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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.

This research contributes to understanding emotional and political challenges experienced by middle managers as they work with contradictions inherent in leading change from the middle. Focus group data from 27 such middle managers based in the UK indicate that, once they have been assigned roles and tasks for leading change, underlying dynamics and processes influence the degree to which they become capable (or unable) to shape and navigate that change. A proposed conceptual framework, illustrated by a case vignette, provides a base of existing knowledge for understanding and explaining these dynamics. We also construct a model of the key tensions that are integral to middle managers leading change. A further contribution to practice involves elaborating the importance of collaborative effort across hierarchical and vertical boundaries, despite emotional and political tensions that undermine middle managers’ roles as change agents.

Too often, promotion from the working level arises merely as the result of being a good worker. There is nothing wrong with this, because a supervisor needs to have a good knowledge of the work. Thus, in the teaching world, a supervisory grade does need to be a good teacher, because he has to be able to guide, enthuse, correct, and set a good example to other teachers.

The concept of distributed leadership within library services is explored in this chapter. It focuses on how this model of leadership, which devolves leadership functions and practice widely throughout organizations, can lead to intra- and interorganizational collaboration as a catalyst for library service development and innovation. The chapter discusses the distributed leadership approach by presenting selected results of a study of team leaders in public and university library services in the East Midlands region of the United Kingdom. The study employed an online questionnaire and individual interviews with library team leaders to identify the level and nature of collaboration taking place in library services and also to ascertain the skills needed for successful partnership work. The interviews focused primarily on how and why collaborations occurred and it emerged that the team leaders had considerable autonomy to establish and participate in partnerships, fitting well within the distributed leadership paradigm. The chapter adds to, and augments the limited literature on distributed models of leadership in libraries by exploring how this approach works in practice. It also proposes and evidences a link between distributed leadership, collaborative working, and innovation. The authors suggest that distributed leadership can help library services innovate and lead service development by freeing up the creativity of employees through a less formal, hierarchical leadership approach. The chapter ends with propositions for a research agenda to establish the best conditions and most appropriate format of distributed leadership in library services.

We propose team-based organizing as an alternative to more traditional forms of hierarchy-based organizing in global firms.

Advancements in the study of global teams, leadership, process, and outcomes were organized into four themes: (1) openness toward linguistic and value diversity as enhancing team creativity and performance, (2) knowledge sharing in team-based organizations, (3) the significance of social capital for global team leader role success, and (4) shared leadership, satisfaction, and performance links in global virtual teams.

We identify questions at three levels for bringing research on team-based organizing in global organizations forward. At the within-team individual level, we discuss the criticality of process and leadership in teams. At the between-teams group level, we draw attention to that global teams also need to focus on relationships and interactions with other teams within the same global firm, for example, when sharing knowledge. With respect to the across-teams organizational level, we highlight how bringing people together in global teams from different organizational units and cultures creates the potential for experiential individual and team-based learning, while making the firm more flexible and adaptable.

The potential of the relatively underexplored idea of global team-based firms as an alternative to hierarchy open up questions for empirical research, and further theorizing about the global firm.

Practitioners can learn about organizational, team, and individual challenges and benefits of global team-based organizing.

A century-old dominant organizational form is challenged when moving away from hierarchy- and hybrid-based forms of organizing toward team-based global organizing of work.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the emergence and development of leadership within the context of new ventures.

A qualitative approach was conducted to analyze in-depth the circumstances under which leadership is emerging and evolving in new ventures. In doing so, 55 founder-CEOs from Austria, Liechtenstein and Switzerland were interviewed.

The findings suggest that during the development from new ventures to early growth ventures the founder-CEOs and their organizations experience three major transitions. First, the founder-CEOs’ leadership behavior tends to emerge and evolve alongside firm development from being more transformational in new ventures to more transactional in early growth ventures. Second, the decisive employee selection criteria change over time, and the initially important person-founder fit turns into a person-organization fit. Third, a transition from a rather external perspective of the founder-CEOs in the new venture stage to a more internally oriented perspective in the early stages of growth was observed.

Although the findings advance research on leadership in new ventures, the limitations concerning potential recall biases and subjectivism have to be kept in mind.

In practice, the findings imply that the emergence and development of leadership in new ventures should be seen as a dynamic process.

This paper is one of the first to study in-depth the emergence and development of leadership in the context of new ventures.

The purpose of this paper is to address the fundamental question “can insider action research approach trigger and enhance simultaneously executive development and company performance”. To answer this question the framework of first, second and third person practice is useful in capturing the range of experiences and challenges that the executives face as they work to lead change in their organizations. Insider action research is an approach that facilitates executive development, creates new knowledge and develops change leadership competencies.

Insider action research.

Insider action research offers a value-added approach to management development and executive education programmes. It extends the acquisition of basic business disciplinary knowledge to the development of the competency (knowledge and skills) to design, facilitate and lead change by the rigours of the action research process and through a focus on first, second and third person practice.

Action research is particular and generates actionable knowledge in localized settings. Further cases in how executives engage in insider action research as they lead change in their organizations are needed to extend this underdeveloped approach.

Yet, despite wide spread executive educational programmes and the rhetoric about the need to make executive education more relevant to organizational needs, an astonishing number of business leaders claim that executive programmes and executive degrees fail in addressing the emerging needs of business leaders. Insider action research provides a radically different executive education orientation.

Insider action research is an approach that facilitates executive development, creates new knowledge and develops change leadership capabilities.

The paper aims to investigate the importance of leadership – distributed leadership (DL) – for the relationship between organizational learning (OL) and business sustainability (BS).

Extensive literature research was carried out to investigate the relationship among leadership, OL and BS. Two theoretical frameworks of the relationship among DL, OL and BS were formulated and tested on the basis of the empirical studies conducted in 694 Polish and Danish companies. The moderated multiple regression and mediation analysis were used.

In-depth, critical literature analysis has shown that the theoretical foundation of the relationship between leadership and BS is limited and not empirically verified. However, the empirical study has revealed a positive, statistically significant effect of DL on both OL and BS and the mediating role of OL on the relationship between DL and BS (a partial and complimentary mediation).

It would be valuable to simultaneously consider other leadership types (beyond DL) in terms of their impact on OL and BS. Additionally, due to the nature of BS challenges and the specificity of DL, other factors influencing BS should be included for a more profound understanding of the relationships under investigation. Finally, additional contextual factors need to be taken into account.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the paper is one of the first studies that present the relationship between OL and BS with reference to factors influencing BS, i.e. leadership. The value of the paper is the development of two alternative models of the relationship among DL, OL and BS and their verification through large-scale empirical cross-country research. Furthermore, the results obtained in the course of the research open up new research directions with respect to the development of the concept of sustainable leadership and deepen the knowledge of the relationship between leadership types and OL.

We review academic journal articles, scholarly book chapters, and dissertations in global leadership published in the last five years to map trends in the field in terms of multiple authorship, nature of overall methodologies used, linkage of global leadership to other constructs, and the degree to which theories outside of the field are used to study global leadership. We conclude with a discussion of potentially fruitful ways in which the field can move forward more rapidly and more productively through the integration of efforts by scholars from various camps within the wider management domain.