrinsic motivation of employees and their thriving at work will be stronger as a result. On the contrary, when ethical leadership is lower than 1.089 (on a seven-point scale), this mediated relationship will head exactly in the opposite direction.

This study focuses on investigating the effects of multiple positive leadership behaviors on promoting employees’ thriving at work. The resultant findings provide compelling evidence for the integration of different leadership styles in practice and consolidate the theoretical underpinnings of related research on thriving at work.

This study aims to investigate how the individual-focused transformational leadership effect of transformational leadership impacts the team member’s individual work performance through the intermediary mechanisms of work engagement and regulatory focus.

A moderated mediation model was analyzed through PLS-SEM by using a sample of 462 team members across diverse work teams in Sri Lankan organizations.

Results revealed that individual-focused transformational leadership positively impacts the team member’s individual work performance through the mediation of the team member’s work engagement. The direct relationship between individual-focused transformational leadership and the team member’s work engagement was found to be positively moderated by the team member’s promotion regulatory focus.

This paper demonstrates implications for team designing and leadership development and highlights the importance of team leaders utilizing individual-focused transformational leadership to gain improved work performance from each team member.

This study provides empirical evidence for the mediating role of work engagement and the moderating role of promotion regulatory focus in deriving the team member’s work performance, which contributes to constructing a more refined profile of individual-focused transformational leadership.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between board independence and internal control quality (ICQ) in Egypt and investigate whether CEO duality moderates such an association.

A survey among external auditors is used to assess ICQ among Egyptian listed firms over the period of 2007-2010.

Findings show that board independence does not have a significant positive effect on ICQ. However, when testing for the moderating effect of CEO duality on such a relationship, the authors document that the association becomes positive and significant under combined board leadership structure, whereas it is negative under separated leadership structure.

The authors’ results demonstrate that CEO duality plays a governance role in weak legal environment like Egypt by strengthening board independence role in increasing ICQ.