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.

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 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.

The purpose of this paper is to foreground place as a critical and central concern for public leadership research, development and practice.

This invited essay draws on the author’s own research and development work engaging in collaborative place-based interventions with academics, policy makers and practitioners.

Place is one of six heuristic lenses in a Leadership Hexad that has been developed to interrogate and better understand leadership in a multi-dimensional manner. Place can provide an important theoretical and practical fulcrum for bridging both collaborative governance and collective leadership and public and political leadership as well as facilitating cross-sectoral leadership.

This essay argues that more time and effort should be invested into researching and developing place leadership to complement the already extensive efforts to promote collaborative governance and place-based policy initiatives. Place leadership development should be genuinely cross-sectoral in its ambition and should focus on developing emerging and established leaders from the public, private, not-for-profit and indigenous sectors to tackle place-based problems and opportunities.

This essay draws on experience undertaking academic research and conducting leadership development that draws from and feeds into policy and practice. It utilises research from geography, leadership studies, public management, public policy and political science to gain a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between place and public leadership and how this can be harnessed to improve economic and social impact.

THE passing at the very height of his powers of Dr. Temple will be felt keenly by librarians whose memories of his years of office as President of the Library Association must be amongst their most valued ones. His processional way through life from the Palace at Exeter to that at Canterbury has been told by many and his statesmanship, eloquence, literary gifts and fine Christian leadership have had many and eloquent witnesses. To us, however, he remains the stalwart, entirely friendly and delightful figure who controlled the Scarborough Conference with skill, dignity and companionable humour. His dinner‐table stories were some of the best we remember. As a writer he was one of the foremost religious philosophers of his generation and, in education, his advocacy of adult education gave it the high place it holds in public esteem today.

Following the resource-based view, this paper aims to investigate the business performance impact of R&D–marketing integration and marketing and technical capabilities at the organization level in a non-Western context. Specifically, this work explores the mediating role of the two capabilities, while accounting for potential moderating effects and under the contingency of technological turbulence.

Survey data were collected from the paired marketing and R&D executives of 207 Japanese manufacturing companies. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

The results show that marketing capability – by itself and also coupled with technical capability – mediates the relationship between R&D–marketing integration and business performance, while technical capability alone does not.

This study’s subjective performance measures and cross-sectional design have inherent limitations. The exploration of antecedents and other contingency variables would provide ample scope for future research.

The findings suggest that managers need to build these two capabilities, especially marketing capability, because R&D–marketing integration by itself will not be sufficient to improve business performance.

This study provides empirical evidence for a new theoretical link through which R&D–marketing integration impacts business performance at the program level. The findings may also partially explain the mixed and conflicting results often found in past studies.