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In this chapter, two academics from the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan collaborate with the President of their university to present their experiences and ideas about positive strategic leadership. Positive strategic leadership is derived from the juxtaposition of ideas from the growing stream of research on positive organizational scholarship with what is already known from the literature on strategic leadership. The authors embed new views into current theoretical perspectives on strategic leadership to provide an integrative overview and use the president's experiences during the nationally followed Affirmative Action cases as a vehicle for illustrating five themes: (1) A lifetime of experiences shapes who you are, (2) issues commonly choose you before you choose them, (3) begin with a purpose in mind, (4) appreciate divergent views, and (5) be a beacon for the future. Additionally, the authors provide practitioners with some “takeaways” on positive strategic leadership.

As CEOs now communicate with a wide variety of stakeholders, it has become increasingly difficult to ensure that the intended meaning of their messages is received. Boas Shamir focuses on how leaders engage in the management of meanings in order to (1) justify their actions and the changes they introduce to the organization; (2) recruit followers and motivate members of the organization to support their actions; and (3) create shared perceptions and interpretations so that members’ actions are guided by a common definition of the situation. Heike Bruch, Boas Shamir, and Galit Eilam-Shamir show how the leader of a large Swiss-based company actively managed the views, interpretations and energy of more than 100,000 employees through weekly e-mail letters when the company faced grave financial difficulties. Gretchen Spreitzer, Mary Sue Coleman, and Daniel Gruber show how an incoming university president dealt with an ongoing lawsuit regarding the university's use of affirmative action in its admissions processes and worked with various stakeholders to firmly establish the university's identity.

The chapter intervenes in the debate among scholars of legal impact about the extent to which law can change society. Reformers, aims are frustrated when targets of law respond with resistance to court decisions, especially where mechanisms to enforce case law are weak (Hall, 2010; Klarman, 2006; Rosenberg, 1991). Even when law’s targets abide by a law, however, other important studies have demonstrated that organizations can leverage ambiguous language to craft policies in compliance that further their aims (Barnes & Burke, 2006; Edelman, 2016; Lipson, 2001). This chapter examines a case in which a state constitutional provision banning affirmative action was written in relatively unambiguous language and one of its targets announced its intention to comply. Through extensive interviews with University officials, this chapter examines the University of Michigan’s use of financial, technological, and political resources to follow the language of the law while still blunting its impact. These findings suggest that to understand law’s impact on society, we need to reconceive compliance and not only take the clarity of the law and its enforcement mechanisms into account but also attend to the goals, resources, and practices of the groups it targets.

A key question with which many senior executives struggle concerns the development of future generations of leaders throughout their organizations. Because these senior leaders realize that they cannot personally groom these next generations of leaders, they have started to explore what conditions will make the leaders of the future “emerge.” They face the challenge of creating conditions that simultaneously provide opportunities for people to demonstrate their leadership potential and that keep the current business running well. Day, in Chapter 2 of Part 1 of the book, proposed the social architecture most conducive to such leader development. His social architecture has three main pillars: low power distance, psychological safety, and a learning orientation. The two application chapters in this part of the book presented two ways of building such a social architecture for leader development.

A key distinction, mentioned by Dubin (1979, p. 227), is “leadership at a distance.” When Dubin was writing, there was little research on this topic. More recently, however, there has been an upsurge in leadership-at-a-distance work. We see a major review by Antonakis and Atwater (2002), following an earlier one by Napier and Ferris (1993), along with work by authors such as Shamir (1995) and Waldman and Yammarino (1999).

John Antonakis (PhD, Walden University) is professor of Organizational Behavior at the Faculty of Management and Economics of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. His research is centered on individual-difference antecedents of effective leadership, the measurement of leadership, and the links between context and leadership as applied to neocharismatic and transformational leadership models, and the development of leadership.

The authors led an interdisciplinary team that developed recommendations for building a “culture of environmental sustainability” at the University of Michigan (UM), and the purpose of this paper is to provide guidance on how other institutions might promote pro‐environmental behaviors on their campuses.

The authors synthesize research on fostering environmental behavior, analyze how current campus sustainability efforts align with that research, and describe how they developed research‐based recommendations to increase environmental sustainability on the UM campus.

Analyses of prior research suggest that there are five factors that influence individuals' pro‐environment behaviors: knowledge of issues; knowledge of procedures; social incentives; material incentives; and prompts/reminders. Given these factors, UM should pursue three types of activities to support the development of pro‐environment behaviors: education, engagement, and assessment.

The specific recommendations in this report are for the University of Michigan. However, other institutions interested in fostering a culture of environmental sustainability might benefit from undertaking similar comprehensive assessments of how they could support community members' development of pro‐environment behavior and knowledge.

The paper builds on prior research to offer a new vision for how to develop a culture of environmental sustainability on a large university campus.

The paper aims to focus on organizational and institutional strategies, including a case study from the University of Tennessee, concerned with recruiting librarians from diverse backgrounds.

Programs from the Association for Research Libraries, the American Library Association, OCLC, and IFLA for recruiting librarians from diverse backgrounds are reviewed. An in‐depth case study of the University of Tennessee Diversity Libraries Residency Program is included to provide a detailed example of a successful program and its contributions locally and to the research library field.

The paper provides strategies and a catalyst for other organizations and institutions to develop robust recruitment programs for a diverse workforce in academic libraries.

This paper lays out strategies for robust diversity recruiting activities at the organizational and institutional level using the University of Tennessee's experiences as a basis for discussion.