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Social capital, an important mechanism for the creation and maintenance of healthy organizational life, may be developed through initiatives such as leadership development as effective leadership development not only enhances individual effectiveness, but serves to build relationships, coordinate actions, and extend and strengthen the social network. An ongoing iterative process which engages all participants such as action learning can facilitate this process. This research supports the connection between leadership development and social capital based on an extended action learning engagement in a healthcare system.

The purpose of this chapter is to develop the idea of enhancing collaboration within a public context. It does so by exploring the challenge of working with others across organisational boundaries, when addressing complex issues. It discusses research findings from a Scotland based public service study concerned with collaborative practice and presents an empirical analysis of what it means to work in a relational way. The existing literature is reviewed alongside the study findings, connecting with contemporary theories and debates in the fields of collaboration, leadership and public administration.

The empirical work detailed in this chapter drew from collective and relational leadership theories which influenced the study design and methodological approach. The data collection method took the form of semi-structured interviews and data were analysed using thematic analysis supported by data mapping exercises. Data were obtained through interviews of 20 participants from multiple public service roles and organisations who were involved in similar activities linked to collaboration.

This chapter promotes an approach where disrupting traditional collaborative practice offers new insights in terms of (1) understanding the group process and (2) recognising what processual and behavioural adjustments can be made to enrich collaborative work. This approach was found to offer a number of benefits linked to building trust, promoting meaningful dialogue and altered the conversations that people chose to have.

The reconceptualisation of collaboration specifically illustrates what it means to ‘work in a more relational way’ and how it is understood by those attempting to build collaborative capacity, sustain public services and improve outcomes for citizens and communities. As such, it is this focus on relationships that is considered innovative and important to creating the open collaborative culture required for addressing complex issues and working across organisational boundaries.

This paper reviews what has been written on leadership development from the leadership-as-practice (L-A-P) perspective, which views leadership as emerging in everyday activities and interactions of a collective in a specific context. This paper aims to deepen the theoretical understanding of how leadership can be learned and developed from the L-A-P perspective.

An integrative literature review was undertaken to review and synthesise what has been written on the topic in journal articles and scholarly books.

The importance of the context and the practices that are embedded in it is the most central aspect affecting leadership development from the L-A-P perspective. This places workplace leadership development centre stage, but several papers also showed that leadership programmes have an important role. Not only collective capacity building is emphasised in the papers, but the importance of individual-level leader development is also recognised.

The contribution of this study is twofold: First, it brings the currently fractured information on L-A-P development together to enhance theory building by providing a synthesis of the literature. Second, a conceptual framework is constructed to show how the L-A-P perspective on leadership development can take both leadership development at the collective and individual levels into account, as well as the learning that takes place either inside or outside the workplace. This study’s results and framework show that the development has its own specific purpose and suggested methods in both levels, in both learning sites.

On September 16, 2022, Mahsa a 22-year-old Kurdish girl was killed in Tehran by so-called morality police due to wearing her hijab improperly. After that, thousands of Iranians, led mainly by Gen Z women, poured into the streets protesting the Islamic Republic’s police actions. Named after the protesters’ main rally cry, the Woman, Life, Freedom (WLF) movement swept across Iran very soon and covered other aspects of Iranians’ frustration with the government. The rallies have been confronted with a violent crackdown by the regime, which denied all the accusations and blamed Western countries for sponsoring the protesters. In the lack of dialogic space, Iranians have created their own spaces of autonomy. Calling these spaces the third spaces of engagement, the authors shed light on the protesters’ disruptive daily activities on social media as well as physical spaces as leadership activities through the lens of leadership-as-practice theory. This chapter reframes the issue of hijab as an issue of authority which WLF as a youth-led movement is challenging. Observing protesters’ practices via video clips, news, photos, and social media posts, the authors give an analysis of the movement’s practices based on Harro’s cycle of liberation. The authors argue that while the movement made a huge breakthrough in building a public community around its main slogan, it is suffering from a lack of unity and inclusive collaborative dialogue. Finally, the authors offer suggestions for the movement’s future actions.

This study aims to propose the application of relational leadership theory (RLT) for magnifying the dynamics involving the individual who participates in the implementation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices in the hospitality sector. Dominant theories in this field fail to show what drivers affect such dynamics. The key preoccupation of those frameworks is the extent to which CSR can attract, motivate and retain employees.

This study uses both qualitative and quantitative methods. Through a quantitative survey involving circa 1,300 hotels, and qualitative semi-structured interviews, this study seeks to unpick what actors identify as sustainable practice driving motives, which, in turn, influence the implementation of CSR initiatives. In this perspective, actors drift away from being mere receivers, or executors of sustainable practices, acquiring a more active role. The qualitative data of this study are collected through semi-structured interviews in hotels in Italy, the UK and Pakistan and run the quantitative survey across the same three countries.

The quantitative data showed a significant positive correlation between economic incentive and teamwork in CSR practices. This aligned with the qualitative data that showed two main drivers – responsibility and convenience – displaying characteristics of collectivity and collaboration, which tie to the principles of RLT.

This study posits the relevance of relatedness at multiple levels to spot how CSR initiatives can produce varying “hospitality work” outcomes.

By focusing on actors and identifying the driving motives of sustainable initiatives, this paper suggests that leaderful practice stands at the core of CSR implementation.

One of the top domestic issues of concern to Americans is access to high-quality and affordable health care, and there is a growing concern about how institutions struggling to survive within this trillion-dollar industry will increase their effectiveness in the future. This chapter outlines a process of leadership development using an action learning approach in one Midwestern health care system over a period of three years. The process addresses both the development of the individual leader as well as the collective leadership capacity in an effort to sustain organizational learning and effectiveness over time. A model is presented that covers four phases or Four C's of development, which includes movement from individual Competency development, to the development of social capital through the enhancement of Connections and Creation of shared understanding, ultimately expanding Capacity for change within the organization. We also address other factors that must be taken into consideration that will either enhance or impede the concentric movement such as culture, sponsor support, and alignment of systems and structures.

This chapter traces the author's journey of change research from positivism to pragmatism and how different types of “engaged scholarship” shape how we know and do change. It takes readers through the ontology, epistemology, and methodology of different types of research and how these were expressed in studies of planned change interventions, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), cynicism and its consequences, “soul work” and community building in business, organizational transformation, and the development of more socially and environmentally conscious people, purposes, and practices. The paper reflects on the author's research as it relates to regulatory versus radical change and whose interests are and might be served by change research.