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The purpose of this paper is to review and critique three conventional assumptions about leadership and put forward an alternative framing, with leadership presented as a distinct form of intervention in particular moments to management. The paper also presents a structure for supporting leadership action by individuals and groups as an alternate to management action, which is seen as the dominant form.

Reflects an elaboration and distillation of concepts developed by the author since an earlier paper on essentially the same topic, drawing on his 20-plus years’ experience as a leadership developer.

Although not an empirical account, the paper seeks to demonstrate how, when conventional but infrequently challenged assumptions about leadership are “peeled back”, a new way of understanding leadership, especially in connection with management, is revealed.

Suggestions are offered as to how the concepts and tools presented here could be evaluated, including in comparison with established leadership frameworks.

Outlines three practices for supporting leadership action in public sector organisations. These practices are working from observation, attributing reasonableness (allowing that others are reasonable) and speaking with authenticity. Collectively, these are known as the OBREAU Tripod (with “OBREAU” comprised of the first two letters in each of the pivotal words, observation, reasonableness and authenticity).

Conceiving of leadership as a different form of in-the-moment action to management in a public sector context is a distinctive contribution to the literature.

This study describes the development of a grounded theory of applied critical thinking in leadership studies and examines how student-centered experiential learning in leadership education bridged critical thinking with action. Over three semester undergraduate students in an upper level leadership studies course at a large four-year public institution in the southeastern United States completed a written assignment in which they were asked to define the concept of “leading critically.” A grounded theory of critical leadership – utilizing critical thinking skills to make decisions about leadership actions in different situations – emerged after completing a qualitative document analysis of these papers and incorporating the researchers’ existing knowledge of leadership and student development theory. The hope is that this research will create dialogue concerning new approaches to leadership education and encourage practices that apply critical thinking skills to leadership.

The concepts associated with leadership and management have often been conflated, considered one and the same phenomenon by some and then considered by others to be quite distinctive. The same ambiguity is even truer at the level of application and practicality. Only a handful of studies have attempted empirically to differentiate between the two concepts. The study sought to develop an instrument to discriminate between the two concepts.

A prospective study was conducted with two groups of scholars in the areas of leadership and management. They completed the exploratory Leadership/Management Concept Scale (LMCS), the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) and provided demographic information. The results from the Initial group were compared with a validation group. Standard statistical techniques were used to analyze the two groups and investigate associations among the study measures.

The LMCS effectively differentiated actions associated with leadership from actions associated with management actions. There were four distinct choices consistently selected as most consistent with leadership: influencing, coaching, modeling and ensuring resilience. No significant correlations were found between scores on the LMCS and the LPI, providing evidence that the former was capturing actions other than those associated with leadership alone.

It is empirically possible to differentiate between the actions typically associated with the concepts of leadership and management. This distinction can be invaluable in various educational programs designed to develop either or both leadership and management abilities, as well as assist in the identification of those with proclivities to one or other of the two concepts. The LMCS shows promise in reliably differentiating between the two concepts and can be useful for scholars aiming to investigate leadership or management without confounding the two.

There are numerous positions and organizational roles where leadership and management are differentiated, with one being much more needed than the other. The LMCS can differentiate empirically how potential candidates for leadership and/or management positions think about the two, which would allow a would-be employer to screen candidates for given opportunities and, depending on their conceptualization of leadership and management, assign them most appropriately.

This study fills a fundamental gap in both the leadership and management field: first in being able to provide evidence that the two concepts, while similar in some regards, are not the same and can be differentiated from each other and second, in developing an instrument (LMCS) that both practitioners and scholars can use to help their audiences better understand the differences between leadership and management and to develop actions appropriate to situational demands.

The purpose of this quantitative study was to assess the relationship between volunteer leadership competencies and stewardship action-taking experiences among Master Gardener (MG) and Master Watershed (MW) volunteers during the COVID-19 pandemic. We collected data from 1196 Penn State Extension MG and MW respondents. The mean summative score for the volunteer stewardship action-taking experience was 2.32 (SD = .79), and volunteer leadership competencies was 3.45 (SD = .60). The results of this study showed a significant moderate association between volunteer stewardship action-taking experiences and volunteer leader competencies (r = .34, p ≤ .001). Volunteer leadership competencies can explain approximately 11 % of the variation in volunteer stewardship action-taking experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. The new knowledge that our research brings can significantly contribute to the practice in leadership teaching and learning of Extension organizations’ volunteers. Future leadership trainings on the enhancement of the MG and MW volunteer leaders’ stewardship action-taking capacity can help contribute to the greater good in their communities in a more confident and efficient manner. Further research should focus on identifying other factors that can affect MG and MW stewardship action-taking experiences, including the impact of the demographics and motivation.

Building on a social‐technical approach to project management, the authors aim to examine the effect of action‐centered leadership attributes on team member's learning, knowledge collaboration and job satisfaction during IT‐related projects.

Structural equation modeling was utilized to assess the work environment of team members as well as the leadership practices of their respective project team leaders. Data were collected with a survey questionnaire from 327 team members in a variety of organizations in 15 industry sectors including financial services, software, manufacturing, retail, government and universities.

The identified action‐centered project leadership practices (effective task management, team efficacy cultivation, and individual autonomy support) create a project team environment that fosters individual learning and knowledge collaboration along with individual performance and job satisfaction, and ultimately project success.

The action‐centered leadership practices construct, developed in this study, can be a good surrogate measure of what is required to be an effective leader in an IT project team environment. The main limitations of the research are those inherent in the survey method (self‐reported; subjective data).

