Search results

Little research has focused on the impact of organizational crisis on their internal stakeholders – the employees. This paper aims to fill this void by examining the impression management strategies used by senior managers in managing their employees during organizational crisis and the impact of these strategies on employees.

The authors collected qualitative data from three organizations and used multiple analytical lenses (such as thematic, content and trope) to explore patterns in senior managers’ management of employees during crisis.

Emerging patterns in the data revealed that the emotional state and reactions of employees (individual and collective) during crisis include anger, fear, shame, depression and shock. Additionally, data revealed two major contradictions (tensions) in managing employees during crisis: maintaining and compromising standard and managers’ wants versus employees’ desire in the way organization crisis is managed. Based on these preliminary findings and using affective event theory and the theory of collective emotions as a frame, the authors built a conceptual model that depicts the relationship between organizational crisis, impression management and emotion-driven employee attitudes and behaviors.

A major limitation in the current research is that authors’ data are largely composed of text (e.g. from newspaper and websites). Nevertheless, the textual data were based on actual interviews with stakeholders and victims and have more than compensated for the limitation. Theoretically, by examining the emotional states and reactions of internal (rather than external) stakeholders to organizational crisis, the authors extend the literature in the area of organizational crisis and crisis management, while the testable propositions in this conceptual model have a potential to open up new pathways for studying organizational crisis. Practically, it is imperative for managers to have skills to identify and manage key employees’ emotional states and reactions to crisis. Managers should align their words and actions during crisis management to increase employees trust. Also pre-crisis planning should include specific guidelines on how to identify and manage employees’ individual and collective emotions during crisis.

The results show that inappropriate impression management strategies may worsen employees’ emotional states and reactions (individual and collective) during crisis; therefore, it is imperative for managers to have skills in identifying key employees’ emotional states and reactions to crisis and the impression management strategies appropriate in managing them. A training that sharpens managers’ emotional intelligence will be helpful in managing the emotions of employees (individual and collective) during crisis. Also, pre-crisis planning should include specific guidelines on how to identify and manage employees’ individual and collective emotions during crisis, while senior managers’ words and actions during crisis need to be synchronized to engender employees’ trust.

This study demonstrates that beyond emotions of employees during crisis, there are contradictions and tensions in the senior manager’s management of their employees during crisis. Also, outcomes of a quantitative test of the conceptual model developed from the current study should improve the generalizability of the results and open up new pathways for future research in this area.

One recent direction for leadership research has been the use of purely qualitative data and qualitative analysis. One analytical method used in this phenomenological research has been the full grounded theory method. That method has generated social process theories about leadership in organizational settings. The present research operationalizes those theories into questionnaire format. This operationalized work gives support to a one-factor model for social processes of leadership (SPL) in organizations. It also identifies four lower-order social processes of leadership. Concurrent validity is concluded from a high correlation with Bass & Avolio’s and Podsakoff’s transformational leadership constructs. The correlations are so high that the SPL scale might be tapping the same underlying construct as transformational leadership. The augmentation effect of transformational leadership over (transactional) management is also supported. Support has been obtained for ongoing grounded theory-based research into the social processes of leadership and influence, and related phenomena, in organizations.

The social influence processes of leadership were investigated within the substantive context of turbulent change in selected local government authorities. The grounded theory method was used to analyze qualitative data. It was found that the basic social process of “enhancing adaptability” emerged from the analysis. This basic social process integrated a range of lower level concepts and explained variation between those concepts. The subsidiary social process of resolving uncertainty also emerged from the analysis. The theory of enhancing adaptability is posited to explain the phenomenon of leadership within the substantive context of change in local government. A number of leadership strategies are presented.

The purpose of this paper is to try and explain what charismatic leadership might be, by finding out more about the other side of the relationship, the perspective of followers and their attitudes, feelings and responses to leaders.

The authors examined followers' implicit narratives of their lived experiences of charismatic leadership in organizational settings and examined metaphors for this experience.

Most respondents identified with positive affect, a form of love story; a minority experienced negative affect, especially anger; and some experienced both positive and negative emotions. The authors suggest that if one adopts a certain identity within the context of a dramatic narrative, one might be attributed with charismatic qualities by followers. In this way, it is suggested that charismatic leadership might be less a “gift from God” and more a “gift from followers”.

Most existing research on charismatic leadership has an essentialist orientation that characterizes it as leader behavior, leader communication or follower dependency. The authors' approach is more discursively oriented. To research charismatic leadership, aesthetic narrative positivism was used, which undertook utilitarian as well as critical method.

Observational learning within the leadership development of managers is under-theorized thus far. The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical argument that builds out from a relational leadership perspective to center on processes affecting observational learning.

The contribution is to draw together research to build a holistic model of observational learning. A further contribution is to apply this model to the context of leadership development.

The paper examines processes associated with attention, availability, access, attainability, motivation and social comparison with significant others in particular contexts. The paper takes a temporal perspective to examine the ways that such interaction appears to be most prominent at particular times.

The paper concludes by outlining the opportunities for applying this understanding of observational leadership learning within management development arenas and explore future directions for research.

Observational learning has been relatively overlooked. Though the authors often “know” that leaders develop through experience, the role of observational learning in this experience is not well understood. This paper is intended to provide a stimulus for exploring this important area in terms of shaping thinking and designs for management development interventions.

The grounded theory method is more appropriate than just a grounded theory “approach,” for teasing out the detail of the level of analysis of constructs. Also, triangulation is important to this kind of research, but the methodological distinctions between qualitative and quantitative data and qualitative and quantitative analysis need to be made clear when mapping out a methodology. The contention here is that the qualitative analysis of quantitative data is more important than the quantitative analysis of qualitative data. Qualitative analysis in line with the full grounded theory method will generate explanations of how and why a construct is represented at various levels of analysis. In turn, such an explanation can illustrate whether the questionnaire instrument is representing the levels of analysis of the construct adequately or not.

The importance of leadership to the change management process is underscored by the fact that change, by definition, requires creating a new system and then institutionalizing the new approaches. While change management depends on leadership to be enacted, to date there has been little integration of these two bodies of literature. Thus, the purpose of this article is to draw parallels between the change literature and the leadership literature; specifically, the transformational leadership literature that is primarily concerned with the capabilities required to enact change successfully. This is done by describing areas of convergence between the two literatures that point to the appropriateness of transformational leadership in enacting change. Finally, the papers in the special issue are previewed by identifying their underlying themes.