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The research on authentic leadership has recently become a priority in leadership literature. As policy-makers and practitioners seek evidence in addressing leadership malfeasance across organisations and the broader society. Hence, a growing body of evidence suggests that the authentic leadership construct is plagued with a lack of conceptual clarity, embodying philosophical ambiguity and demographic limitations. Consequently, the study provides crucial descriptions of authentic leadership within a developing economy context.

The study’s findings show that three perspectives were evident from the authentic leaders and followers in defining authentic leadership. Authentic leaders perceive the construct from dual perspectives while followers have a singular outlook. The first perspective provided by the authentic leaders focussed on their leadership and how the burden of the role influenced their approach. The second perspective linked authentic leadership to areas that improve organisational outcomes. An unconscious awareness of the necessities that support organisational performance underpins the descriptions by the leaders. Remarkably, followers provide the last perspective that emphasises the relational aspects of the authentic leader and how it influences them in their daily lives. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the study’s contributions and limitations before charting the path for future research.

This issue is a selected bibliography covering the subject of leadership.

Socioeconomic stress has been a major influence on organizational development during the past decade, and will continue for the foreseeable future. This treatise aims to focus on The Key and its importance for effective organizational development via leadership responses to communication challenges during the present era. It is a conceptual paper based on an actual case.

The Key is a concept that refers to the thoughts and feelings (based on attitudes) that a leader reflects in communications and interactions with his/her universe, a universe that exists both internally within an organization as well as externally to it. The case focuses on communication challenges encountered by Judith Campbell, executive vice president of Creative Innovations, Ltd, and her interaction with Jonathan Bryant, president of Bryant and Associates, Ltd, an organizational development firm. Communication challenges that had arisen primarily due to socioeconomic stress, were seven in number: tendency to rely on only logical thinking; negative responses to external influences; lack of expectations for positive results; tendency toward reliance on sensory input; actions that ignore an inclusive perspective; failure to value and trust in change; and lack of commitment to interactive relations.

Following Bryant's counsel, Campbell chose to address these communication challenges with a training seminar that focused on a paradigm of seven leadership responses related to The Key. These were: Paradoxical thinking; Controlled reflecting; Intentional focusing; Instinctive responding; Inclusive behaving; Purposeful trusting; and Relational being. The training program, as described herein, proved to be very enlightening to the participants and quite effective for the continued organizational development of the firm.

The paper reveals the results of a training program based on seven communication challenges the results of which can be used to aid in continued organizational development of a firm.

This study aims to examine the relationship between leaders' personality traits and their internal communication practices from the leaders' and the followers' perspectives. The effectiveness of leader communication on the followers' perceived relational quality with their organization is also tested.

Two survey studies in the United States were conducted focusing on leaders' and followers' perspectives on communication practices, respectively.

Results of Study 1 showed that leaders' self-reported extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability and openness to experience are all significantly and positively associated with their symmetrical and transparent communication practices. From the followers' perspective (Study 2), extraversion and agreeableness positively influenced symmetrical leader communication, while agreeableness and conscientiousness were positively related to transparent leader communication. Both symmetrical and transparent leader communication enhanced the followers' perceived relationship quality with their organization.

The current study is among the first attempts to incorporate the trait theory of leadership in understanding organizational leaders' effective and ethical communication practices with their followers.

For work organizations and their members, establishing and maintaining mutually satisfying employment relationships is a fundamental concern. The importance that scholars attach to employment relationships is reflected in research streams that explore the optimal design of strategic human resource management systems, the nature of psychological contract fulfillment and violation, and the factors associated with achieving person-environment fit, among others. Generally missing from theory and research pertaining to employment relationships is the perspective of individuals who reside at the employee-employer interface – managerial leaders. We argue that, for managerial leaders, a pervasive concern involves the tangible and intangible resource requirements of specific employees. We then provide the groundwork for study of the leader’s perspective on employment relationships by proposing a model that identifies how employees come to be perceived as low versus high maintenance and how these perceptions, in turn, influence leader cognition, affect, and behavior.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a competency framework that incorporates the key leadership competencies required of female leaders working in male-dominated industries by putting particular emphasis on the male leaders’ point of view.

This qualitative research combines a thorough literature review on important leadership competencies with ten in-depth, semi-structured interviews with male leaders from the Telecommunication and ICT industry, two typically male-dominated industries in Germany. All the interviews were transcribed and analysed through qualitative content analysis based on Mayring.

Findings revealed that success of female leaders within male dominances is shaped by not only their exceptional professional expertise but also the complex mix of behaviours on a professional and interpersonal level.

This study contributes to the academic debate on why only a few women reach the top of organisations in male-dominated industries by considering the perspective of male leaders. A competency model is proposed that incorporates both professional competencies and expected behaviours on a personal and interpersonal level and therefore enables leadership professionals to better understand the male leaders point of view on the complex mix of competencies expected from female leaders operating in male-dominated industries.

