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Articulation of a vision is commonly held to be a critical component of theories of outstanding leadership – both transformational and charismatic leadership. Although there is reason to suspect that vision contributes to leader performance, less is known about the nature and origin of viable visions. In the present chapter, we argue that leaders’ visions can be viewed as a prescriptive mental model reflecting beliefs about the optimal functioning of an organization. To test this proposition, outstanding leaders possessing two contrasting types of prescriptive mental models were identified: ideologues whose models stress the maintenance of extant standards and charismatics whose models stress adaptive change. These two types of prescriptive mental models were associated with distinct patterns of leader behavior in a sample of notable historic leaders. The implications of these findings are discussed with respect to current theories of outstanding leadership.

This paper sets forth a theory on how the articulation of a salient vision on the part of a team leader enhances team effectiveness in terms of innovativeness, efficacy, and performance. In addition to vision salience – determining, as it were, one dimension of successful leadership influence – this study postulates another dimension of leadership influence, i.e., self-sacrificial leader behavior. A leader's self-sacrificial behavior is shown to play a key role in communicating the credibility of her vision to the team, a critical factor on the basis of which team members may decide to commit themselves to its implementation. Drawing upon the roles of salient vision and self-sacrifice, this study hypothesizes a synergistic effect of leadership on team effectiveness when a salient vision by a team leader is conjoined with her self-sacrifice. The study also hypothesizes that a leader's self-sacrifice and salient team vision are more prominent in a collectivistic team climate, and predicts that a collectivistic team environment will be more conducive in increasing a leader's influence through vision salience and self-sacrifice than an individualistic team climate. The hypotheses were tested in a sample of teams (n=53) at the team level. The results support the positive moderating effects of vision with sacrifice, vision with collectivism, and sacrifice with collectivism, respectively, on team performance. In addition, vision salience and self-sacrifice exert their main effects on team innovativeness and team efficacy. This paper provides a detailed discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

This chapter explores distributed leadership in volunteer multistakeholder groups tackling complex problems, focusing on community organizing practices to bridge the gap between health and health care in Columbia, South Carolina. Columbia faces increasing chronic disease, high rates of uninsured, unequal access to healthcare services, and rising costs. Regional leaders periodically tackled these problems together but faced challenges common to multistakeholder groups. In 2010, leaders from Columbia partnered with the authors in a learning enterprise to find new, more sustainable ways to address these challenges. Together we adapted a community organizing approach to develop distributed leadership skills necessary to overcome the challenges of volunteer multistakeholder groups and transform the health system in a local area. In the first year, teams provided health screenings to over 1,000 residents; over 3,000 residents exercised leadership to improve community health; over 5,000 residents pledged to improve their health. Clinic hours were extended; new health coaches focused on primary care and wellness programs. Providers and payers committed to reinvesting a share of savings in the community, which has a voice in their use. We show that developing distributed leadership via community organizing offers an approach to solving seemingly intractable community problems.

This chapter offers an integrated framework for the design of educational leadership preparation programs that situate disability in the vision of social justice leadership (SJL) and equity for all students. We examine the extent to which current standards for building-level administrators inform their ability to implement programs for students with disabilities. Utilizing Theoharis’ (2007) definition of social justice leadership (SJL), we propose a broader framework for SJL that accounts for students with disabilities and present four key components upon which the broader framework of SJL rests. We align the updated standards for building-level leaders with the professional standards for special education administrators and describe how the skill sets for special education leaders complement and inform the design of leadership preparation programs to support candidates’ ability to create, sustain, and implement programs that meet the needs of all children. Finally, we argue for an integrated framework of professional standards that provides a more comprehensive set of skills necessary for meeting the needs of each and every student in the school, and we provide recommendations for leadership preparation programs to achieve this integration.

We argue that entrepreneurship emerged as a celebrated global cultural ideology during the neoliberal era; it is a product of the intensified celebration of the individual as the source of progress. As a result of these cultural roots, contemporary ideas of entrepreneurship are constituted by intertwined dimensions that reflect the sacred status of individuals; namely, vision and leadership. We illustrate our arguments about the expanded discursive celebration of entrepreneurship and its dimensions using the empirical example of changes in the content of Harvard Business Review articles over time. Our analysis of 13,117 abstracts and titles over the period 1925–2019 show an early focus on concrete industry settings, followed by a period dominated by formal organization and management, and then the rise of a focus on entrepreneurship, vision, and leadership since the 1990s. As a cultural trend, the discursive valorization of entrepreneurship is disconnected from the typical entrepreneurial experience (of failure) and from actual founding rates of new ventures (which decline in recent years). Moreover, the shift from liberal to neoliberal cultural ideologies supported a fundamental transformation away from formal management and organization and toward leadership and entrepreneurship. If the cultural foundations shift again, as recent global declines in democracy and trade suggest may be occurring, we are likely to see changes in the nature of the favored models for structuring economy and society.