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The relationship of leadership to culture is explored in this study. The study was designed to determine if significant relationships existed between specific leadership practices and different cultural profiles. The treatment for this correlational study consisted of 15 teams with an assigned formal leader for each team. Significant relationships were found between the variables in 14 of the 20 relationships examined. It was concluded that different leadership practices resulted in different cultures.

To meet the demands for effective leadership, leadership educators should integrate high-impact practices for students to develop, practice, and evaluate their leadership knowledge, skills, and abilities. The purpose of this application brief is to describe how undergraduate leadership teaching assistant (ULTA) experiences can be a high- impact practice for undergraduates studying leadership. The ULTA experience at Texas A&M University in the Agricultural Leadership, Education, and Communications (ALEC) department was examined using the six characteristics purported by Kuh (2008) to describe effective high- impact practices: considerable time and effort to purposeful tasks, interaction with faculty and peers on substantive matters, increased likelihood of experiencing diversity, frequent feedback on performance, application of learning to different settings, and better understanding of self in relation to others. The ULTA experience can be a high-impact practice that provides leadership students with the opportunities to apply their leadership learning to their teaching roles and reflect on their experience to gain new leadership perspectives. Recommendations for implementing this practice include: purposeful interactions with ULTAs, feedback and assessment of experience, training, and a rigorous recruitment process.

School library media specialists (SLMSs) often struggle with assuming leadership roles. Discrepancies existed in perceptions of SLMSs of their leadership preparedness, their opportunities to exert leadership, and their assumption of leadership roles. The purpose of this quantitative study was to explore the perceptions of SLMSs regarding their instructional leadership and to examine the extent to which they practiced instructional leadership. The study was designed to determine whether there were differences between SLMSs perceptions of the importance of their leadership roles and their opportunities to practice those roles. The results of the study indicated that SLMSs perceived all of the leadership roles to be more important than they were able to carry out in practice and that supportive administrators were the most essential factor in providing SLMSs the opportunity to practice and expand their roles as instructional leaders.

Based on a critique of reductive understandings of physicality, this chapter explores the significance of embodied materiality, the artefactual physical, the role of the living body and embodiment in relation to ‘intra and inter’ practices of leadership from a phenomenological perspective. Using a phenomenological and cross-disciplinary approach, issues of an embodied physicality in leadership are systematically explored and implications discussed beyond physicalist empiricism and meta-physical idealism. Furthermore, the chosen phenomenological approach reveals problematising limitations of naturalist and constructionist approaches.

Following Merleau-Ponty an extended understanding of physicality as well as the significance of the co-constitutive role of embodiment, inter-corporeality and intra-action in and of leadership practices in organisational life-worlds are identified and discussed. Insights into the role of corporeal materio-socio phenomena and expressions of meaningful practices of leading and following are rendered. The chapter concludes by noting limitations and implications of embodied physicality and physical inter-becoming of ‘bodiment’ for a more integral and sustainable conception of leader-and followership in organisations. Through its specific post-dualistic approach the chapter provides an innovative perspective on the interrelations between living, material, bodily and embodied dimensions of physicality in leadership.

Leading inclusion is a complex field of practice that is framed in traditional conceptions of school administration. Leadership in inclusive schools is a constant struggle with fluctuating dimensions, often compounding difficulties for students with difference and disability. Nevertheless, inclusive school leadership remains an important component of successful practice of inclusive education, where all students with diverse abilities equally benefit. This chapter provides an introduction to different types of leadership practices that promote inclusive practices. A key focus of the chapter is to discuss the social theory of Bourdieu in relation to understanding and measuring what we consider as effective inclusive school leadership. This framework provides both theoretical and practical approaches in developing inclusive school leadership practices and ways effective inclusive leadership practices could be measured.

Leadership studies, as an academic discipline and field of practice, have predominantly been developed in relation to Western forms of knowledge, norms, and cultural practices. Knowledge and ways of practicing leadership in Sub-Saharan Africa contexts are often unseen or marginalized in formal leadership studies literature. This is also true for the way leadership is practiced throughout the networks of the African Diaspora. The influence of uniquely African ways of knowing, doing, and experiencing leadership is even more challenging in the context of the African Diaspora. Often contextualized within the legacy of the Transatlantic Slave Trades, and increasingly shaped by contemporary dynamics of globalization, the African Diaspora and leadership exist at the intersection of multiple cultures and contexts. Leadership theory and practice must account for these inter- and multicultural contexts to better understand and practice leadership in the African Diaspora. The objective of this chapter is to develop a collective, constructionist, and practice frame capable of teasing apart cultural and contextual influences of leadership in the African Diaspora. This is not a comprehensive account of approaches to African Leadership, but instead a preliminary effort to mark out collective, constructionist, and practice approaches to leadership in the African Diaspora as it exists in practice and might inform future research and leadership learning and development efforts.

