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The purpose of this paper is to develop a survey for co‐creating leadership dispositional values and contexts by examining the self‐perceptions of school leaders, teachers, and staff on the practice of co‐creating leadership behaviors and conditions that facilitate the practice.

Based on qualitative data and a literature review, survey statements were developed to gather quantitative data for purposes of establishing an instrument for studying the practice of dispositional values and presence of contexts that facilitate co‐creating leadership in schools.

The instrument internal reliability scales covering the seven dispositions and three contexts were calculated using Cronbach's α scores. All scores were above the suggested level of 0.70. The coefficient α reliabilities for the subscales ranged between 0.73 and 0.86. The survey resulted in a two‐factor solution (dispositional values and contexts). Correlation coefficients amongst the subscales of dispositional values and contexts ranged between a moderate r=0.460 and a high r=0.815 (p<0.01).

This study led to the development and verification of a quantitative survey instrument that may be used to assess the practice of co‐creating leadership dispositional values and contexts in schools. Dispositional values consisted of seven factors (trust and trustworthiness, humility, active listening, resilience, patience, collaboration, and cultural anthropology). Contexts consisted of three factors (deep democracy, quality relations, and evolving power).

This purpose of this paper is to explore the discursive constructions of context and its significance in employees’ accounts of leadership practices, more specifically, discourses of communicative leadership. In doing so, it also seeks to clarify the relationship between perceptions and constructions of contexts and leadership discourses.

This study relies on focus group interviews conducted with nine groups and a total of 31 employees (16 males and 15 females) in a Swedish industrial organization employing 490 employees.

The findings reveal that micro-contexts were more evident influencing leadership discourses in the accounts of employees. However, macro-contexts identified as an authoritative leadership style were triggering constructions of “idealized” communicative leaders in contrast to the leadership experienced in the work environment by employees as “real.”

The investigation presents one organizational context, but can be expanded using additional contexts that may show various leadership forms and communication needs. Findings suggest that understanding the context considered to be relevant to perceptions and constructions of leadership can be essential for identifying and confronting challenges, leading to a more communicative organization.

The study approaches leadership and context as dynamic and multifaceted constructs shaped locally in interaction with macro-discourses. Further, it also suggests that individuals are agents of change controlling context through being aware of their discourses.

The purpose of this study is to examine how context shapes leaders' caring approach in ways that influence organizational learning and the cultivation of professional capital.

This exploratory study draws on case study data from two schools. Within each school, the authors draw primarily on semi-structured interviews with teachers and leaders.

The authors found that school context and the accompanying leader beliefs shaped the structures and practices where organizational learning occurred, and thereby influence the diffusion of organizational learning in the school and the flexibility by which organizational lessons can be applied.

This research demonstrates that the context and place in which schools are situated influence how problems are apprehended and addressed. Leaders' relational approach, bounded by this context, influences how members of the school develop professional capacity. Larger scale studies would help clarify the nature of these effects.

Although context has been shown to influence leadership, no study has examined the links between context, leaders' relational approach and organizational learning.

As the global presence of Chinese firms grows, increasing numbers of Chinese managers are working abroad as expatriates. However, little attention has been paid to such Chinese expatriate managers and their leadership challenges in an inter-cultural context, especially across a large cultural distance. To fill the gap in the literature concerning the leadership challenges for expatriate managers in an inter-cultural context, the purpose of this paper is to elucidate the leadership styles of Chinese expatriate managers from the perspectives of three traditional Chinese philosophies (i.e. Confucianism, Taoism, and Legalism) in the inter-cultural context of the Netherlands.

The data for this qualitative study were collected via semi-structured, open-ended, narrative interviews with 30 Chinese expatriate managers in the Netherlands.

