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The purpose of this paper is to test the proposition that business strategy affects leadership functions, skills, traits, and styles, and to assess the implications of these effects for the practice of both leadership and strategic planning.

This is an empirical study based on over 450 responses to an online survey. Continuous rating scales allowed the use of regression analysis to test the impacts of different strategies on leadership.

The results provide strong empirical evidence that Product (Differentiation vs Low Cost strategies), Best Value, and Blue Ocean strategies have significant effects on leadership. Market strategies (Broad vs Niche strategies) have limited impacts. The greater complexity of Product, Best Value, and Blue Ocean strategies underlie these findings.

This study explores the effects of strategy on leadership. Future studies need to explore if these effects are moderated by external, competitive conditions, and if strategy mediates the impacts of leadership on organizational performance.

The practical implications of these findings are that leaders must adjust their behavior and leadership styles to effectively implement alternative strategies, and planners must assess their organization’s leadership capabilities when formulating strategy.

There have been numerous studies of the impacts of external/internal conditions on leadership, but this is one of the first studies of the critical impacts of strategy on leadership.

The purpose of this paper is to examine knowledge of strategy within the field of educational administration. It is intended to be the basis for future empirical research and inquiry into strategy in education by suggesting alternate ways of defining and researching strategy.

The study examines the contemporary context of educational administration, the evolution of strategy as an educational construct, its definition and need within educational administration. Using this information the author identifies key conceptual and methodological issues in current research.

The paper finds that knowledge of strategy in education is incomplete and muddled because research and writing in the field have approached strategy from a narrow and conceptually flawed position.

The advancement of knowledge in the area will only advance with alternate conceptualisations and methodological approaches.

Rather than merely review literature, this paper proposes a redefinition of strategy as an educational administration construct, focusing on key features not words and actions. The hope is that fellow scholars and practitioners will continue to question and focus on the key features of strategy and the issues that confront them.

Modern academic links between leadership and strategy were forged in the early 1960s with the heightened application of strategy to business planning. These links were soon dissolved by the strategy consultants who came to dominate the field of business strategy in the mid-1960s. The consultants dismissed the role of leadership in strategic planning in favor of objective analyses of the external environment that eliminated any need for leadership skills, judgment, values, or intuition. Failures to implement strategy in the 1980s led to limited roles for leaders in implementing strategies they had no role in creating, but the gulf between leadership and strategy has steadily widened.

This paper traces the consequences of this widening gulf for teaching leadership and strategy in the classroom. It explores how an integrated approach to teaching leadership and strategy would better prepare today’s students for the challenges they will face as future business leaders.

The purpose of this study is to examine the performance consequences of misalignment among business strategy, organizational configurations and management accounting systems (MAS).

The authors conducted a questionnaire survey to collect data and test the hypotheses developed in this study. The authors sent the questionnaires to the accounting and finance managers of the manufacturing companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange. The authors received 259 responses from a total of 579 questionnaires sent or a 44.73% response rate. This study excludes 36 responses for further analyzes due to incomplete responses (five responses) and responses from lower-level employees (31 responses). The remaining 223 responses are used for statistical analyzes.

This study hypothesizes and finds that misalignments among business strategy, leadership style, organizational culture and MAS are negatively associated with both financial and non-financial performance.

The study has three limitations. First, the authors intentionally collect data from the manufacturing industry to minimize the effect of data heterogeneity. To improve the generalizability of the study, future research might consider using data from other industries. Second, the study measures business strategy based on respondents’ perception of their companies’ strategy using indicators representing either product differentiation or cost leadership strategy. Future studies might use different ways of measuring business strategy using more objective empirical proxies such as research and development expenditures or premium price capability. Finally, this study conducts a survey and measures all the variables in a single period. Future studies might use a longitudinal approach to investigate the evolution of companies’ strategies and their impact on leadership styles, organizational commitment and MAS.

The results of the study will help companies in their search for senior executives, in building their organizational culture and in implementing their MAS. The study suggests that product differentiation companies should search for transformational leaders that empower their subordinates to take initiative and encourage innovative ideas in performing their tasks. In regard to MAS, the results suggest that product differentiation companies should implement broad focus MAS that emphasize the balance between financial and non-financial factors. By contrast, cost leadership companies should search for transactional leaders who emphasize on completing tasks on hand effectively and efficiently. In regard to MAS, the findings suggest that cost leadership companies will benefit more from using narrow focus MAS such as formal planning and budgeting, variance analyzes and cost-volume-profit analyzes.

