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To enhance the development of individuals for executive positions, fast‐track management development programmes have been adopted by many organisations. However, such programmes do not always lead to positive consequences for the participant. The purpose of the present research was to investigate the frustrations of participants in an entry‐level fast‐track programme. Results of the study suggest several important lessons for those responsible for fast‐track programmes. First, participants′ major frustrations involved issues regarding ongoing career guidance, future job assignment uncertainty, and the degree of challenge, responsibility, and variety inherent in their job assignments. Second, participants are likely to have high expectations for themselves and their careers which must be considered. Third, company executives and programme supervisors may misjudge the frustrations of participants; therefore, monitoring such frustrations is important.

Despite their fairly widespread use among large companies, little information is available to those interested in designing, managing, or evaluating high‐potential (fast‐track) management development programmes. In an attempt to fill this void, three sources of programme ineffectiveness are examined: participants′ dissatisfaction, the negative attitudes of non‐participants, and cultural misfit. Also examines ten ineffectiveness‐avoiding lessons for programme design and implementation learned during an in‐depth assessment of one company′s formalized, entry‐level high‐potential management development programme

Although the measurement of organizational readiness for change has been encouraged, measuring readiness for change poses a major empirical challenge. This is not because instruments designed to do this are not available. Researchers, consultants, and practitioners have published an array of instruments, suggesting that readiness can be measured from various perspectives and the concept of readiness has not been clearly defined. This paper reviews the history of the readiness concept, the perspectives used to assess readiness, and the psychometric properties of readiness instruments. Based on the review, an integrated definition of readiness is presented along with the implications of the definition for research and practice.

The paper seeks to address the lack of empirical research on servant leadership by investigating relationships between servant leadership and four individual differences – values of empathy, integrity, and competence and the five‐factor model's personality factor of agreeableness.

Dennis and Winston's servant leadership scale (a revision of Page and Wong's servant leadership instrument), Braithwaite and Law's Goal and Mode Values Inventories, Mayer and Davis' integrity scale, and Costa and McCrae's NEO Five‐Factor Inventory were used with 288 followers and 126 leaders in three organizations in order to measure relationships between followers' ratings of leaders' servant leadership, followers' ratings of leaders' values of empathy, integrity, and competence and leaders' ratings of their own agreeableness.

Followers' ratings of leaders' servant leadership were positively related to followers' ratings of leaders' values of empathy, integrity, and competence. Followers' ratings of leaders' servant leadership were also positively related to leaders' ratings of their own agreeableness.

Common method bias is a potential limitation due to respondents' tendency toward consistency in responses.

Organizations embracing servant leadership may benefit from selecting leaders partly on the basis of certain personal attributes such as those investigated in the present study. Furthermore, in order to maintain a servant leadership culture and to retain leaders in a servant leadership organization, recruiters and trainers in servant leadership organizations would likely benefit from communicating accurate information about attributes valued in a servant leadership culture – e.g. attributes explored in the present research.

The study extends our understanding of servant leadership research by offering support for individual attributes related to the practice of servant leadership.

The paper seeks to investigate whether or not leader‐member exchange (LMX) is influenced by the personality of subordinates and/or supervisors.

Previous literature from the general leadership, personality, and LMX domains was used as a theoretical background for proposing certain types of relationships between the personality traits that make up the Big Five and employees’ perceptions of LMX. Personality data were collected from 195 matched pairs of employees and supervisors. LMX data were collected from 195 employees. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test the hypothesized relationships.

Employees' conscientiousness, extroversion, openness, and neuroticism were found to impact perceptions of LMX. Likewise, supervisors' conscientiousness and agreeableness also impacted employees' perceptions of LMX.

The present study included two potential research limitations. First, personality was measured using the short‐version of the NEO‐FFI; thus, we were unable to run analysis at the facet level. Second, although we did have two sources of data (i.e. the supervisor and subordinate), there is a possibility that common method variance may have influenced some of the hypothesized relationships.

