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Total Quality Management activities are gaining prominence in higher education. Many universities and colleges are implementing these activities across their institutions and incorporating them into the curriculum. Total Quality Management adoption by academia may enerally be attributed to pressures from industry. This research studies the views and expectations of industry managers across the United States on the subject of Total Quality Management in business education. The related literature is reviewed and from it research questions are posed concerning managers’ views of Total Quality Management adoption in business education. Managers were surveyed, and their views in general align well with those of prominent industry advocates. Industry managers in the study, however, are sending the message that knowledge of Total Quality Management is not a prerequisite for employment. In addition, given their opinion that industry is not the primary customer of the business school, managers may be neglecting the supplier‐customer relationship with area business schools. This is a gap that needs to be bridged if business schools are expected to embrace Total Quality Management practices.

Forecasting sales for an innovation before the product's introduction is a necessary but difficult task. Forecasting is a crucial analytic tool when assessing the business case for internal or external investments in new technologies. For early stage investments or internal business cases for new products, it is essential to have some understanding of the likely diffusion of the technology. Diffusion of innovation models are important tools for effectively assessing the merits of investing in technologies that are new or novel and do not have prima facie, predictable patterns of user uptake. Most new product forecasting models require the estimation of parameters for use in the models. In this chapter, we evaluate three techniques to determine the parameters of the Bass diffusion model by using an example of a new movie.

The decade of the 1980s was unique for the sheer quantity of education reform reports and legislation. Virtually every state enacted education reform legislation, including reforms of teacher education, licensing, and comprehension. According to Darling‐Hammond and Berry, over 1,000 pieces of legislation related to teachers have been drafted since 1980, and “a substantial fraction have been implemented.” As I discussed in my 1989 RSR article, “Five Years after A Nation at Risk: An Annotated Bibliography,” two waves of 1980s reform reports were identified in the enormous body of primary and secondary literature dealing with education reform. The reform publications of the early 1980s stressed improvements in curricular standards, student performance outcomes, and changes to the education programs, such as salary increases, teacher testing, and stricter certification requirements. The second‐wave reform publications emphasized more complex issues centered around the concepts of restructuring the schools and teacher education programs, as well as empowering teachers to become more involved in curriculum and governance issues.

This chapter investigates the relevance and necessity of leadership and authentic leadership roles in organisational change in the modern VUCA world. He argues that authentic leaders need to learn to adapt to the increasingly VUCA environment, asking: Can they? Do they? If so, how? Authentic leaders need to evaluate not just the metrics behind success or failure but also their leadership traits and behaviour during organisational change to determine whether adjustments may be warranted. Taran provides an inspiration list of categories for leadership and authentic leadership self-refection. He calls for in-depth case studies of authentic leadership in response to VUCA circumstances that could be largely descriptive producing a body of data against which new theories can be tested and refined.

This chapter offers a comprehensive review the literature on authentic leadership (AL). The authors employ a bibliometric approach to identify, classify, visualise and synthesise relevant scholarly publications and the work of a core group of interdisciplinary scholars who are key contributors to the research on AL. They review 264 journal articles, adopting a clustering technique to assess the central themes of AL scholarship. They identify five distinct thematic clusters: authenticity in the context of leadership; structure of AL; social perspectives on AL; dynamism of AL; and value perceptions of AL. Velt and Sinkovics assert that these clusters will help scholars of AL to understand the dominant streams in the literature and provide a foundation for future research.

This chapter critically reviews the literature on authentic leadership (AL) that emerged in response to scandals in private- and public-sector organisations, drawing on theories, concepts and methods from other disciplines. The author finds that AL lacks a consensus definition, and that quantitative research has largely been at the level of employees rather than executives or board members. The review reveals 12 categories of criticisms. Schaefler advocates inductive qualitative research on the major concerns of executive leaders and means of addressing them via group dynamics, maintaining that exploring processes of AL in real-world settings would complement existing quantitative research and contribute to the development and extension of AL theory.

The effectiveness of work groups can be strongly affected by their “cohesiveness”. This study examined stereotypes held by African‐American college students regarding African‐American, Euro‐American, and Hispanic persons. The 92‐items in Schein’s Descriptive Questionnaire were rated by subjects (graduating African‐American undergraduate business students) as either positive (e.g. intelligent, persistent, ambitious, etc.) or negative (e.g. uncertain, passive, nervous, etc.). A total of 55 items were characterized as positive while 11 were considered negative. African‐American students perceived African‐Americans in general in a favorable light when compared to Euro‐Americans and Hispanic persons. The potential effects of such perceptions on African‐Americans’ integration into business organizations and mixed working groups are discussed.

This article examines the effects of transformational school leadership on the commitment of teachers to school reform, and the effort they are willing to devote to such reform. It does so by building on the knowledge from both educational and non‐educational research into such effects. A model of such effects is tested using two approximately comparable sets of data collected from samples of Canadian and Dutch teachers. Structural equation modeling is applied to test the model within each data set. Results of the Canadian and Dutch studies are then compared. The findings show transformational leadership dimensions to affect both teachers’ commitment and extra effort. The effects of the dimension's vision building and intellectual stimulation appear to be significant in particular. Overall, the findings clearly indicate the importance of analyzing dimensions of transformational leadership for their separate effects on teacher commitment and extra effort within the context of educational reform.

Attempts to discover whether African Americans who aspire to managerial positions are the victims of racial discrimination. Seeks to provide insight into the perceptions of these candidates against a managerial profile. Provides the results of a survey of 231 African American students at a business school of a historically African‐American University in the southern USA. Concludes that some African‐Americans’ experiences are unique to this minority.