The findings of the study suggest that product differentiation companies should build a flexible culture that encourages subordinates to take the risk and effectively manage opportunities and challenges through changes and innovation. Furthermore, cost leadership companies should build a controlled culture that promotes adherence to policies and procedures to minimize costs and increase efficiency.

This paper introduces to the management and accounting literature the concept of fit among competitive strategy, leadership style, organizational culture and MAS and uses the two-stage method proposed by Ittner and Larcker (2001) to measure the degree of misalignment among business strategy and its contextual variables and, in turn, examines the impacts of the misalignment on financial and non-financial performance.

It is widely agreed that top management's leadership behavior is a source for achieving and sustaining competitive advantage. Very few research studies analyzed the prevalence of transformational leadership style in the manufacturing environment, and importantly, the associations between transformational behaviors and manufacturing strategies in connection with flexibility, quality, delivery, and cost are not yet deeply explored in the literature. In this direction, efforts are initiated to explain the relationships between transformational leadership behaviors and manufacturing strategies in this study. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A systematic literature review was conducted by analyzing all traditional and contemporary research studies in the fields of leadership and operations management in order to examine the link between transformational leadership and manufacturing strategies comprising of flexibility, quality, delivery, and cost strategy.

It was found from the review that top-level leaders exhibit transformational leadership behaviors while implementing manufacturing strategies in their firms. In particular, transformational leaders are capable to transform the production system into flexible system, and in addition, they develop new production processes for manufacturing both new and old products. Such leaders ensure quality in all the levels of production process and support to speed up order delivery process with the help of technology. Finally, they also concentrate on reducing cost growth.

This study is bounded by its focus on Bass and Avolio's transformational leadership behaviors and Ward and Duray's manufacturing strategies comprising of flexibility, quality, delivery, and cost strategy.

This study shows that transformational leaders, in the manufacturing environment, use manufacturing strategy as a tool to improve operational performance. Thus, they have potential to achieve and sustain competitive advantage through formulation of manufacturing strategy.

To achieve business success in a competitive market, hospitality firms are urged to search for different ways to enhance the firms' innovation capabilities. Drawing on dynamic capability theory, this study examined the role of entrepreneurial leadership in promoting product and process innovation through the mediating effect of innovation strategy and the moderating effect of knowledge acquisition.

Data were collected through a time-lagged (two waves, two months apart) survey from 137 managers and 322 employees working in 103 Vietnamese hotels. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test the proposed hypotheses in our conceptual model.

The findings revealed that entrepreneurial leadership is positively associated with both product and process innovation. In addition, these relationships are mediated by innovation strategy. While the relationship between innovation strategy and product innovation is moderated by knowledge acquisition, evidence was not obtained for the moderation effect of knowledge acquisition on the link between innovation strategy and process innovation.

The findings advance innovation and leadership literature by identifying the roles of entrepreneurial leaders in managing an organization as a dynamic system and developing appropriate innovation strategy to adapt to rapidly changing environments. In addition, this study offers important implications for hospitality firms that are investing in innovation activities and are seeking ways to promote the firms' innovation of products and processes.

The purpose of this paper is to reveal the mediating role of leadership style on the relationship between strategy and company performance.

The study uses empirical data gathered from top managers in a stratified sample of 476 Danish private businesses.

The results show the mediating effects of leadership styles on strategic performance. In particular, both supportive and directive leadership styles partially mediate the effect of the differentiation strategy, while the supportive leadership style displays a stronger mediating effect than the directive one. The multi-group analysis shows the moderating impact of the manager’s tenure, managerial level, strategy clarity, industry and business environment risk.

The study is limited by its nature and the specificity of the national context in which it was conducted. In this vein, the evidence collected here can be enlarged and complemented by having access to panel data or the generalization of some results to neighboring or other developed countries.

Several implications of the findings for managerial practices are discussed.

There are very few discussions of the mediating effect of leadership style between strategy and performance. The paper fills the gap by examining the role of leadership style planning on the relationship between those two variables in Denmark.

This paper seeks to address the question: what is the relationship of culture to self‐leadership?

In an exploratory study, 74 US and 44 Chinese undergraduates rated their cultural beliefs and self‐leadership strategies. After four‐weeks in which a self‐leadership intervention was utilized, respondents contrasted positive aspects of their professional objectives with obstacles that impeded the realization of their goals.

The intervention did not influence participants' self‐leadership strategies, as measured two weeks after the intervention (p > 0.11). Repeated MANOVA measures revealed that the US group expressed higher levels of self‐leadership than the Chinese group during the three phases of the study (p < 0.001). Surprisingly, Chinese students held higher individualistic characteristics than the US group (p=0.009).