In a project team environment, it is essential that all team members collaborate effectively to increase the likelihood of project success. The implication for managers from these findings is that concentrating more on the identified action‐centered leadership practices can positively influence the team environment.

Although previous studies have described attributes that influence team performance, a clearer understanding of what team leadership practices enable a project manager to be effective warrants further investigation. A second order construct merges these team leadership practice attributes and validates its use.

This study examines how perceptions of injustice, anger, and group identification motivate follower intentions to engage in collective action against leaders. The study revolved around the Malaysian prime minister’s actions and responses toward allegations of misuse of public funds. Responses from 112 Malaysians via a cross-sectional survey revealed that follower perceptions of leader injustice are significantly related to anger toward the leader, which in turn is related to intentions to engage in collective action. The relationship between perceptions of distributive injustice and anger is moderated by group identification, while group efficacy moderates the relationship between anger and collective action intentions.

Effective leadership action requires managers to harness power that is intrinsically political. This paper aims to study and characterise the political nature of a manager's behaviour when taking leadership action.

The methodological approach is qualitative and examines three organisations over a three‐year period when these entities experienced a major product failure. The paper analyses the actual managerial behaviour of managers and provides insight into the factors that most strongly influence the effectiveness of managers when taking leadership action.

Political behaviour when taking leadership action can be conceptualised in terms of rationality and emotionality. In so doing, it can be clarified how behaviour must be modified to ensure that leadership action is consistently effective.

A case study of three multinational engineering companies engaged in the design, development and manufacturing of turbomachinery provides the platform for the research. The concepts presented in the paper will require validating in other organisations of different demographic profiles.

The concepts presented and the implications discussed provide insight into the political nature of managerial behaviour when taking leadership action. The paper highlights the practical steps individual managers can embrace to ensure that their behaviour is appropriate to context, even under the most traumatic situations. Thus, the paper provides managers with a model that facilitates effective leadership action.

This paper provides insight into how managers behaved in circumstances that mattered to them. Through immersion in events at the time they took place, the authors captured situations in which managers were under real pressure and, in so doing, avoided the bias inherent when interviewing a manager about past events. As such, the paper concludes that the political behaviour in which managers engage when taking leadership action is rooted in the reality of the adversity that the most capable managers have both experienced and overcome. This detailed study reports behaviour in a situation where managers' business and future prospects were in jeopardy. This paper identifies why some managers were able to use the experience positively, helping them to adopt politically intrinsic behaviour to facilitate effective leadership action.

The purpose of this paper is to examine organizational leadership and its relationship to regional health authority actions to promote health.

Through use of four previously developed measures of Perceived Organizational Leadership for Health Promotion, this paper focused on leadership as a distributed entity within regional health authority (RHA) jurisdictions mandated to address the health of the population in the province of Alberta, Canada.

First, examination of differentials between organizational levels (i.e. board members, n=30; middle/senior management, n=58; and service providers, n=56) on ratings of the four leadership measures revealed significant differences. That is, board members tended to rate leadership components significantly higher than service providers and middle/senior managers: from across all 17 RHAs; and in low health promotion capacity and high health promotion capacity RHAs. Second, regression analyses identified that the leadership measures “Practices for Organizational Learning” and “Wellness Planning” were positively associated with health authority actions on improving population heart health (heart health promotion). The presence of a “Champion for Heart Health Promotion” and the leadership measures “Workplace Milieu” and “Organization Member Development” were also positively associated with health authority actions for health promotion. A subsidiary aim revealed low to moderate positive relationships of the dimensions of Leadership, Infrastructure and Will to Act with one another, as proposed by the Alberta Model on “Organizational Capacity Building for Health Promotion.”

This paper, conducted on the baseline dataset (n=144) of the “Alberta Heart Health Project's Dissemination Phase”, represents a rare effort to examine leadership at a collective organizational level.

This paper is derived from a thorough and systematic study, contributing to further understanding of the perception of authentic leadership in the context of Cyprus, by involving school principals' both espoused values and values in action coupled with their leadership styles.

Data were drawn from a combination of methods, both quantitative (235 questionnaires) and qualitative (5 case studies), thus facilitating a more reliable and valid exploration of school principals' espoused values and values in action coupled with their leadership styles.

School principals' values in action may be filtered by particular factors, which affect them, when they try to promote their espoused values during their leadership practice. In general, the findings indicated that practicing authentic leadership might be, in fact, impeded by specific factors connected to the broader context in which school principals operate.

It is not possible to draw concrete conclusions on relation between the espoused values and values in action, as only five school principals took part during the second research phase. However, in this study, the quantitative (first phase) and qualitative (second phase) research were combined in order to produce a general picture, with regards to the practice of authentic leadership.

The study of values has received an extensive research interest lately. In this study, it was approached collectively and cohesively by taking into consideration the differentiation between espoused values and values in action.

This chapter describes the change efforts and action research projects at a Dutch multinational which, over a period of 25 years, produced in one of its businesses a zigzag path toward collaborative leadership dynamics at the horizontal and vertical interfaces. The chapter also identifies the learning mechanisms that helped achieve this transformation. Changing the patterns at the vertical interfaces proved to be a most tricky, complex, and confusing operation. The data show that organizations need hierarchical interfaces between levels, but are hindered by the hierarchical leadership dynamics at these interfaces. The data furthermore show that competitive performance requires more than redesigning horizontal interfaces. A business can only respond with speed and flexibility to threats and opportunities in the external environment when the leadership dynamics at agility-critical vertical interfaces are also changed.