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The purpose of this paper is to offer a practice-based understanding of leadership based on the concept of “leaderful” practice. In supporting this concept, the paper describes the contexts that shape leadership capacity and introduces an integrative framework that further illustrates “leaderful” practice.

The paper draws on prior research conducted by the authors in a variety of industries. Insights were gleaned from both theoretical perspectives and qualitative data drawn from a number of empirical studies.

In order to lead confidently in turbulent times, leaders need to first unlearn the conventional wisdom of leadership. Three contextual enablers contribute to “leaderful” practice, namely problem, action, and experience. Becoming “leaderful” is being mindful of how these three enablers could be harnessed and integrated to facilitate change in meaningful ways.

In order to promote “leaderful” practice, both reflective and conversational spaces are imperative. Such spaces help leaders to be mindful of their internal and external contexts, including a keen awareness of self and others in framing references of the past for the future. In doing so, leaders need to be “present” to confront “wicked” problems and take action through collective experience and intelligence.

Understanding how leaders think, feel, and act in actual practice helps us understand the genuine characteristics of leadership. The paper introduces a framework of “leaderful” practice with a focus on leading with confidence. It extends current understanding of leadership practice by viewing “leaderful” practice from the perspective of problem, action, and experience.

The purpose of this paper is to make the case, firstly, that democratic leadership, referred to as “leaderful practice,” should be the fundamental form of leadership that characterizes participatory organizational change. The parties affected by change are those engaged who seek to reflect upon their own tacit collective practices. Their mode of communication is a dialogue or deliberation that involves the responsible parties to decision making without privileging particular stakeholders because of their status or authority. Thus, it is purported, secondly, that the three practice elements of democratic leadership, dialogue, and deliberation should be included among the bedrock principles of participatory organizational change.

A critical conceptual examination is undertaken of the contribution of three alternative literature streams – leaderful practice, dialogue, deliberation – to participatory organizational change.

Dialogue, an authentic exchange between people, and its decision‐making cousin, deliberation, can become the communication modes associated with participatory organizational change. They are each characterized by equality of participation; thus they are inherently democratic processes that should substitute for top‐down or monologic discourses, which are inimical to participatory practice.

If organization development and comparable participatory change processes claim at their core to be democratic processes, their exponents would endorse a leadership and communication that would preferably match their value system. There would be a shared communication by all those who are involved in the change activity, wherever they may sit within the organizational bureaucracy. The communication would become a multiple‐party reflective conversation that is captured in the mode called dialogue.

By focusing on critical reflection, the dialogic perspective with its emancipatory interest challenges common sense assumptions that are likely to be historical and cultural as psychological. Ultimately, dialogue supports democratic leadership at a core interpersonal level in which participants learn to engage through a reflective practice that allows them to observe and experiment with their own collective tacit processes in action.

This study aims to propose the application of relational leadership theory (RLT) for magnifying the dynamics involving the individual who participates in the implementation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices in the hospitality sector. Dominant theories in this field fail to show what drivers affect such dynamics. The key preoccupation of those frameworks is the extent to which CSR can attract, motivate and retain employees.

This study uses both qualitative and quantitative methods. Through a quantitative survey involving circa 1,300 hotels, and qualitative semi-structured interviews, this study seeks to unpick what actors identify as sustainable practice driving motives, which, in turn, influence the implementation of CSR initiatives. In this perspective, actors drift away from being mere receivers, or executors of sustainable practices, acquiring a more active role. The qualitative data of this study are collected through semi-structured interviews in hotels in Italy, the UK and Pakistan and run the quantitative survey across the same three countries.

The quantitative data showed a significant positive correlation between economic incentive and teamwork in CSR practices. This aligned with the qualitative data that showed two main drivers – responsibility and convenience – displaying characteristics of collectivity and collaboration, which tie to the principles of RLT.

This study posits the relevance of relatedness at multiple levels to spot how CSR initiatives can produce varying “hospitality work” outcomes.

By focusing on actors and identifying the driving motives of sustainable initiatives, this paper suggests that leaderful practice stands at the core of CSR implementation.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how an Academic Health Science Centre, providing pediatric rehabilitation services, research, and education, developed a Centres for Leadership (CfL) initiative to integrate its academic functions and embrace the goal of being a learning organization.

Historical documents, tracked output information, and staff members’ insights were used to describe the ten-year evolution of the initiative, its benefits, and transformational learnings for the organization.

