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Explores the concept of mentoring – a process that allows leaders in a field to share their experience, vision and enthusiasm for the profession with colleagues who have exhibited leadership qualities and the potential for greater productivity and achievement. The mentoring relationship involves the sharing of experience and the investment of time and caring in helping to develop a future leader’s growth, knowledge and skills. It is a beneficial experience both for parties and for the profession. The article includes tips for mentors and mentees/protégés.

During the last two years management training and development has endured the same strong pressures as other sectors of the British economy, the same questioning, the same reluctant pruning in the interests of cash flow, and even survival. Management attention has therefore been focused on short‐term returns rather than long‐term developments, and this has led to a different attitude towards short management courses. No longer do sponsoring managers turn readily to an educational experience of 3–10 weeks' duration as a background for further development of their staff, unless it forms part of a special development programme, and then only for a few favoured people.

This paper aims to explore a leadership development intervention activity to solve an organisational problem and seeks to identify critical success factors for the design and delivery of such activities.

This is a case study employing a mixed‐method approach within an action research methodology. The participants were a student group of 19, plus the teaching team and client‐training adviser. The project used questionnaires for identifying and ranking critical success factors and focus groups to explore transferability and other issues. These were supplemented by e‐mail and telephone communications.

The critical success factors involved people, task, process, and location and facilities dimensions. Most were deemed transferable, but with certain warnings about key factors.

This is a small‐scale study and issues of transferability of findings are acknowledged. Contextual details are presented to reduce the effect of the limitation.

The findings are of high practical value for leadership development and for organisations seeking new ways of addressing organisational challenges using internal staff.

The paper has value in its practical and theoretical contribution. The identification of critical success factors for such intervention activities is new and the opportunity for application adds further value to the work.

This paper reports on research into Australian school principals' leadership. It explores an emerging construct – that of ‘readiness to lead’ – and showcases the development of a tentative tool for determining school principals' readiness to lead.

Seven principals from Australian and International Schools were interviewed about their leadership strategies, intentions and expectations for impending school reform. Qualitative analyses using grounded theory and an interpretivist constructivist paradigm were applied.

The construct of ‘readiness to lead’ emerged during initial analysis and a tool was developed from a compilation of literature on leadership. Findings revealed that five principals were well-aligned with the strategies, intentions and expectations the research literature indicates are characteristic of good leadership. These principals could be regarded as ‘ready to lead’ their schools in significant school reform. An unexpected finding was that the concepts of ‘hope’ and ‘trust’ also played a significant role in leadership. ‘Hope’ appeared important as a major strategy for the less-well aligned principals, whereas mutual ‘trust’ appeared to be evident in the principals with stronger leadership readiness.

The tool warrants peer review and validation; data revealed an emerging construct and review is welcomed. The authors are continuing to research and investigate in this field, and invite further academic dialogue.

The study has explored the fecundity of the tool for analysis, and evaluated the principals' preparedness to lead reform. Having a tool to determine whether and to what degree school principals are ready to lead would be advantageous for the profession.

While there has been substantial discussion about the potential for clinical leadership in improving quality and safety in healthcare, there has been little robust study. The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a qualitative study with clinicians and clinician managers to gather opinions on the appropriate content of an educational initiative being planned to improve clinical leadership in quality and safety among medical, nursing and allied health professionals working in primary, community and secondary care.

In total, 28 clinicians and clinician managers throughout the state of Victoria, Australia, participated in focus groups to provide advice on the development of a clinical leadership program in quality and safety. An inductive, thematic analysis was completed to enable the themes to emerge from the data.

Overwhelmingly the participants conceptualised clinical leadership in relation to organisational factors. Only four individual factors, comprising emotional intelligence, resilience, self‐awareness and understanding of other clinical disciplines, were identified as being important for clinical leaders. Conversely seven organisational factors, comprising role clarity and accountability, security and sustainability for clinical leaders, selective recruitment into clinical leadership positions, teamwork and decentralised decision making, training, information sharing, and transformational leadership, were seen as essential, but the participants indicated they were rarely addressed. The human resource management literature includes these seven components, with contingent reward, reduced status distinctions and measurement of management practices, as the essential organisational underpinnings of high performance work systems.