The results clearly show that the leadership style of Chinese expatriate managers is deeply rooted in the three traditional Chinese philosophies of Confucianism, Taoism, and Legalism, even in an inter-cultural context. Specifically, the study reveals two salient aspects of how Chinese expatriate managers frame and interact with a foreign cultural context from the perspectives of traditional Chinese philosophies. First, the Chinese expatriate managers reported an initial cultural shock related to frictions between the foreign cultural context and Confucianism or Taoism, but less so in the case of Legalism. Second, the Chinese expatriate managers also reported that their interactions with the Dutch culture are best described as a balance between partial conflict and partial complementarity (thus, a duality). In this sense, the leadership style of Chinese expatriate managers is influenced jointly by the three traditional Chinese philosophies and certain elements of the foreign cultural context. This is consistent with the Chinese perspective of yin-yang balancing.

This study is among the first to offer a more nuanced and highly contextualized understanding of leadership in the unique case of expatriate managers from an emerging market (e.g. China) in an advanced economy (e.g. the Netherlands). The authors call for more research to apply the unique perspective of yin-yang balancing in an inter-cultural context. The authors posit that this approach represents the most salient implication of this study. For practical implications, the authors argue that expatriate leaders should carefully manage the interplay between their deep-rooted home-country philosophies and their salient host-country culture. Reflecting on traditional philosophies in another culture can facilitate inter-cultural leadership training for Chinese expatriates.

The purpose of this paper is to compare leadership functions from different team contexts considering context characteristics that contribute to team effectiveness.

A qualitative study was conducted. Seven leaders of multidisciplinary child protection teams (MDTs) and nine managers of an information technology (IT) company took part in semi-structured interviews. The data were analyzed using content analysis with ATLAS.ti.

Results showed that the two types of teams used different performance criteria, with teams from non-profit contexts lacking defined performance criteria. The results also showed that transition leadership functions are more frequently mentioned by IT than by MDT leaders. Moreover, interpersonal leadership functions emerged as independent functions that may occur in both the transition and action phases.

Context is paramount for performance criteria definition and for the relevance of certain team leadership functions over others. It also presents some suggestions for improvement to the model of Morgeson et al. (2010a).

The results support the idea that there are differences in the leadership functions that are most valued by leaders, depending on the specific team’s context. Results also showed that some non-profit and less task-structured teams lack the specific performance criteria that could help them make more successful interventions.

This paper reviews context literature, it shows that the emphasis on team leadership functions can vary across contexts and to the knowledge it is the first that compares the model of Morgeson et al. (2010a) in different contexts.

Through discussion of research about the leadership of two schools, this paper explores the complexity of school leadership and how various contextual elements interact with the work of principals in schools that are attempting to create inclusive, rich, worthwhile and unique schools. A systems thinking leadership and context model is developed to frame the exploration of the two cases, which, in turn, helps inform the veracity and development of the model.

The research reported is broadly based on multiple-perspective case studies that have included individual and/or group interviews with school leaders, teachers, students, parents and/or school council members, observation and document analysis. The focus for this paper is on evidence from the cases that elucidate the model.

A leadership and context view of schools helps to understand how school leaders work with, within and influence various contextual factors to develop schools that are both successful and unique. The cases demonstrated how individual leadership factors including career histories, personalities and values coalesced with school and broader community factors in reciprocal ways that resulted in school-specific improvements.

The research is limited by the nature of bounded, small number, qualitative case research. Nevertheless, the authors suggest that the school leadership and context systems model the authors presented captures much of the complexity of the successful leadership of these schools. The authors further suggest that this model provides a conceptual contribution to the study of successful school leadership that moves beyond more linear leadership views. Implications of this research and the conceptual contributions that the authors advance are that leadership and context should be considered in reciprocal and nuanced ways across a complex variety of contextual levels.

These cases explore the growth and development of new school communities and capture the dynamic interactions between leadership and context within the complex arrangements of policy, system, history and community. The cases demonstrated how individual leadership factors, including career histories, personalities and values, coalesced with school and broader community factors in reciprocal ways that resulted in school-specific improvements. These findings and the system thinking leadership model help school leaders to consider their own work in developing successful and unique schools.

School leadership is important for school success, and schools that meet student and community needs are important for society. The authors’ system thinking leadership model helps school leaders improve their practice in creating more interesting and successful schools that meet student and community needs.