Leadership scholar-practitioners seldom need to be sold on the benefits of working together. Rather leadership educators want to know how to teach adult leadership scholar-practitioners how to work together across differences. The aim of this paper is to guide leadership development practitioners on how to nurture leadership that can address the complex problems the changing global arena demand of us today and into the future. We argue when preparing adult leadership scholar-practitioners, using adult learning theories and paying attention to the interdisciplinary roots of the field of leadership might lead to better learning and engagement with real world challenges. In this paper we present a leadership development model we call interdisciplinary leadership. First, we discuss the interdisciplinary roots of leadership. Second, we describe interdisciplinary leadership as a tapestry – an intricate combination of identities, practices, and outcomes used to prepare people to address complex problems. Finally, we describe the mission, structure, curriculum, and instructional strategies that can be used by leadership educators when applying interdisciplinary leadership. This model acknowledges the identity, practices, and outcomes needed to develop scholar-practitioners of leadership and provides practical techniques to help leadership educators prepare leaders to work together across differences to address complex problems.

Leadership educators seek to understand how they can better develop leadership among their students through formal and informal course experiences. The purpose of this study was to understand how undergraduate students perceive reasons for changes in their leadership practices, after completing a personal leadership education course. The course focused on the five exemplary practices of college students. As part of the course, students completed the Student Leadership Practices Inventory (S-LPI) as a pre and post assessment. A qualitative content analysis of 107 undergraduate student reflections from multiple sections of a leadership course was conducted to examine students’ perceptions of what influenced their change in scores on the S-LPI assessment. Students perceived that the curricular, co-curricular, and extracurricular activities of the course (including the high-impact service-learning project) affected their change in score for the leadership behavior(s) they intended to focus on throughout the semester. Students whose scores did not increase for the leadership behavior they chose to focus on still experienced leadership growth and development but attributed their growth to different items: their growth was in a different leadership behavior than intended or they developed a greater understanding of the five practices which affected their self-assessed score.

This paper reviews what has been written on leadership development from the leadership-as-practice (L-A-P) perspective, which views leadership as emerging in everyday activities and interactions of a collective in a specific context. This paper aims to deepen the theoretical understanding of how leadership can be learned and developed from the L-A-P perspective.

An integrative literature review was undertaken to review and synthesise what has been written on the topic in journal articles and scholarly books.

The importance of the context and the practices that are embedded in it is the most central aspect affecting leadership development from the L-A-P perspective. This places workplace leadership development centre stage, but several papers also showed that leadership programmes have an important role. Not only collective capacity building is emphasised in the papers, but the importance of individual-level leader development is also recognised.

The contribution of this study is twofold: First, it brings the currently fractured information on L-A-P development together to enhance theory building by providing a synthesis of the literature. Second, a conceptual framework is constructed to show how the L-A-P perspective on leadership development can take both leadership development at the collective and individual levels into account, as well as the learning that takes place either inside or outside the workplace. This study’s results and framework show that the development has its own specific purpose and suggested methods in both levels, in both learning sites.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how leadership is practiced across four different hospital units.

The study is a comparative case study of four hospital units, based on detailed observations of the everyday work practices, interactions and interviews with ten interdisciplinary clinical managers.

Comparing leadership as configurations of practices across four different clinical settings, the author shows how flexible and often shared leadership practices were embedded in and central to the core clinical work in all units studied here, especially in more unpredictable work settings. Practices of symbolic work and emotional support to staff were particularly important when patients were severely ill.

Based on a study conducted with qualitative methods, these results cannot be expected to apply in all clinical settings. Future research is invited to extend the findings presented here by exploring leadership practices from a micro-level perspective in additional health care contexts: particularly the embedded and emergent nature of such practices.

This paper shows leadership practices to be primarily embedded in the clinical work and often shared across organizational or professional boundaries.

This paper demonstrated how leadership practices are embedded in the everyday work in hospital units. Moreover, the analysis shows how configurations of leadership practices varied in four different clinical settings, thus contributing with contextual accounts of leadership as practice, and suggested “configurations of practice” as a way to carve out similarities and differences in leadership practices across settings.