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With mounting complexity and interdependence and the increasing pace of change in organizational environments, leadership agility has become a much‐needed competency. This article aims to report research findings that appear in a new publication.

The study on which this article is based included a total of 604 subjects. Of these, 384 were participants in previous research studies that identified each manager's “stage of ego development” as measured by the Washington University Sentence Completion Test (SCT). The other 220 managers, who provided in‐depth case studies, were clients, interviewees, or evening MBA students, whose stage of ego development was also assessed.

This study identified five levels of leadership agility, each of which corresponds to a stage of adult ego development. It also resulted in the discovery of four leadership agility competencies (context‐setting, stakeholder, creative, and self‐leadership agility) and eight underlying capacities that evolve as managers develop from one level of leadership agility to another.

Fruitful areas for future research include: expanding knowledge about how leaders develop from one level of agility to another, identifying the competencies and capacities associated with the level beyond synergist, and better understanding the stages or levels of organizational development that parallel the levels of leadership agility.

This research has significant implications for an “integral” approach to leadership development that places emphasis both on professional skills needed in complex, rapidly changing environments and on the mental and emotional capacities that underlie these skills.

Managers and leadership development professionals both can benefit from the fresh perspective presented in this article.

IT governance has become the recognized norm system for chief information officers. The purpose of this paper is to understand how CIOs relate to these norms, by studying how they legitimate incompliance with the norms.

The paper uses an interpretive, qualitative, structured interview study with 18 CIOs in large Swedish organizations regarded as having excellent IT governance practice, using motive talk as analytical lens to identify the informants’ relationship to norms.

The study identifies norm‐specific patterns for how CIOs legitimate incompliance with IT governance, finding that CIOs use a combination of excuse and justifications as strategies of legitimation. The study also finds that CIOs display a tendency of not contesting IT governance‐related norms unless these are in conflict with neighboring professional jurisdictions. This is regarded as an identification of the “margins” of IT governance.

The study illustrates how the theory of motive talk is a viable road ahead for future studies of IT professionals. The generalizability of the identified patterns of legitimation is limited by the selection of large organizations with solely male CIOs, as well as the selection of solely organizations that have succeeded in establishing external legitimacy concerning IT governance and the organizations being Swedish.

CIOs aspiring to increase their legitimacy should avoid direct conflicts with neighboring professions. In addition to this, they should also aspire to be clear in a separation of motive talk and actual practice, since full norm compliance may be detrimental to their factual operations.

The originality of this paper lies in the methodological approach of combining motive talk and speech acts to investigate CIO legitimation practices.

Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.

The purpose of this study is to review literature on the relationship between leadership and workplace learning, to critically analyze and discuss findings and to suggest future research paths based on the synthesis.

This study applied a refined literature review process leading to a selection of 40 articles, which originated from 14 internationally acclaimed journals.

When explaining leadership influence regarding individual and team learning, the concepts of role modeling behavior, relational support and negotiation of meaning is significant. If leaders provide support, show exemplary behavior and negotiate individual arrangements with employees, workplace learning development is positively affected.

Future studies should focus on empirical cases further illustrating how the leader–employee relationship is formed in practice, to further understand differences in leadership influence on employee workplace learning.

The gathered knowledge implicates that carefully designed leadership training programs and personalized work arrangements between leader and employees are beneficial for leader’s ability to influence employee workplace learning.

The reviewed studies were solely published in top management journals, which resulted in an original literature selection. This study also discusses implicit or articulated assumptions about the view of learning in the selected studies, offering additional understanding about the underlying learning views in leadership–workplace learning research.

This chapter is a conversation between the three authors, an Indigenous person, a multigenerational White settler, and a White immigrant, about how equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) connects with the history and pervasive practices of colonialism, White supremacy, and embedded racism, and what might be done to create a new future that is individually and collectively just. EDI has become increasingly embraced by organizations and governments to overcome bias, to increase representation of underrepresented groups, and to revise discriminatory policies across almost all areas of intersectionality. But EDI has no answers for the issues of Indigenous reconciliation and decolonization that seem to exist in a parallel world. A deeper understanding is needed about the individual rights roots of “equity,” as well as knowledge of Indigenous history, since Indigenous communities are not simply additional cultural groups in Canada. The British Royal Proclamation of 1763 initially codified a “nation to nation” relationship, but subsequent broken treaties, and the 1876 Indian Act, imposed a White supremist relationship on Indigenous populations, stole lands, and attempted to eliminate traditional cultures. Since 1970, Indigenous organizations have sought a “citizenship plus” relationship with Canadian federal and provincial governments, a direction supported by more recent court decisions. This chapter includes examples of how these ideas have been applied by some organizations and concludes with a model for developing personal stamina and resilience for learning, reconsidering, and interacting with others about identity issues given the complexities of personal learning and system change.

