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This research contributes to understanding emotional and political challenges experienced by middle managers as they work with contradictions inherent in leading change from the middle. Focus group data from 27 such middle managers based in the UK indicate that, once they have been assigned roles and tasks for leading change, underlying dynamics and processes influence the degree to which they become capable (or unable) to shape and navigate that change. A proposed conceptual framework, illustrated by a case vignette, provides a base of existing knowledge for understanding and explaining these dynamics. We also construct a model of the key tensions that are integral to middle managers leading change. A further contribution to practice involves elaborating the importance of collaborative effort across hierarchical and vertical boundaries, despite emotional and political tensions that undermine middle managers’ roles as change agents.

This chapter expands the limited work on leadership in the digital age and considers how the relative inclusivity of organizational identity as well as its corresponding organizational scripts affects who performs “leading tasks,” formal leaders or committed supporters, in two social movement groups. Drawing on a random sample of 5% of Facebook posts from committed supporters and 1% of Facebook posts from group administrators associated with March Against Monsanto (MAM) and Occupy Monsanto (OM), two groups that have shared general goals but different organizational identities, we find that the clarity of an organization’s script shapes who performs leading tasks and how they perform them. MAM, which has an exclusive organizational identity and relatively defined script, encouraged supporters to engage with one another directly and perform a broad range of leading tasks even as it reinforced the group’s hierarchy. OM, which has an inclusive organization identity and relatively undefined script, had less supporter engagement. Absent scripts regarding the rules of participation, OM’s committed supporter primarily shared information with other site users, but rarely engaged them directly. We conclude with a discussion of our results and outline additional avenues for analyzing leadership in the digital age.

The purpose of this chapter is to enable interviewers to understand how they can elicit interviewee-generated data that are not ‘muddied’ by the researcher. The chapter has three main components. First, we discuss the authorship of data and illustrate how questions may unwittingly affect this authorship. Second, we outline the problem with ‘leading’ questions and introduce three features of leading questions that are relevant to researchers from different research epistemologies. Third, we introduce the ‘cleanness rating’, which is a way to categorise how questions are used in an interview according to the extent to which they are leading or ‘clean’. We conclude with the difference this can make for researchers, including enhancing the capacity for interviewers to reflect on their practice and making their role in the generation of interview data more transparent.

Since the transportation sector plays an important role in the initiation and propagation of business cycles, in previous chapters we developed output [transportation services output (TSI)] and other indicators to construct an index of coincident indicators for the U.S. transportation sector to identify its current state. We defined the reference cycle, including both business and growth cycles for this sector beginning in 1979 using both the conventional National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) method and modern time series models. A one-to-one correspondence between cycles in the transportation sector and those in the aggregate economy was found; however, both business and growth cycles of transportation often start earlier and end later than those of the overall economy. Although the knowledge and inference based on coincident indicators can serve as an important reference for planning and other decision-making processes, these indicators are also subject to substantial lag due to data collection, processing and revision, underscoring the need to develop a system of leading indicators for the industry. Thus, in this chapter, we construct an index of leading indicators for the transportation sector as a forecasting tool using rigorous statistical procedures.

As the role of senior school leaders has become more complex, the leadership of improvement, innovation and change has been distributed to middle leaders. However, middle leaders are often not prepared for the shift to strategic thinking and leading. This chapter provides an overview of what it means to think and lead strategically when leading from the middle. Then, the theory is translated into practical templates and tools that can be employed by a middle leader. The context of this chapter is leading a faculty in a secondary school; however, the ideas and examples provided are easily translated to any middle leading context.

This chapter explores the unique role of leadership in organizational innovation. Drawing from the investment theory of creativity (Sternberg & Lubart, 1995), we show that organizational innovation begins with a leadership decision. Based on a review of the creativity, organizational, and leadership literatures, the key components of organizational innovation are examined from individual, group, and organization-wide perspectives. Leading innovation is conceptualized as a special case of leading organizational change, which requires creative leadership skills applied to social systems. Establishing an organizational environment that supports innovation in the current market environment increases systemic paradoxes that must be managed by leaders. We conclude that leading innovation increases the creative demand on the leadership system, which requires leaders who have a developed understanding of the process of innovation and its environmental requirements.

This chapter explores how industrial PhD students are engaged in authentic leadership processes while coping with challenges through self-leadership. The authors illustrate how self-leadership can be a helpful approach to managing the leading-and-being-led dilemma. They argue that self-leadership is a process of goal achievement in collaboration with key stakeholders and, therefore, an important aspect of authentic leadership. The authors identify four aspects of self-leadership that influence authenticity: roles, resources, relations and results. Kringelum, Mortensen and Holmgren call for research into the emergence of self-leadership and authentic leadership, the leadership capabilities required and the double-sidedness and dilemmas inherent in such emergences across different contexts.