Search results

The purpose of this chapter is to extend research and theory on learning and performance orientations to multiple levels of analysis. We begin by introducing a model describing the impact of individual learning and performance orientations on attentional focus, response to failure, experimentation, and motivation, and identify potential sources of these orientations. We then describe how learning and performance orientations are linked to incremental and profound change, and theoretically based propositions are presented to guide future research efforts. Leadership, organizational learning, and strategic human resource management are discussed in relation to the model, and implications of the framework for future research and practice are revealed.

M. Ronald Buckley is a Professor of Management and a Professor of Psychology and the holder of the JC Penney Company Business Leadership Chair in the Michael F. Price College of Business at the University of Oklahoma. He received his Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Auburn University. His research interests are diverse and include decision making in the employment interview, performance evaluation, organizational entry processes, and the issues surrounding unethical behavior in organizations. He has published over 70 refereed journal articles in, among others, the Academy of Management Review, Journal of Applied Psychology, Applied Psychological Measurement, Journal of Management, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes on topics related to human resource management issues.

Most years, several AIB members are elected as AIB Fellows on account of their excellent international business scholarship, and/or past service as AIB President or Executive Secretary. The Fellows are in charge of electing Eminent Scholars as well as the International Executive and International Educator (formerly, Dean) of the Year, who often provide the focus for Plenary Sessions at AIB Conferences. Their history since 1975 covers over half of the span of the AIB and reflects many issues that dominated that period in terms of research themes, progresses and problems, the internationalization of business education and the role of international business in society and around the globe. Like other organizations, the Fellows Group had their ups and downs, successes and failures – and some fun too!

The sexual and erotic dimensions inherent in leadership’s physicality impact on power dynamics within organizations but have been rendered largely invisible by current scholarship. In organizational practice, leadership is a masculine activity ideally carried out by male bodies, such that women’s leadership is still perceived as problematic. This suggests that the field is fearful of allowing sexual bodies to pollute what should be a functional, cognitive and instrumental activity. This chapter therefore draws on Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection to explain how and why the sexual body is positioned as the unspoken other of leadership. To do this, I explore the representation of two very contrasting leaders, Jean Luc Picard and the Borg Queen, in the popular film Star Trek: First Contact. The film illuminates how leadership ideally resides in a virile, mastered and distant male body. The sexual female body is represented as disgusting, dangerous, and a source of contamination and so must be cast out and destroyed. Finally, I ask whether the representation of the Borg Queen is useful as a transgressive means to undermine the abjection of the female leader’s body. However, I conclude that to counter abjection, scholars of leadership need instead to build discursive and material practices that revalue the feminine and respect the alterity of self and others.

This chapter examines the role of multimodal rhetoric in processes of theorization. Empirically, we investigated the theorization process of a highly disruptive innovation in the history of architecture: reinforced concrete. Relying on archival data from a prominent French architectural journal in the period from 1885 to 1939, we studied the rhetorical modes at play in the theorization of reinforced concrete. First, we found that theorization entailed two recursive activities: dramatization and evaluation. While dramatization relies on both verbal and visual (i.e., multimodal) means, evaluation relies on verbal means. We integrated these components into a dynamic model of theorization that explains how visual discourse contributes to theorization beyond the effects of verbal discourse.

This chapter investigates the predictability of the European monetary policy through the eyes of the professional forecasters from a large investment bank. The analysis is based on forward-looking Actual and Perceived Taylor Rules for the European Central Bank which are estimated in real-time using a newly constructed database for the period April 2000–November 2009. The former policy rule is based on the actual refi rate set by the Governing Council, while the latter is estimated for the bank’s economists using their main point forecast for the upcoming refi rate decision as a dependent variable. The empirical evidence shows that the pattern of the refi rate is broadly well predicted by the professional forecasters even though the latter have foreseen more accurately the increases rather than the policy rate cuts. Second, the results point to an increasing responsiveness of the ECB to macroeconomic fundamentals along the forecast horizon. Third, the rolling window regressions suggest that the estimated coefficients have changed after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in October 2008; the ECB has responded less strongly to macroeconomic fundamentals and the degree of policy inertia has decreased. A sensitivity analysis shows that the baseline results are robust to applying a recursive window methodology and some of the findings are qualitatively unaltered from using Consensus Economics forecasts in the regressions.