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It is quite common for industries to quickly go from a state of stability to one of decline in today’s hypercompetitive marketplace. In this article, we examine research on organizational and industry decline, a topic often overlooked by researchers and practitioners. In particular, survival guidelines are provided for organizations within declining industries. Also, it is demonstrated how an organization can use such guidelines by examining a single‐sex boarding school that is currently facing such a dilemma. It is hoped that our observations and prescriptions for the boarding school may be helpful to other organizations that may be facing similar decline in their environments.

This research evaluated learning outcomes of a leadership development program at a large, southern land grant institution. The program is an interdisciplinary, semester-long class where experience and theory are juxtaposed to offer leadership training and development. Through an intensive research project, the program exposes students to four practical skills and four adaptive skills related to leadership development. The research outcomes of this study found that students did perceive to have gained the intended leadership skills as related to the four practical and four adaptive skills set forth by the program curriculum. As leadership programs continue to grow, these programs must be assessed and evaluated to continue to garner merit within the academic community.

Leaders often find themselves encumbered by many challenges. Because of these hurdles, leaders may lose sight of their holistic wellbeing. Wellbeing is a combination of the quality and cumulative effects of work, life, health, relationships, and community. Leaders with higher levels of wellbeing are likely to be more effective, productive, and foster quality relationships with followers. This practice paper details a guided meditation methodology that creates a safe space for leaders to remove mental distractions, reflect on their current state of wellbeing, and develop increased levels of self-awareness. Results to date indicate learners have responded positively to the guided meditation process and have sustained the practice of introspection. Recommendations and implications are discussed.

This paper aims to describe an application of key concepts in agency theory to organizational development. Specifically, it seeks to highlight that formal control systems, the ways to regulate employees' performance, are associated with an important factor for organizational development – the capacity for improvement.

The paper presents a literature review on organizational development and agency theory, and an empirical examination of the relationships between bureaucratic control systems, task programmability and the organization's capacity for improvement. The hypotheses of interrelationships among different control systems, task programmability and the capacity for improvement were tested with a sample of 237 employees in the service industry.

Results indicate that input control is a significant factor in determining an organization's capacity for improvement, and task programmability moderates the relation between a bureaucratic control and the organization's capacity for improvement.

The results are based on a cross‐sectional self‐report study. It is advisable to include managers' assessment of subordinates' capacity of improvement in further research.

The effect of formal controls on organizational performance was controversial. This paper reveals the moderating role of task programmability in a control‐performance relationship. In doing so, this paper sheds light on how a manager can enhance his/her subordinates' performance on organizational improvement through different control tactics.