This research provides some insight into the similarities and differences between people from different cultures as to their use of self‐leadership strategies. Further research using more robust validation methodology is warranted to confirm the measurements of the study at issue here.

Managers will benefit from becoming aware that individuals' cultural characteristics influence their use and development of self‐leadership strategies.

This study makes a significant contribution to the body of research on self‐leadership. The study provides what may be the first glimpse of the volitional and self‐awareness components of self‐leadership strategies within the native Chinese population, and provides a backdrop with a US population for contrast.

This study aims to examine the effects of international competitive strategies, i.e. cost leadership and differentiation, on export (market share and strategic) performance. This study further explores the roles of exploitative and exploratory organizational learning in the relationships between international competitive strategies and export performances. To fill research gaps, this study intends to provide guidance on how varied exploitative/exploratory organizational learning and cost leadership/differentiation strategy combinations would affect export performance. The outcomes of this study provide a new match and mis-match conceptualization to extant international competitive strategy and organizational learning literature.

This study selected New Zealand (NZ) exporting as the research setting because exporting plays such a vital role in NZ’s economy and NZ exporting firms have long been highly competitive in international markets (e.g. meat and dairy exporters), with the primary data collected through surveys conducted in 2010 and 2013. This study adopted a three-year lagged performance approach.

Cost leadership strategy has a positive effect on market share performance. This effect is enhanced by exploitative learning but dampened by exploratory learning. Cost leadership also has a positive effect on strategic performance, which is not affected by exploitative and exploratory learning. Differentiation strategy bears no relation to market share and strategic performance, even allowing for exploitative and exploratory learning. Collectively, the contingent role of organizational learning in the international competitive strategies and export performance framework is far more comprehensive than was expected.

This study reveals that a match between cost leadership strategy and exploitative learning may result in a superior market share. The configuration of differentiation strategy and exploitative learning and the integration of cost leadership strategy and exploratory learning are suggested as mis-matches, as these combinations would not lead to any significant and positive market share and strategic performance. Unexpectedly, the co-alliance of differentiation strategy and explorative learning is not suggested as a match, as it does not result in a superior market share and strategic performance. This latter outcome suggests that the differentiation strategy-export performance link may be stimulated by other moderating factors (e.g. business managerial ties).

While choosing an appropriate international competitive strategy, managers may use cost leadership over differentiation strategy to achieve successful export performance in both the market share and strategic perspectives. Export managers focusing on cost leadership strategy may further implement exploitative learning instead of explorative learning, when market share is vital. Meanwhile, they may note that explorative learning may not have a moderating effect on enhancing strategic performance through cost leadership. These points signify that exploitation of existing knowledge may be more effective than exploration of new knowledge for market share expansion when cost leadership strategy is devoted to exporting activities. Differentiation strategy, however, does not influence market share and strategic performance in exporting, even with an alignment of exploitative/exploratory learning. Managers are urged to pay attention to the mis-match of differentiation strategy and organizational learning when market share and strategic performance are the priorities in export performance evaluation.

This study contributes to the organizational learning literature by providing a new match and mis-match conceptualization relating to international competitive strategy and export performance. The new framework provides directions on when firms should use organizational learning to enhance their competitive strategies (a match scenario) and when they should not use it (a mis-match scenario). This study broadens the existing research that has mainly focused on alignment combinations such as organizational learning-internationalization strategy and organizational learning-social network.

In this study, self-leadership strategy serves as a self-regulatory mediating mechanism of individual differences in predicting individual creativity because it is related to actions intended to lead their own goal-directed activities. The purpose of this paper is to explore the boundary conditions of the effect of regulatory focus on employee self-leadership behaviors.

Considering the contextual influence, cross-level moderating effect of empowering leadership on the relationship between the promotion (prevention) focus and self-leadership has been examined. The research data were collected from 441 employees of 65 work teams from three software companies located in Northern Taiwan. A time-lagged design by implementing three time surveys was applied to minimize potential problems of cross-sectional design. At Time 1, employees completed the measures of promotion focus, prevention focus, empowering leadership, and individual-level control variables. At Time 2, employees reported the extent of their self-leadership at work. In the final survey, team leaders assessed the individual employee creativity.

This study concludes several findings. When self-leading behavior-focused strategies are considered as mediators, the indirect relationships that promotion focus and prevention focus had with individual creativity were confirmed. As an influential team-level indicator, empowering leadership could moderate the relatedness between employees promotion-focused strategies and behavior-focused strategies that positively influenced on individual creativity.

In this study, responding to the call by De Stobbeleir et al. (2011) to examine how employees actively manage their creative performance, the author zoomed in on self-leadership strategies and how these strategies relate to actual creative performance.