During the COVID-19 crisis in Victoria, Australia the complexity of school leadership increased greatly for school principals. This study focused on the lived experiences of early career principals in the independent school sector from March to November 2020 in Victoria, Australia. It investigates transformative work that was undertaken by these leaders in leading their schools over a protracted crisis.

The study builds on constructs of crisis leadership, adaptive leadership, agile leadership and emotional intelligence, exploring the leadership approaches undertaken by twenty-two early career principals in Victoria, Australia. Using a narrative inquiry approach, across three temporal points in 2020, storied productions drawn from the findings present four emergent types of emotionally intelligent leadership approaches undertaken by these principals. These leadership approaches are presented as the commander-leader, the conductor-leader, the gardener-leader and the engineer-leader with each approach demonstrating both organisational leadership approaches as well as individual leadership styles used by these principals as they led their schools.

The findings have direct implications for professional development programs focusing on aspiring principals and early career principals with emphasis on the importance of developing emotionally intelligent skillsets in principals for use during periods of rapid change or high crisis in schools. The findings present insight into the support useful for early career principals in the first five years of principalship.

This study uses a unique emotional intelligence approach to understand school leadership during and after a crisis.

Leadership development has been replete with a skill-based focus. However, learning and development can be constrained by the deeper level, hidden self-knowledge that influences how people process information and construct meaning. The purpose of this paper is to answer the question of how people construct and develop their leader identity. The authors intend to shed light on the critical facets of identity changes that occur as individuals grapple with existing understanding of the self and of leadership, transform them, and absorb new personalized notions of leadership into their identity, resulting in a higher level of confidence acting in the leadership domain.

The authors conducted a grounded theory study of participants and their mentors in a lay leadership development program in a Catholic diocese. The authors inductively drew a conceptual model describing how leader identity evolves.

The findings suggested that leader identity development was not a uni-dimensional event. Rather, it was a multi-faceted process that encompassed three key facets of identity development: expanding boundaries, recognizing interdependences, and discerning purpose. Further, it is the co-evolvement of these three facets and people’s broadening understanding of leadership that led to a more salient leader identity.

The model addresses the gap in literature on how leader identity develops specifically. It enriches and expands existing knowledge on leader identity development by answering the question of what specific changes are entailed when an individual constructs his or her identity as a leader.

The findings could be used to guide leadership development professionals to build targeted learning activities around key components of leader identity development, diagnose where people are in their leadership journey, set personalized goals with them, and provide pointed feedback to learners in the process of developing their leader identity.

The authors provide an in-depth and integrative account of the contents and mechanisms involved in the construction of the leader identity. The authors zero in on the critical transformations entailed in the process to establish and develop a leader identity.

Interrelated conflict and transformation are associated with post World War II U.S. military. Conflicts within the command structure are depicted by military officers in their writings. Transformation, characterised by military sociologists as a process of “civilianisation,” has informed understanding over the past few decades. However, neither the officer‐writers‘ “close‐up” perspective nor, in retrospect, the sociologists’ sanguine formulations effectively interrelate structural transformation and conflicts in command. In this respect, these literatures suggest relevant analogies: officer‐writers reflect existential crisis not unlike many traditional peoples experiencing consequences of externally induced economic change; sociological characterisations of “civilianisation,” like those of “modernisation,” fail to account for adverse and conflictual consequences of such “development”. Both the “crisis in command” and sociological failures to explicate it may be related to political economy's transformation of the military. That is the argument entailed in this article.

The purpose of this paper is to report on the experience of attempting a “collaboratory” approach in sharing knowledge about leadership development evaluation (LDE). A collaboratory intertwines “collaboration” and “laboratory” to create innovation networks for all sorts of social and technological problems.

The authors, alongside a variety of public and private sector organisations, created the collaboratory. Within the process, the authors collected various forms of qualitative data (including interviews, observations, letter writing and postcards).

The findings show key areas of resonance, namely, the ability for participants to network, a creation of a dynamic shift in thinking and practice and the effective blending of theory and practice. Importantly, there are some critiques of the collaboratory approach discussed, including complications around: a lack of “laboratory” (hence bringing into question the idea of collaboratory itself), and the need to further develop the facilitation of such events.

The originality is to ultimately question whether the network actually achieved the collaboratory in reality. This study concludes, however, that there were some distinct benefits within our collaborations, especially around issues associated with LDE, and this study provides recommendations for academics and practitioners in terms of trying similar initiatives.