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This study attempts to draw a value profile of a transformational leader – the leader who transforms people and organizations. It compares the terminal and instrumental value systems of leaders who are more transformational with those of leaders who are less transformational, using a sample of 95 pairs of leaders and subordinates of a non‐profit organization in the United States. Findings reveal that transformational leaders do have some identifiable patterns in their value systems. They give relatively high priority to “a world at peace” and “responsible”, and relatively low priority to “a world of beauty”, “national security”, “intellectual”, and “cheerful”. Results also suggest that transformational leaders might give greater importance to values pertaining to others than to values concerning only themselves.

Leaders are important social actors in organizations, centrally involved in establishing and maintaining institutional values, a view that was articulated by Philip Selznick (1957) nearly a half-century ago, but often overlooked in institutionalists’ accounts. Our objective is to build on Selznick’s seminal work to investigate the value proposition of leadership consistent with institutional theory. We examine public interview transcripts from 52 senior executives and discover that leaders’ conceptualizations of their entities align with the archetypes of organization (i.e., economic, hierarchical, and power oriented) and institution (i.e., ideological, creative and collectivist) and cohere around a set of relevant values. Extrapolating from this, we advance a theoretical framework of the process whereby leaders’ claims function as transformational mechanisms of value infusion in the institutionalization of organizations.

With increased globalization, technology advancements, and interconnectedness, greater alignment on values and leadership is needed. The purpose of this paper is to explore the role that personal values play in sustaining leadership during challenging times. The importance of values as a guidepost in an environment in constant change offers leaders a foundation for decision making.

Narrative inquiry and narrative interviews were used so leaders could share their stories of navigating challenging situations. One group interview was scheduled to share preliminary research findings with the research participants and receive their input. Both narrative analysis and thematic analysis were used.

Sustainable leadership included the ongoing pursuit of personal mastery, a values-based personal and professional support network, and expertise in leading self and other through the inevitable transitions that occur during change and challenge.

The above recommendations allow for leaders to sustain themselves and others while working in service of the common good.

This research offers practical guidance to public sector leaders who wish to sustain themselves amidst the inevitable challenges that they experience as part of their public sector leadership.

Leaders who adopt the above recommendations will be well positioned to support their leadership and to use values as guiding principles to release the hero in everyone around them.

This narrative study harvested the wisdom of the lived experience of leaders working in the public, health, and education sectors who have navigated challenges in their leadership. The findings offer valuable guidance to public sector leaders.

The aim of this paper is to explore the stakeholder exclusion practices of responsible leaders.

An interpretive multiple case analyses of seven responsibly led organisations was employed. Twenty-two qualitative interviews were undertaken to investigate and understand perceptions and practice of responsible leaders and their approach to stakeholder inclusion and exclusion.

The findings revealed new and surprising insights where responsible leaders compromised their espoused values of inclusivity through the application of a personal bias, resulting in the exclusion of certain stakeholders. This exclusivity practice focused on the informal evaluation of potential stakeholders’ values, and where they did not align with those of the responsible leader, these stakeholders were excluded from participation with the organisation. This resulted in the creation and continuity of a culture of shared moral purpose across the organisation.

This study focussed on responsible leader-led organisations, so the next stage of the research will include mainstream organisations (i.e. without explicit responsible leadership) to examine how personal values bias affects stakeholder selection in a wider setting.

The findings suggest that reflexive practice and critically appraising management methods in normative leadership approaches may lead to improvements in diversity management.

This paper presents original empirical data challenging current perceptions of responsible leader inclusivity practices and indicates areas of leadership development that may need to be addressed.

Employees want to be supported to do their best work, but not every leader is comfortable or motivated to serve an employee’s “soft, emotional” needs. One key to help leaders become servant leaders is connecting serving others to their own values (even if “serving others” is not a value). Two assessments provided the framework for understanding this link between servant leadership attributes and the leader’s values. A case study demonstrates this link within a healthcare system where these tools helped develop servant leadership skills to support employee performance. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors used a servant leadership competency assessment and values assessment with leaders in a healthcare organization. By citing several leadership experts, and explaining how values relate to servant leadership behaviors, the authors offer a way to help leaders understand that anyone can improve their success with servant leadership.

By offering two case studies of anonymous yet actual participants in the study the authors show how leaders gained insights they needed to change their habits in working with others.

The research results are from two distinct assessments. Researchers are encouraged to test the proposed propositions further with other similar assessments.

The paper includes implications for the development of a leader’s servant leadership behaviors, which in turn supports employee engagement and organizational success.

In today’s age of mass technology, it has become a unique proposition to relate to others on the basis of serving their needs by relating to their values one-on-one. This paper inherently promotes in-person conversation with “soft” skills such as, listening, empathy, appreciation, and kindness.

This paper fulfills an identified need to study how servant leadership behaviors can be improved by using a second tool focused on values.

The popular use of labels such as Baby Boomers, Generation X, Generation Y and Millennials suggests that the nature of effective leadership changes over time in response to the prevailing modern context. Using a values-based leadership lens, defined as the moral foundation underlying stewardship decisions and actions of leaders, the purpose of this paper is to explore the alternative notion that fundamental leadership ideals – from antiquity to modern executives to MBA students – are timeless in nature.