The need for more women in leadership has become a global business imperative, yet little is known about the competencies required to succeed in environments shaped by male leadership styles and the understanding that women are less capable leaders. Assessing the point of view of male leaders, who dominate these working environments, provides new and valuable insights into the complex issue of women in leadership for the academic debate and the practitioners’ point of view.

This paper aims to investigate whether leaders whose transformational leadership behavior improves after training exhibit different psychological reactions compared to leaders whose leadership behavior does not improve.

The authors followed 56 leaders taking part in a transformational leadership training program. Questionnaire measures of leaders’ self-efficacy, positive affect, perspective taking, and transformational leadership behavior were obtained pre- and post-training.

Leaders whose self-efficacy, perspective taking and positive affect increased over the training period also reported improvements in their transformational leadership behavior. In addition, leaders whose positive affect increased were more likely to receive improved transformational leadership behavior ratings from their supervisors, team members and peers.

The study supports the proposition, derived from social cognitive theory that change in transformational leadership behavior is related to change in leaders’ psychological attributes. Further research is required to establish the direction of this relationship and whether leaders’ psychological reactions represent a means through which the effectiveness of leadership interventions can be improved.

Leaders’ psychological reactions should be monitored and supported during developmental interventions. Effective leadership training interventions are important not only to achieve change in behavior, but to avoid negative psychological outcomes for leaders.

The study is unusual because it explores the relationship between leader attributes and leadership behavior longitudinally, in a training context. The longitudinal analysis, focussing on change in leaders’ psychological attributes, allowed us to explain more variance in leaders’ reactions to training.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of followership dimensions in the transformational leadership process by reversing the lens from the traditional leader-centric perspective to emerging followership perspective and examine the role of trust as a mediating variable in the proposed relationship.

Using quantitative method data were collected through a questionnaire from 506 respondents of the telecom sector in Pakistan. The proposed hypotheses were tested using SPSS V.23 and PROCESS V.3.1.

The results indicate that followership dimensions (active engagement and independent critical thinking) positively affect all the four constructs of transformational leadership (idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individualized consideration). Furthermore, trust in leadership partially mediates the direct relationship between followership dimensions and transformational leadership constructs.

This study is conducted in a developing country context which limits its generalizability in other cultural backgrounds. Hence, further investigation could test the role of followership using different samples and methods.

Organizations need to pay more attention to followers’ development to produce better followership outcomes that will ultimately help establish strong relationships with transformational leaders and sustained positive outcomes.

This study empirically tests Shamir’s (2007) “reversing the lens” perspective and extends a distinct theoretical contribution to the social exchange theory that neither followers are passive participants, nor always on the receiving end of the relationship but they actively participate to establish a strong relationship with their leaders.

This paper sets out to identify barriers to intra-network exchange within international manufacturing networks (IMNs) from the micro-level perspective of key actors at the plant level, namely, plant leaders.

Data were collected through interviews with 12 plant leaders from nine different firms operating in at least three geographically dispersed manufacturing facilities.

Six partially interrelated barriers to intra-network exchange were identified. First, there are a lack of resources, network strategies, plant overlap and individual-level ties between plant leaders. Furthermore, this study shows that the pronounced local focus of plant leaders, fierce inter-plant competition and falsely designed incentives constitute barriers to inter-plant exchange. The results underline the need for network management to consider the individual-level perspective when designing rules and policies for IMNs.

The generalisability of the results is limited by the sample, which consists of plant leaders from firms headquartered in German-speaking areas.

The findings indicate that network managers should consider the interests and concerns of plant leaders when trying to facilitate network thinking. In addition to delayering the overall IMN into distinct subnetworks of peer plants, network managers should set clear and openly communicated objectives in a mission for each subnetwork that also points to inter-plant exchange and provides the resources for such activities. Practitioners should also apply shared objectives for plant leaders and promote individual-level ties between them to benefit from intra-network exchange.

By analysing the perceptions of plant leaders, this study sheds light on the individual level of global operations, which has been neglected in research on IMNs to date.

Based on the theory of social networks, it is crucial to enhance information superiority through joint venture capital (VC). The purpose of this paper is to explore the impacts of different roles’ structural and relational embeddedness on the information superiority of joint VC alliances.

The authors design the multiple linear regression models to investigate the leader’s investment ratio from a network embeddedness perspective. Panel data analysis and robustness tests are adopted based on the data from Chinese VCs Database.

The results show that VC leaders enjoy information search advantages because of their better network positions, while their followers lack this superiority. Information sharing among investors and investees may enhance the influences of structural embeddedness on investors’ information search advantages. Joint VC’s scale and its number of leaders could also increase VC alliances’ information superiority.

This research provides a more holistic understanding of the formation of joint VC alliances’ information superiority from a social network perspective. Both VC managers and social planners can seek guidance from this study to implement better strategies and policies to promote information symmetry in the VC market.