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This study examined the relationship of soft skills gained to the amount of leadership education completed by graduates from the Department of Leadership studies at a Midwestern regional university. Those who received no leadership education were compared with those who received a leadership certificate and those who received a bachelor’s degree in Organizational Leadership. The study provided insight into whether academic leadership education enhances graduate’s soft skill development and assessed the impact this had on their perception of teamwork proficiency. Results indicate that a bachelor’s degree in leadership does make limited significant changes in graduates’ soft skill proficiency as compared with graduates who received a leadership certificate. Multiple significant changes were found in graduates with bachelor’s degrees as compared with graduates who received no leadership coursework.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how legitimacy is gained, maintained or repaired through direct action with salient stakeholders and/or through external reporting, by using a number of empirical case vignettes within a single case study organisation.

The study investigates a foreign affiliate of a large multinational organisation involved in an environmentally sensitive industry. Data collection included semi-structured interviews with 26 participants, organisational reports and participation in the organisation’s annual environmental management seminar and a stakeholder engagement meeting.

Four vignettes featuring environmental issues illustrate the complexity of organisational responses. Issue visibility, stakeholder salience and stakeholder interconnectedness influence a company’s action to manage legitimacy. In the short-term, environmental issues which affected salient stakeholders resulted in swift and direct action to protect pragmatic legitimacy, but external reporting did not feature in legitimacy management efforts. Highly visible issues to the public, regulators and the media, however, resulted in direct action together with external reporting to manage wider stakeholder perceptions. External reporting was used superficially, along with a broad suite of communication strategies, to gain legitimacy in the long-term decision about the company’s future in New Zealand.

This paper outlines how episodic encounters to manage strategic legitimacy with salient stakeholders in the short-term are theoretically distinct, but nonetheless linked to continual efforts to maintain institutional legitimacy. Case vignettes highlight how pragmatic legitimacy via dispositional legitimacy can be managed with direct action in the short-term to influence a limited range of salient stakeholders. The way external reporting features in legitimacy management is limited, although this has predominantly been the focus of prior research. Only where an environmental incident damages legitimacy to a larger number of stakeholders is external reporting also used to buttress community support.

The concept of legitimacy is comprehensively applied, linking the strategic and institutional arms of legitimacy and illustrating how episodic actions are taken to manage legitimacy in the short-term with continual efforts to manage legitimacy in the long-term. Stakeholder salience and networks are brought in as novel theoretical extensions to provide a deeper understanding of the interrelationships between these key concepts with a unique case study.

In the world of public school education everything depends on good leadership. Sadly, many of our schools administrators can't differentiate the difference between leading and managing; far too many of them don't know the first thing about fundamental leadership principles. In short, they don't understand the fundamentals of Mission Oriented Leadership, the need for top-down leadership, or the critical differences between leadership and management. A cursory review of the selection process for school administrators, and the graduate level curriculums for those who seek a degree in school administration, clearly supports the contention that policymakers and educators are under the misconception that anyone can be taught or trained to be an effective school leader. Nothing could be further from the truth.