The evolutions concerned development of a series of CfLs, and changes over time in leadership and management structure, as well as in operations and targeted activities. Benefits included enhanced clinician engagement in research, practice-based research, and impacts on clinical practice. Transformational learnings concerned the importance of supporting stakeholder engagement, fostering a spirit of inquiry, and fostering leaderful practice. These learnings contributed to three related emergent outcomes reflecting “way stations” on the journey to enhanced evidence-informed decision making and clinical excellence: enhancements in authentic partnerships, greater innovation capacity, and greater understanding and actualization of leadership values.

Practical information is provided for other organizations interested in understanding how this initiative evolved, its tangible value, and its wider benefits for organizational collaboration, innovation, and leadership values. Challenges encountered and main messages for other organizations are also considered.

A strategy map is used to present the structures, processes, and outcomes arising from the initiative, with the goal of informing the operations of other organizations desiring to be learning organizations.

This paper reviews what has been written on leadership development from the leadership-as-practice (L-A-P) perspective, which views leadership as emerging in everyday activities and interactions of a collective in a specific context. This paper aims to deepen the theoretical understanding of how leadership can be learned and developed from the L-A-P perspective.

An integrative literature review was undertaken to review and synthesise what has been written on the topic in journal articles and scholarly books.

The importance of the context and the practices that are embedded in it is the most central aspect affecting leadership development from the L-A-P perspective. This places workplace leadership development centre stage, but several papers also showed that leadership programmes have an important role. Not only collective capacity building is emphasised in the papers, but the importance of individual-level leader development is also recognised.

The contribution of this study is twofold: First, it brings the currently fractured information on L-A-P development together to enhance theory building by providing a synthesis of the literature. Second, a conceptual framework is constructed to show how the L-A-P perspective on leadership development can take both leadership development at the collective and individual levels into account, as well as the learning that takes place either inside or outside the workplace. This study’s results and framework show that the development has its own specific purpose and suggested methods in both levels, in both learning sites.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how companies that characterise their leadership style as plural, shared or distributed narrate their actions and practices in online blog texts.

The data consist of online blog texts published by seven Finnish IT companies. The analytical strategy draws on both thematic and structural approach to narrative analysis. The blog texts were analysed thematically to uncover different aspects of plural leadership. The analysis revealed a narrative pattern consisting of three categories that explain why and how companies implemented plural leadership.

The first category in the narrative pattern describes the motivation for engaging in plural leadership. The second category explains how the companies broke down existing hierarchies in order to create new flexible work roles. The third category describes how the organisations sought to create a communal culture and a strong sense of trust using symbols, material objects and spaces.

The study contributes to leadership research that emphasises post-heroic leadership conceptualisations. The narrative pattern provides future empirical studies a framework for analysing plural leadership practices in different organisational settings. Whereas this study sheds light on the ways in which organisations and their leadership practices can be investigated using online data, traditional organisational ethnographies can make a further contribution to this line of research.

Implementing plural leadership in organisations can lead to informal power plays. Attention should be paid on to how plural leadership evolves in flat hierarchies and promotes community building.

Company webpages have rich information on how companies operate and perceive themselves. They provide yet another window for observing organisational activities. This study makes a novel contribution to how plural leadership is practiced and conceptualised in online blog texts.

During the COVID-19 crisis in Victoria, Australia the complexity of school leadership increased greatly for school principals. This study focused on the lived experiences of early career principals in the independent school sector from March to November 2020 in Victoria, Australia. It investigates transformative work that was undertaken by these leaders in leading their schools over a protracted crisis.

The study builds on constructs of crisis leadership, adaptive leadership, agile leadership and emotional intelligence, exploring the leadership approaches undertaken by twenty-two early career principals in Victoria, Australia. Using a narrative inquiry approach, across three temporal points in 2020, storied productions drawn from the findings present four emergent types of emotionally intelligent leadership approaches undertaken by these principals. These leadership approaches are presented as the commander-leader, the conductor-leader, the gardener-leader and the engineer-leader with each approach demonstrating both organisational leadership approaches as well as individual leadership styles used by these principals as they led their schools.

The findings have direct implications for professional development programs focusing on aspiring principals and early career principals with emphasis on the importance of developing emotionally intelligent skillsets in principals for use during periods of rapid change or high crisis in schools. The findings present insight into the support useful for early career principals in the first five years of principalship.

This study uses a unique emotional intelligence approach to understand school leadership during and after a crisis.

In this innovative practice paper, we will illustrate how discursive practices of Visual Thinking StrategiesTM (VTS) can foster leadership development capacity of college students. We will show how VTS aligns with constructionist perspectives to post-heroic leadership grounded in discursive approaches to leadership development. This arts-based pedagogy advances leadership development through dialogue and sense-making.