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In the wake of the extraordinary financial scandals that both preceded and followed the September–October Financial Crises of 2008, discussions about the executive virtues of honesty and integrity are no longer academic or esoteric, but critically urgent and challenging. As representatives of the corporation, its products and services, corporate executives in general, and production, accounting, finance, and marketing executives in particular, must be the frontline public relations and goodwill ambassadors for their firms, products, and services. As academicians of business education, we must also analyze these corporate wrongdoings as objectively and ethically as possible. What is wrong must be declared and condemned as wrong, what is right must be affirmed and acknowledged as right. We owe it to our students, our profession, our stakeholders, and to the business world. Contemporary American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) proposes the issue of morality in a threefold question: Who am I? Who ought I to become? How ought I to get there? The answer to every question refers to the virtues, especially to corporate executive virtues. This chapter explores corporate executive virtues, especially the classical cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice as defining and enhancing corporate executive life.

Research on nearly 120 chief executive officers (CEOs) and their spouses from among The Times 1000 European companies is explored. The research found that many CEOs are showing increasing signs of stress, and that the main difficulties are associated with the job interfering with family and private life due to enhanced workloads, work‐related travelling, weekend working, etc. Suggestions are made about what organisations can do to help.

This paper aims to examine the work experiences of female executives and the challenges of their visible and invisible work activities, considering the operating modes they develop to carry out their work activities.

This study relies on a materialist feminist perspective and a critical experientialist work theory, which considers both the visible and invisible dimensions of the work performed by female executives. The methodology is based on a qualitative research design involving individual and group interviews with 51 Canadian female executives.

The results reveal the hyper-efficiency operating mode mobilized by female executives, which combines strategies to take over and delegate work activities from the domestic sphere to reconcile the managerial work with their different life spheres.

A key finding emerging from these results relates to the invisible but omnipresent part of the work activities from the domestic sphere throughout the lives of female executives.

Research on nearly 120 chief executive officers (CEOs) and their spouses from among The Times 1,000 European companies is explored. The research found that many CEOs are showing increasing signs of stress, and that the main difficulties are associated with the job interfering with family and private life due to enhanced workloads, work‐related travelling, weekend working, etc. Suggestions are made about what organizations can do to help.

This paper aims to study the relationship between structure and agency of Indian women executives in the area of work-life balance in a developing and globalized context. It examines social production in a collectivist culture.

The approach is qualitative and interpretative. Semi-structured interviews of 105 senior women executives from major metropolitan cities in India (Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai) form the rich data for this research. It uses sociological theories of McNay and Bourdieu to discuss the narratives of women executives.

The agency of women executives in India is influenced by cultural meta-narratives of marriage and motherhood. They experience conflict in the home front and less at the work place. Their negotiations with their structures reveal a nuanced agency wherein they try to fit cultural roles and also seek self fulfillment in a career.

First, it includes women executives only from the corporate sector. Second, opinions expressed by women executives alone have been taken for this study and is not cross-validated by opinions of others. This study is also limited to socio-cultural roles and expectations from women executives. Other variables that affect agency are not examined.

This study contributes to the understanding of how women executives, who have a greater agency, negotiate their structural constraints and how these actions contribute to social production.

It studies the societal impact of the agency of women executives in India.

The study provides a theoretical insight into structure and agency of women executives in India and thus adds an Indian perspective to the gender discourse.

The study provides practice-based vignettes describing career shocks as experienced by executives. It also offers a brief description of the approaches taken by the coach in helping executives to cope with their initial reactions. This work informs the readers about examples of career shocks in the executive population and provides access to normally rarely available information about sensitive aspects of psychological life of executives.

This paper is a qualitative exploration of managers' career shock experiences reflected in executive coaching interventions. It takes an anecdotal look at how executives react to shocks of various valences, and how coaching attempts to assist them by processing their first reactions and choosing a response. The paper particularly looks at managers' responses almost immediately following a shocking event triggering their request for coaching help.

Coaching conversation serves as opportunities for handling immediate emotional reactions to career disruptions. Even shocks with positive valence can cause ambivalent reactions. Processing of career shocks through coaching conversations can activate agency in dealing with abrupt career events. Coaches can offer further support in career deliberations. In one of the cases, an instance of anticipation of a negative career event was associated with positive hopes, and the non-occurrence of the event led to further elaboration about one's career options.

