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I begin by examining some ways in which organisations have attempted to improve their recruitment and selection procedures to minimise bias and unfair discrimination, and focus on the assessment centre as a potentially useful technique in this respect, especially for managerial selection. I go on to examine the assessment centre in more detail, including its origins, construction and uses, before discussing the strong evidence for its validity as a selection and assessment procedure. I then describe some recent British innovations in assessment centre design and practice, especially in its use for management and organisation development purposes, before discussing some of my own recent research, in collaboration with Ivan Robertson and Usha Rout, on participants' attitudes towards the use of assessment centres for selection and development purposes, including gender differences in attitudes.

Studies of distributed leadership (DL) are increasing, but are not systematic, often taking a normative position emphasizing the superiority of DL to solo leadership and using the term in an imprecise way. The purpose of this paper is to re-conceptualize DL and develop a systematic framework to identify dimensions of DL and their association with team effectiveness.

Based on a comprehensive review of existing literature, this paper develops a systematic framework of DL and team effectiveness by deriving eight research propositions.

Based on two perspectives, role space occupation and dependency of actions, the paper identifies four main dimensions of DL: shared, conjoint, fragmented and dispersed leadership, each of which represents a specific pattern of DL activities. A leader-task-context (LTC) framework is developed to analyze outcomes of DL dimensions in different settings. The eight propositions developed clearly identify where DL can be best applied, how particular configurations of DL affect team performance, and in what situations it is most effective.

This paper has made several contributions. First, the authors address the question of what constitutes DL by conceptualizing its dimensions. Second, the authors extend the DL literature by arguing and modeling how different contexts influence the fulfillment of DL. Third, the authors develop an analytical framework of DL – the “LTC” framework – to help build a foundation and guide further research on the relationships between DL and team performance.

Assessment centres as a total system, involving theoretical, practical and technical aspects, are focused on. Recent research findings on assessment centres, their processes and practices, are discussed and the implications for practice are examined.

A fair amount of evidence has been amassed concerning the reliability, validity and fairness of assessment centres when used for selection purposes. Selection‐oriented assessment centres provide valid predictions of managerial performance and success, and seem not to generate significant adverse impact against black or female candidates. Assessment centres increasingly, however, seem to be used for purposes other than immediate job selection. In particular, they are often used for the identification of long‐term managerial potential, and for the diagnosis of training and development needs, perhaps as a part of an overall audit of managerial strengths and weaknesses or as a part of a wider organisational development effort. Two studies of participants′ reactions to development centres are presented. These are followed by two longitudinal studies of the impact on a range of career and organisational attitudes held by participants of two development centres run by two major UK financial services organisations.

Most organisations attempting to implement equal opportunity with regard to race issues have concentrated on policy formulation, monitoring and training. Despite recent criticism, racism awareness training has been frequently adopted, often in isolation from developments in other human resource functions. However, strategic integration of all the HRM functions is necessary if equal opportunity objectives are to be achieved. Drawing on empirical research in assessment centres and on interorganisational collaboration, it is argued that this requires developments in recruitment, selection, training, career development, appraisal and reward functions and attention to issues of cultural change.

This article looks at the role of leadership development in the ethical leadership of English local government. Since the development of the ethical framework with the Local Government Act 2000 leadership has been seen to be increasingly important, although comparatively little consideration has been given to what this actually means in practice. This article seeks to investigate the situation in a number of ways. It will discuss the distinction between ‘ethics leadership’ and ‘ethical leadership’ and argue that the two are connected: leadership is both an external role and an internalised process. We will then argue that the ethics framework has created a new community of practice in which leadership is exercised by a relatively large group of stakeholders. In so doing, we will identify both members of the broader ethical community and also members of the internal ethical community: ie. those stakeholders within any given local authority. Different aspects of leadership and leadership development (LD) will then be investigated in relation to ethics as a community of practice and a model is presented that illustrates the modes of ethical leadership development.

Most approaches to the management of equal opportunity in the “race” field in the UK have emphasised policy development and communication, gender and ethnic monitoring, and attention to developing recruitment and selection practices that ensure a more representative workforce. Race training, especially racism awareness training, has often been given a key role. Organisation development (OD) approaches have not tended to be influential, despite the origins of OD in addressing practical problems of race relations. Drawing on empirical work with assessment procedures, in particular the use of developmental assessment centres, and on work on improving collaboration between nurses and social workers so as to enable women of Asian origin to enjoy greater access to hospital social work services, it is argued that such OD approaches as teambuilding, survey feedback and targeted career development are crucial to the management of equal opportunity, and to the management of cultural change.

The purpose of this paper is to review some uncertainties experienced by a group of CEs, and how they are assuaged through their participation in an executive development (ED) programme. These uncertainties relate both to their involvement in the programme as such, particularly during their early days of membership, and to their everyday work experience.

An in‐depth, longitudinal case study of an ED programme undertaken by the authors, using participant observation, semi‐structured interviews and documentary analysis.

Five main CE uncertainties are identified: knowledge, job/career, behavioural, personal, and contextual. The case study section of the paper outlines each of these uncertainties, and illustrates how they are being assuaged through the CE programme.

The usual caveats apply about generalising from a case study. On the other hand, the paper presents a rare detailed “insider” account of and reflection upon chief executives' experience of an ED programme, situating it in the wider contexts of their work and anxieties.

In the light of the uncertainties identified, a number of implications for the design and operation of executive development programmes are outlined and discussed.

New data is presented and analysed, linked to relevant themes in the ED/Leadership Development literatures.

Most discussions of knowledge, knowledge management and knowledge transfer, especially of human resource management (HRM) knowledge and its transfer, have failed to consider them in a cross‐cultural context. After a discussion of this issue, the paper analyses the migration or transfer of what is often claimed to be best practice in HRM from Western countries to developing, culturally different countries. It does this with specific reference to the case of HRM in Mauritius, especially in the Mauritian Civil Service, and uses this case not only to identify some of the limits to cross‐cultural knowledge management, but also to develop a more appropriate model of “knowledge migration” of HRM knowledge across cultures based on viable systems theory, including a future research agenda.

This paper explores the multifaceted nature of commitment in three industrial firms in Jordan. Furthermore, the study investigates the nature of organizational commitment using employees’ job performance and five demographic variables. The results confirm that organizational commitment is a three‐dimensional concept. The findings also uncover positive relationships between the global form of commitment and its three components on one hand, and job performance on the other hand. Moreover, organizational commitment and its three dimensions present positive and negative relationships with age, sex, education, job status, and organizational tenure variables. Implications for our understanding of the role of organizational commitment in the Middle East are also discussed.