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This paper aims to examine the media coverage of a new reproductive benefit (oocyte cryopreservation) made available to employees at Apple and Facebook in 2014, in light of an ongoing public debate around the conflict experienced by women to be both “ideal workers” and “ideal mothers”.

The study examines the coverage of the new benefit as a news item in major American newspapers and websites. It uses problem/solution frame analysis and provides a qualitative analysis of the leads, journalists’ rhetoric and sources found in 23 news articles on the topic. A rudimentary quantitative analysis of positive and negative solution evaluations is also included.

All the articles were found to use a problem/solution frame in their presentation of the new benefit as a news item. When biology is presented as at the root of the motherhood/career conflict, as it was by many journalists and their chosen sources, this logically leads to a biotechnological solution, such as egg-freezing. Other potential contributors to motherhood/career conflict, such as rigid and gendered career timelines and inadequate supports for working parents, are largely left out of the discussion – as are potential broader workplace and socio-cultural changes.

This study was limited to news articles only; the coverage of the issue in opinion pieces and in other media might have different findings. An experimentally designed study might lead to interesting findings on the impact of these framing elements (leads, rhetoric, sources) on readers’ responses to this topic.

This study contributes to research on the media coverage of motherhood and to management scholarship on gender, parenthood and work.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the thematic content and inclusive language in leaders' media interviews to maintain legitimacy for organizational sustainability activities.

An exploratory, qualitative content analysis of 24 organizational leaders' media interviews about environmental sustainability was conducted. Inclusive language (i.e. collective focus terms, collective personal pronouns, and metaphors) and thematic content were analyzed.

Legitimacy maintenance entails both describing organizational sustainability activities and conveying, through the use of inclusive language, multiple audiences' connection to the organization. The qualitative content analysis found that leaders discussed both primary and secondary stakeholders. With the exception of the code defending existing practices, leaders consistently highlighted positive sustainability activities of their organizations. The inclusive language analysis found that collective focus terms were used by all the leaders, with the most common term being “everyone.” Collective personal pronouns were found in half the interviews. Metaphors were employed by all leaders; the most common sustainability-related metaphors were journey, structural, personification, military/competition, vision and science.

The sample is limited to 24 organizations and not representative of all industries.

While sustainability communication research focuses on annual reports and website and social media content, this study draws attention to a common but under-examined type of strategic external communication: senior organizational leaders' media interviews. To the authors’ knowledge, scholars have not previously considered the possible legitimacy maintenance function of organizational leaders' use of inclusive language and thematic content to address a broad array of stakeholders in their external communication.

This paper aims to investigate how organizational structure (i.e. centralized hierarchical vs decentralized egalitarian decision-making) can color leadership evaluations of equivalently positioned men and women independent of their actual leadership style. This study addresses three questions: Are men’s leadership abilities, in terms of competence, dominance and interpersonal skills, evaluated more positively than women when they lead a hierarchical company? Are men and women’s leadership abilities evaluated similarly when they lead an egalitarian company? Do organizational outcomes change these effects?

The research performs an eight-condition online vignette experiment on American community college students.

The findings suggest that organizational structure and outcomes influence how male versus female leaders are perceived. When leading a hierarchical company, male leaders not only gain more in perceived leadership ability when their company succeeds but are also less likely to lose legitimacy when their company fails. When leading successful egalitarian organizations, men and women’s leadership skills are thought to gain similar legitimacy, but when an egalitarian organization fails, perceptions of female leaders’ competence, status dominance and interpersonal skills drop more than those of men.

This study’s generalizablity is limited given the sample of participants and the context of the industry utilized in the vignette.

This study suggests that women’s promotion into leadership can be impeded by the decision-making structure of the organizations they lead independent of their individual choice in management style. Women leaders face not only disadvantaged evaluations of their leadership abilities in hierarchical organizations but are also not unilaterally advantaged in egalitarian organizations.

This paper highlights the need to theoretically examine how organizational structures fundamentally embed gender stereotypes.

This chapter contends that to meet the needs of refugees, we must go beyond addressing only safety and security by including education as well, specifically, literacy development. The authors suggest that in order to support refugee education, generally, we need to identify best practices for supporting reading programs in refugee settings. The authors discuss basic design and assessment of literacy education programming in refugee settings that parallels the designs for traditional school-wide literacy programs, which we have in place in more stable regions of the world. The authors attempt to converge the fields of literacy education with refugee studies to make recommendations for supporting refugees’ literacy education with the goal of preserving their native language and literacy while preparing them for the future.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the expectations women have of their women managers and/or women employees and to suggest personal and organizational strategies to strengthen those relationships.

Building on a first phase of research using narrative inquiry into the lived experiences of women managing and/or being managed by women, workshops were held with 13 participants to explore their relationship expectations of women managers and/or employees.

While the participants initially believed they expected the same things of a manager or employee irrespective of gender, a closer examination revealed gender-based expectations. Women expect a higher degree of emotional understanding and support from a woman manager, than they would from a man. They also expect a woman manager to see them as an equal, take a holistic view of them as people, understand the complexities of their lives and provide flexibility to accommodate those complexities.

This is an exploratory study in an under-researched area. Extensive further research is warranted.

Understanding the expectations women have of their women managers enables the development of both personal and organizational strategies aimed at strengthening those relationships.

These findings begin a dialogue on the often-unspoken and unrecognized gender-based expectations women have of their relationships with women managers and/or women employees. Although considerable research exists on gender stereotypes in the workplace, little research exists on these gender-based relational expectations.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the different leadership development techniques used to develop leaders from the human resource development (HRD) and performance improvement (PI) literature, and to categorize the development techniques using Garavan et al.’s (2015) multifaceted typology of development where development has recently emerged in the literature as a “central and important process” (p. 360).

This literature review followed the guidelines for an integrative literature review presented by Torraco (2005) and Imel (2011). This literature review was a freestanding literature review designed to provide directions for future research and development within the HRD discipline.

This literature review categorized over 500 leadership development techniques and mapped them with previously identified leadership capacities into Garavan et al.’s (2015) development typology. Once mapped, the authors were able to identify the most common leadership capacities and related development techniques for each development domain in the typology.

This research provides a tool for identifying required leadership capacities and development techniques that could be used by scholars and scholar-practitioners to conduct further research, as an aid in designing future leadership development programs and as instructional materials in the classroom.

Leadership is becoming a shared construct in today’s literature. Leadership as a shared construct has multiple shareholders, both internal and external of the agent. To better meet the needs of these shareholders, this research provides tools for the scholar and scholar-practitioner for leadership development that can be catered to one’s needs – as opposed to a one-size fits all strategy.

This paper highlights the HRD and PI literature, and provides a pragmatic tool for leadership development. This tool can be used by scholars for future research and for testing, as well as by scholar-practitioners for designing future leadership development programs.