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Business ethics provide a potent source of competitive advantage, placing increasing pressure on organizations to create and maintain an ethical workforce. Nonetheless, ethical breaches continue to permeate corporate life, suggesting that there is something missing from how we conceptualize and institutionalize organizational ethics. The current effort seeks to fill this void in two ways. First, we introduce an extended ethical framework premised on sensemaking in organizations. Within this framework, we suggest that multiple individual, organizational, and societal factors may differentially influence the ethical sensemaking process. Second, we contend that human resource management plays a central role in sustaining workplace ethics and explore the strategies through which human resource personnel can work to foster an ethical culture and spearhead ethics initiatives. Future research directions applicable to scholars in both the ethics and human resources domains are provided.

Scholars continue to debate whether planning, in fact, contributes to creativity and innovation. In this chapter, we argue that planning is critical to innovation and will contribute to the generation of viable new ideas. Effective planning, however, must be based on an incremental approach involving a viable portfolio of projects. The implications of this model for the management of innovation at the organizational, group, and individual levels are discussed. Potential new directions for research are considered, along with the model's implications for the management of creative ventures.

In this chapter, we view team cohesion from a more generalized perspective of team dynamics, and focus on four leadership models for understanding these dynamics in teams in the context of the Mars Mission. Given the long duration of the mission with periods of no or intermittent communication and support, isolation and confinement, and the risk of great physical and psychological harm, having tailored leadership models for this unique team dynamics context is critical. And yet, many of these same dangerous conditions occur in other contexts such as for first responders, crisis management teams, Special Forces operations, and scientific exploration teams in extreme environments. As such, building from a model of leadership and team dynamics for dangerous contexts, for a long-duration space mission involving both Mission Control and the Astronaut Crew, these models of leadership and team dynamics include a collective-level approach for scientists and engineers, a primarily crew-based socioemotional approach, a leader-level crisis/emergency approach, and a dyadic or sortie-level approach. Implications of these models for effective leadership in building and maintaining team dynamics and cohesion for the Mars Mission and across a variety of other dangerous and extreme contexts are discussed.

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.

Theories of outstanding, historically notable, leadership have traditionally emphasized charisma. Recent research, however, suggests that charisma may represent only one pathway to outstanding leadership. Outstanding leadership may also emerge from ideological and pragmatic leadership. In this article, we examine the conditions influencing the emergence and performance of charismatic, ideological, and pragmatic leaders. It is argued that different conditions operating at the environmental, organizational, group, and individual levels influence the emergence and performance of each of these three types of leaders. Implications for understanding the origins and impact of charismatic, ideological, and pragmatic leaders are discussed.

This chapter provides an in-depth understanding of the cognitive processes that facilitate creativity from a multi-level perspective. Because cognitive processes are viewed as residing within the individual and as an individual-level phenomenon, it is not surprising that a plethora of research has focused on various cognitive processes involved in creative production at the individual level and the factors that may facilitate or hinder the successful application of these processes. Of course, individuals do not exist in a vacuum, and many organizations are utilizing teams and groups to facilitate creative problem solving. We therefore extend our knowledge from the individual to the team level and group level, providing more than 50 propositions for testing and discussing their implications for future research.

Recognizing the impact of innovation on organizational performance, scholars from a number of disciplines have sought to identify the conditions that make innovation possible. Although these studies have served to identify a number of key variables, the relationship between these variables and innovation is complex. In this chapter, we argue that the apparent complexity of these relationships may be attributed to cross-level differences in the requirements for innovation and the existence of complex interactions among the phenomena operating at a given level of analysis. The implications of this multi-level perspective for understanding how innovation occurs in organizational settings are discussed.

In their chapter, Mumford, Bedell-Avers, and Hunter (this volume) confront the nontrivial issue of whether creativity and innovation can be planned, and proceed to support an affirmative answer with a well-organized treatment of the applied research literature relevant to this topic. They outline and reference an incremental approach to this planning process at multiple levels of analysis (organization, group, and individual), and present both a state-of-the-art review and a general, normative approach to this daunting challenge. In reviewing this chapter, this commentary addresses what is worthwhile and important in their presentation that students of this field should find noteworthy. Next, it takes up the issue of what is underdeveloped or missing that would fit nicely into Mumford et al.'s framework, or might provide food for thought to those wanting to go forward with research on the topic of planning for innovation. Finally, it presents conclusions about this topic and the field in general that were stimulated by Mumford et al.'s chapter, including the role of information technology and knowledge management for innovation planning.

Plans and planning have a long and checkered history. In their commentaries, Ettlie (this volume) and Miller and Osborn (this volume) take rather different views on the need for planning in innovative projects. In this commentary, we take the position that innovation requires constraints. These constraints induce certain risk factors that warrant attention, such as oversystemization. By the same token, they produce conditions, including social conditions that make sustained innovation possible. Based on these observations, some potential directions for future research are discussed.