At a time when international sharing of information and international testing of schools is pushing towards a uniformity of thinking about what good schools should be, the reality of leading schools is far different. This paper contributes to the knowledge about how school leaders navigate contextual complexities to create successful and unique schools that meet local needs.

In this final chapter, we summarize the core challenges to leadership in complex organizational systems as well as the lessons that we believe leaders can learn from the contributions presented in this book. Building on Complexity Leadership Theory (Uhl-Bien & Marion, 2009), we argue that high levels of complexity characterize the contexts described, and that they are unusual because they deviate from the setting of standard business organizations. Since these contexts are not often discussed in the general leadership literature, there seems to be a largely unused potential in terms of leadership learning. Specifically, in order to better contextualize leadership, scholars and practitioners need to take organizational complexity into account. With reference to the underlying structure of the book, core challenges to leadership are proposed, clustering around four main foci: sports and competition, high risk, creativity and innovation, care and community. Subsequently, we derive six lessons for leadership: adaptability, perseverance, handling paradox, leading with values, inventing the future, and sharing responsibility. We thereby hope to stimulate fruitful discussions that put leadership into context and capitalize on complexity theory as an innovative approach to leadership research and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to explore empirically the importance of context on participants' understanding of leadership behaviour in 12 companies in the German and UK chemical industries. In doing so, it also seeks to review existing literature on contextual influences on leadership and to look more closely at the possible conceptualisation of such contexts.

Findings are drawn from a wider study of 105 qualitative interviews conducted in the German and UK chemical industries in 2004/2005. Textual analyses of these research data have focused on the importance and nature of different contexts, such as the immediate social, cultural, institutional and historical.

The findings indicate that it is the immediate social context in the form of organisational departments that seems to influence leadership behaviour most. The influence of this context on leadership is further shaped by other contexts such as the education of employees, present occupations and national origin.

The findings support the usefulness of the conceptual framework introduced here and especially the assumption that different types and levels of context interact to shape the specific and continuously changing context in which individuals understand and enact leadership. Although clearly confined to the limits of the data set, the finding has potentially significant implications for the focus of leadership development for managers.

The paper responds to Berry and Cartwright's call for a wider contextualisation of leadership, which has so far remained unanswered in LODJ.

This paper aims to offer a new leadership perspective based on the premise that leader effectiveness depends on the context in which leadership behaviors are enacted.

Literature in the areas of abusive supervision and leadership were reviewed. Using social learning and attribution theories, this study develops propositions regarding the role of perceived abusive supervision in high vs low-intensity organizations.

In this theoretical account, this paper distinguishes between low and high-intensity work organizational contexts articulating a rationale for conditions appropriate for directive leadership. This paper posits that while directive leadership will be more prevalent in high-intensity contexts, it will be specifically targeted toward poor performers, those with personality characteristics that are tied to poor performance and those engaging in deviant behaviors. This study proposes that outcomes of directive leadership will depend on how it aligns with organizational norms and culture and the causality attributed to such behaviors.

Recent leadership theories focus on nurturing and providing support to followers. This paper posits that such theories are suited to low-intensity organizations. This study offers a counterintuitive perspective in proposing that directive leadership which involves inducing stress, will lead to better outcomes in high-intensity organizational contexts. This paper offers testable propositions and avenues for future research on directive leadership in high-intensity organizational contexts.

Based on the premise that leadership is context-dependent, this study proposes that directive leadership is best suited in high-intensity organizational contexts, which is a novel proposal. Even within these high-intensity contexts, such leadership, this paper proposes will be targeted toward poor performers and employees with characteristics that are tied to poor performance and violation of organizational norms.

Examination of the role of directive leadership in high intensity, clan culture organizations may facilitate understanding that effective leadership styles may differ depending upon the organization context.

Based on the premise that leadership is context-dependent, this study presents a novel proposal that directive leadership is most suited to high-intensity organizational contexts. Even within these high-intensity contexts, such leadership, this paper posits will be targeted toward poor performers and employees with personality characteristics associated with poor and deviant performance.