The results of this study propose that clinical leadership is an organisational property, suggesting that capability frameworks and educational programs for clinical leadership need a broader organisation focus.

The paper makes clear that clinical leadership was not perceived to be about vesting leadership skills in individuals, but about ensuring health care organisations were equipped to conceptualise and support a model of distributive leadership.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the critical success factors (CSFs) for effective project stakeholder management at the local government level in Ghana.

The study used data from questionnaires administered to project stakeholders for identifying and ranking CSFs.

The study identified the top five CSFs for stakeholder management at the local government level in Ghana to be: communicating with and engaging stakeholders; identifying stakeholders properly; formulating a clear project mission statement; keeping and promoting good relationships; and analyzing stakeholder conflicts and coalitions.

Generalization of the findings should be done with caution since the scope of data collection was limited to district assemblies in the Greater Accra region of Ghana. Nevertheless the results of the study are, however, useful and indicative and can lend direction to future research.

This paper has contributed to the growing body of knowledge related to CSFs for local government projects. The results should help understand factors which are of priority to stakeholders when assessing their involvement in projects. Further, the findings could form the basis for competency development of local government personnel in specific areas where improvements are required.

The paper identified CSFs for effective project stakeholder management at the local level. Most studies on critical factors in project environments have focused on CSFs and project success and thus this study delves into an area which has not received much attention in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical model of leadership and knowledge creation by drawing on two contrasting diversity perspectives. The model argues a moderating role for leadership in explaining the influence of diverse composition on team knowledge creation.

A model of leadership's impact on knowledge creation is developed based on an interdisciplinary review of literature spanning the creativity, innovation and learning literature, diversity management, top management team demography and upper echelons literature and learning from transformational leadership research.

The main contribution of this paper is the development of a model of transformational leadership's impact on knowledge creation in diverse teams based on a series of propositions. Focusing on the information/decision‐making perspective, our model depicts the role of leadership in facilitating constructive cognitive effects on knowledge creation. From the social categorisation perspective our model depicts the role of leadership in mitigating against destructive emotional barriers to group effectiveness.

This paper's review and model indicate significant implications for future research and practice. The model provides a better understanding of the effects of transformational leadership on knowledge creation. The paper present justification for two pathways, cognitive and affective, through which leadership moderates the impact of diversity on team outcomes. By examining the model and its proposed relationships, we believe that it will enable researchers to shed new light on these issues for further investigations.

This review is among the first to address the role of transformational leadership in diverse teams, and one of the only papers to connect leadership, diversity and knowledge creation.

This paper aims to examine relationships between vision realization factors (vision communication, motivation and empowerment of employees), employee satisfaction, and affective organizational commitment in a state‐owned energy provider in Thailand.

Subjects are drawn randomly from employees working at the Thai state‐owned energy provider who completed a questionnaire made up of valid and reliable instruments that measure each of the variables studied. Hypotheses are tested through a series of regression analyses.

Findings indicate that vision communication, motivation and empowerment of employees, and follower affective organizational commitment are three direct predictors of enhanced employee satisfaction. Empowerment of employees and employee satisfaction are two direct predictors of employee affective organizational commitment. These findings indicate a reciprocal relationship between employee satisfaction and affective organizational commitment, with a stronger effect from employee satisfaction on affective organizational commitment than the reverse.

How supervisors empower and motivate their subordinates in the Thai state‐owned energy provider still needs a further investigation. The relationship between employee satisfaction and affective organizational commitment needs to be re‐examined by future research, using a different research design and statistical technique.

Leaders at all levels of the state‐owned energy provider should frequently communicate their vision to, motivate and empower their subordinates to enhance subordinate satisfaction and affective commitment.

The body of knowledge about vision‐based leadership in an Asian state‐owned energy provider is scanty. The present study contributes to this area.