This work is based on a small sample of executives experiencing career shocks.

This work informs executives about opportunities provided by executive coaching in handling difficult reactions to external career events. Coaches or coaches-in-training receive an overview of coaching requests associated with career shocks.

With the increasing instability in careers the paper draws the attention to the helping potential of coaching to those experiencing career shocks. It also contributes to normalization of turning for support in psychologically burdening situations.

This work is a trigger for further consideration of the experiences of career shocks by business executives. It provides a first look into immediate reactions of this career population to unexpected external disruptions. It also offers opportunities for further exploration of the role executive coaching can play in career deliberations.

Executives must develop skills to manage management time as well as conventional time. Methods which improve skills include understanding time‐space structures, using methods proposed by Peter F. Drucker, and managing one′s immediate management molecule as proposed by William Oncken. Unconventional time management techniques used by Harold Geneen, Ex‐CEO of International Telephone and Telegraph are also explored.

This study investigates the relation of executive cash compensation and gender characteristics of senior executives of Thai listed companies using 1,660 firm-years observations from 2009 to 2013. The findings show that male executives earn more cash compensation than do their female counterparts and that compensation is higher for male CEOs whose educational qualifications were Master’s degree or above. Companies with a higher proportion of male executives and with better firm performance (measured by ROA, ROE, and Tobin’s q) pay higher cash compensation. The results conform with the Expectancy theory that male executives receive more compensation than do female executives because of their (expected) abilities to make higher returns to the firm’s assets. Other significant determinants are that older and larger firms pay more cash compensation to the executives (Life cycle theory) and that companies with a higher proportion of independent directors (Agency Theory) and higher ownership concentrations (Stewardship theory) offer less compensation.

In the global world we live in, organizations have become progressively complex. “C” organizations have been replaced by “I” organizations, implying that we have moved from organizations permeated by a command, control, and compartmentalization orientation, to organizations distinguished by cultural signifiers such as interaction, information, and innovation. Effective teamwork will be essential to make these complex, highly diverse, increasingly virtual structures work.

Given the complexity of teamwork, this chapter discusses some of its benefits and drawbacks. Particular attention is given to possible team killers. Given the darker side of teams, a group coaching intervention technique is presented to resolve this daunting challenge. Taking this approach will help the members of a team to take control of their key team functions: setting direction, creating alignment throughout the organization, and building the commitment of everyone needed to accomplish organizational objectives.

To explore this intervention technique, the notion of the clinical paradigm is introduced, meaning using a psychodynamic-systemic lens that focuses not only on what is directly observable, but also on out-of-awareness behavior. The five premises that characterize the paradigm are described. It is suggested that applying the clinical paradigm within group coaching setting helps to tease out the central interpersonal role in which executives consciously and unconsciously cast themselves. It also helps explore the complementary roles they take on in an executive role constellation, creating tipping points for change. In addition, a number of other intervention techniques are introduced that help foster change.

In the African context of business practice, the authors face two interrelated challenges. First, executives need to deal strategically and sustainably with growing levels of inequality, under-employment and declining levels of wellness and safety. Second, executive development needs to develop virtues to help executives to address these problems. This paper aims to articulate an integrated, sustainable business education approach that aims to prepare executives to practice integrative thinking while simultaneously cultivating virtues that enhance their lives, thereby enabling them to make ongoing sustainable impacts to their worlds.

This study uses a mixed method analysis including both quantitative and qualitative data from student course feedback evaluations from Business Model Innovation (BMI) and Phronesis Development Practice courses run over four consecutive years between 2018 and 2021 at the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business as part of the Executive Masters of Business Administration degree.

The program’s pedagogical approach integrates a philosophical habituation process with a core course on BMI practice. This philosophical integration is one in which there is a sustainable focus on cultivating specific “process” and “practice” virtues which foster awareness amongst executives of their everyday mundane skilful coping in the world. This leads to candidates becoming attuned to ways, in which they can strive for more authenticity and to step into newer ways of being, that allow them to reflect their values and evolve cultural practices.

As the first business school in Africa to base a BMI course on the affordances of the phenomenon of being-in-the-world and a philosophical habituation process, the authors hope to inspire more business schools to adopt holistic, sustainable approaches to executive development that goes beyond the competence paradigm.