Results indicate there may be a dispositional basis to perceptions of LMX. Thus, the relationship between LMX and outcome variables (i.e. performance, turnover, satisfaction, etc.) may be only part of the story. Practitioners that want to maximize the relationship between employees and their supervisors would be well served to actively consider personality issues. In particular, some employees and some supervisors appear to be more willing to engage in exchanges than others.

As far as we know, this is the first study to investigate the influence of personality from two sources (i.e. the supervisor and subordinate) on LMX. It moves beyond the traditional study of demographic similarity.

Increasing global competition has accelerated the rate of organizational changes, such as reengineering, restructuring, and downsizing. As a result, organizational leaders find themselves faced with growing cynicism among employees that the current wave of changes is nothing more than the program of the month that will pass as those that preceded it. We address the issue of how to make changes permanent by providing a model developed from theory and research on organizational change and from successful practices implemented in numerous organizations worldwide. The model can serve at least three purposes. First, the model can assist change agents in planning for and assessing progress toward institutionalizing organizational change. Second, the model can help focus efforts of organizational scholars to study the change process. Third, the model offers the basis for hypothesis testing regarding the success or failure of change efforts.

The purpose of this paper is to first identify the work‐ and non‐work‐related criteria US‐based management doctoral students consider important in selecting an initial academic appointment, and second, to explore whether gender and race/ethnicity are associated with the importance attached to these criteria.

To address these objectives, the authors developed a 125‐item survey of work‐ and non‐work‐related criteria that management PhD students about to enter the academic labor market for the first time may wish to consider in weighing prospective job opportunities.

Job and professional considerations were dominant in assessing an initial employment opportunity. Female doctoral students differed from their male counterparts in attaching greater importance to four major themes: family friendliness, research support, clarity of performance and reward criteria, and university and community diversity. Race/ethnicity differences were also found, with Asian doctoral students valuing considerations related to academic prestige and research support more than their White counterparts.

Respondents indicated their race/ethnicity, but not their nationality, or whether they were immigrants or US citizens and, thus, may have confounded the results to some degree.

The authors' results carry important implications for departmental administrators seeking to fill open positions with first‐time faculty candidates, as well as management PhD students interested in whether a department can meet their expectations regarding academic and financial resources necessary for academic success.

In that detailed information about what PhD students in general and management doctoral students in particular want in an initial academic appointment is limited, the paper fills a longstanding gap in the research literature.

Achilles A. Armenakis is the James T. Pursell, Sr. Eminent Scholar in the Department of Management at Auburn University. Achilles has published research on diagnosis, implementation, and evaluation of organizational change. His current research efforts are focused on the readiness, adoption, and institutionalization processes. He is a fellow of the International Academy of Management and of the Southern Management Association.

Volume 16 of Research in Organizational Change and Development highlights several emerging trends in our field and in the world within which our research takes place. The papers that make up this volume hit on some familiar topics, all related to the challenge of invoking, supporting, or measuring organizational change but they also go farther than that. In Volume 16, we see evidence that the issues of concern to leaders and researchers are becoming increasingly global in nature. In order to understand these issues, we must pay attention to cultural differences, and the language that is used during change interventions to set expectations and deal with the myriad issues that threaten to undermine the success of the effort. In this volume too we see that different types of organizations approach change in ways that reflect their unique cultures and contexts. Rather than a one size fits all approach, authors of papers in this volume call for an understanding of these differences among organizational types and their implications for how we approach organizational change. The role of the leader in change is also examined in several papers here. We have known for a long time that leadership is essential during change, but these papers give us a fresh look at what it is that leaders do and say that affects the outcomes achieved. Finally, as always, we see included in Volume 16 some excellent contributions to methodology and research on the topic of change. Each of the papers in Volume 16 is well-crafted, thoughtful and very much worth the time to read.