Using a thematic analysis approach, The Aeneid was coded for key leadership themes (integrity, good judgment, leadership by example, decision-making, trust, justice/fairness, humility, and sense of urgency); and a mixed-method research framework was employed to juxtapose the leadership lessons identified to the demands of modern leadership. Deductive thematic analysis was utilized to examine key themes from responses of 13 multi-sectoral leaders (for profit, non-profit, government) and 137 MBA students (from three MBA programs in differing regions).

Whether viewed qualitatively or quantitatively, or across sectors, the findings of this study affirm the explicit relevance of The Aeneid to the demands of modern leadership. Additionally, it was found that the way managers ranked leadership values was not significantly different from how MBA students ranked the same values. Moreover, the authors found integrity to be a superordinate value – without which the remaining values have far less significance.

This research highlights a leadership paradox – while managerial traits are an important consideration for the prevailing operational context in the short term, a values-based approach to hiring, promoting and retaining leaders may be superior in achieving organizational sustainability and performance. This study illustrates the practical contemporary relevance of The Aeneid specifically, and illustrates a humanities laden and values-based approach to reflecting on leadership effectiveness generally.

Assumptions regarding the effect of leader self-enhancement values on leader-follower relationships are oversimplified. To advance this conversation, we test non-linear and congruence effects. We hypothesize that leader self-enhancement values (via prestige) have an inverted U-shaped relationship with employee perceptions of leader-member exchange (LMX) and leader interpersonal justice, and that leader-follower incongruence is negatively related to LMX and interpersonal justice.

To evaluate our hypotheses we use hierarchical regression, polynomial regression, and surface plot analysis. Our sample consists of 193 leader-follower dyads from a variety of organizations.

LMX and interpersonal justice increase as leader self-enhancement increases, but begin to decrease at higher levels of self-enhancement values. Additionally, leader-follower self-enhancement incongruence is negatively related to interpersonal justice. Finally, LMX is lowest when leaders are higher than followers in self-enhancement values compared to when followers are higher than leaders.

It is critical to evaluate the level of leader self-enhancement values and/or the joint influence of the follower values (self-enhancement) to fully understand the effect of leader values on follower perceptions of the dyadic relationship. Organizations interested in facilitating high-quality leader-follower relationships should focus on the levels of the values and on mechanisms that facilitate leader-follower value alignment.

This work extends prior research assuming a direct, linear effect of leader self-enhancement values on follower outcomes. To fully understand the influence of leader values it is important to consider curvilinear and congruence effects.

This paper seeks to argue that leadership is a purposive process, which is value‐transcendent, and to suggest that organizations, and leadership systems within organizations, are governed as much by beliefs as by rationality and outcomes.

The paper provides a model which incorporates three sets of value‐anchored antecedents as predictors of leader behavior is presented: work values including the Protestant work ethic and work involvement, leadership values including corporate stewardship, accountability and spiritual values including trust, humility, stewardship and community.

The paper is consistent with research that supports the role values play as personal and organizational phenomena as well as research that indicates that values and beliefs are instrumental determinants of organizational culture.

By including spiritual values as a domain of corporate values and predictors of leader behavior, the author is expanding existing value typologies and opening the discourse toward a values‐based, spiritually anchored paradigm of leadership.

Although empirical tests of effective lean-team leadership are scarce, leaders are often blamed when lean work-floor initiatives fail. In the present study, a lean-team leader’s work values are assumed to affect his or her team members’ behaviors and, through them, to attain team effectiveness. Specifically, two of Schwartz et al.’s (2012) values clusters (i.e. self-transcendence and conservation) are hypothesized to be linked to team members’ degree of information and idea sharing and, in turn, to lean-team effectiveness. The paper aims to report the examination of these hypotheses.

Survey responses (n=429) of both leaders and members of 25 lean-teams in services and manufacturing organizations were aggregated, thereby curbing common-source bias. To test the six hypotheses, structural equation modeling was performed, with bootstrapping, linear regression analyses, and Sobel tests.

The positive relationship between lean-team effectiveness and leaders’ self-transcendence values, and the negative relationship between lean-team effectiveness and leaders’ conservation values were partly mediated by information sharing behavior within the team.

Future research must compare the content of effective lean-team values and behaviors to similar non-lean teams.

Appoint lean-team leaders with predominantly self-transcendence rather than conservation values: to promote work-floor sharing of information and lean-team effectiveness.

Human factors associated with effective lean-teams were examined, thereby importing organization-behavioral insights into the operations management literature: with HRM-type implications.

Servant leaders focus on their direct reports to enable them to grow to be independent and autonomous leaders. The purpose of this paper is to understand the way personal values and personality traits collectively influence this other-centered behavior. This will go a long way to unravel this unique style of leadership.

The study surveys managers and their direct reports. Leaders rated their personality trait and personal values, while their direct reports rated the leader’s servant leadership behaviors. Age, educational level, conscientiousness, extraversion and neuroticism of leaders were used as controls. The study also checked for endogeneity threats.

Using a sample of 81 leaders and 279 of their direct reports, the study finds that the personal value of benevolent dependability relates negatively to servant leadership behaviors. In addition, the personality traits of agreeableness and openness/intellect moderate the relationship between benevolent dependability and servant leadership behaviors.

The findings shed important insights into what motivates servant leaders to engage in other-directed behaviors, thereby enabling future research into individual characteristics that define servant leaders.

Although studies have examined how values and personality traits influence leadership behaviors, no research has examined both types of individual differences in a single study. Studies examining the individual differences of servant leaders are few, and this study answers the call by Liden et al. (2014) to examine individual characteristics that are both personality based (traits) and malleable (values).