Search results

The purpose of this paper is to describe, examine and discuss scholarly literature on reflective leadership, a topic gaining momentum as a result of globalization. Despite the growing popularity of reflective leadership techniques, current and aspiring leaders are struggling to find ways in which to effectively practice reflection as a consequence of a lack of tangible available guidance.

Scholarly literature on reflective leadership was examined and presented in this paper. Discussion on the potential efficacy of reflective leadership is also included as the available literature on the topic is scarce in comparison to other more established leadership techniques.

Reflective leadership has been shown to improve organizational performance. The advent of globalization further intensifies the need for an effective approach leaders may deploy when assessing the long-term consequences of their actions and decisions. Therefore, methods to extend the theory and effective practice of reflective leadership are necessary to enable the future development of leaders.

This paper provides leaders with strategies for improving their leadership effectiveness. Practical techniques for utilizing reflective leadership are offered.

This paper describes the challenges faced by leaders when adopting reflective leadership as a way to improve organizational performance. A universal framework is presented for the effective practice of reflective leadership. This framework provides a basis for future research to test the efficacy of the model.

Ambidexterity increases an organisation’s capability to successfully navigate dynamic and uncertain environments. While leaders are expected to model flexible learning and practices throughout the organisation, little is known about the leader characteristics and contextual factors that underpin ambidexterity. This study aims to explore whether paradoxical thinking, integrator behaviours and managerial role and level influence the likelihood of leaders exhibiting ambidexterity.

This study relied on a self-report questionnaire completed by 152 managers of a large, public health-care organisation in New Zealand. A k-means cluster analysis of the data was conducted to identify leader ambidexterity clusters, and the hypothesised effects were tested with multinomial logistic regressions.

Health-care managers favoured exploitation and moderate ambidexterity. Higher levels of integrator behaviours (i.e. reflective learning and context responsiveness) were found among leaders who showed high ambidexterity. Context responsiveness was the sole significant predictor distinguishing between high ambidexterity and other ambidexterity profiles. No statistically significant differences in ambidexterity cluster membership were found between clinical and non-clinical roles and across managerial levels.

While our study relied on a cross-sectional self-reported design, the findings underscore the importance of learning behaviours and context responsiveness to ambidexterity. This study discusses avenues for future research and leadership development towards improved organisational learning systems and practices.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to test the contribution of paradoxical thinking and integrator behaviours to health-care leader ambidexterity and to examine differences in ambidexterity profiles across managerial levels and roles. The factor analysis suggests that integrator behaviours represent two distinct constructs: reflective le`arning and context responsiveness.

The purpose of this article is to phenomenologically explore the reflective practices of leaders in public organisations amidst a complex societal context in combination with rapid changes. In this article, the authors specifically explore the lived experiences of public leaders to generate new hypotheses concerning their reflective practices.

The phenomenological methodology consists of analysing the lived experiences of 13 public leaders, collected in an in-depth interview and written reflections.

The thick data offer new and up-to-date insights into the daily experiences of public leaders concerning their challenges, the effect of the addictive and alienating forces, their reflex to withdrawal when facing emotional incidents and the effects of their contradictory mindsets.

The practical implication is a critical approach towards reflective practices of public leaders. The risk is that reflectivity is approached as a socially desirable instrumental ritual. Considering the needs and desires the public leaders shared, the authors wonder: Is there a growing importance of reflective time and space – or, above all, meaningful relations and resonant moments amidst the alienation forces?

The phenomenological exploration offers concrete insights into the daily experience of public leaders', as opposed to the often-abstract theory. The new hypotheses provide a new starting point for further critical phenomenological research.

The purpose of this paper is to develop, validate, and test the impacts of reflective leadership (RL) on organizational performance.

This is an empirical study based on over 700 survey responses from business leaders around the world. An instrument was developed to validate the model, and the statistical significance of its impacts on organizational performance was tested.

The findings show that a model of RL consisting of three leadership practices, creating an open and safe work environment, defining purpose, and challenging assumptions had significant impacts on organizational performance, accounted for 16.5 percent of the variance in the accomplishment of organizational goals; 13.9 percent of the variance in sales; and 14.7 percent of the variance in profits.

The major limitations are the biases that might be introduced with survey data. There are numerous implications for future research in terms of exploring additional RL practices, their impacts on additional and objective measures of performance, and in exploring the effects of moderating and mediating variables on the impacts of RL on performance.

The results show that RL is an effective management tool practitioners can employ to improve organizational performance.

A number of studies have broadly suggested that RL improves organizational performance, but this study empirically tests the impacts of a clearly defined, validated model of leadership on specific measures of performance.

The purpose of this paper is to explore opportunities for delivering sustainable leadership education through critical reflection embedded in the framework of higher and degree apprenticeships.

This paper contributes to leadership development research that focusses on “leader becoming” as an ongoing process of situated learning (in the classroom and everyday work life). The approach to leadership development adopted in this paper proposes that sustainable leadership practices and decision making are developed when leadership learning is firmly embedded in work-based practices and critical self-reflection.

The discussion of critical reflection methods focusses on utilising the learning portfolio as a core aspect of all leadership and management apprenticeships to embed sustainable and reflective practice and facilitate situated leadership learning. The paper explores the role of training providers in actively connecting higher and degree apprenticeships to embed this model of leadership development and seeing leadership as a lifelong apprenticeship. It also highlights the potential for resistance by managers and senior leaders in seeing themselves as apprentices rather than accomplished leaders. By paying attention to issues of language and identity in this discussion, it will surface practical implications for the delivery of sustainable leadership education through the framework of apprenticeships.

This paper adds to the theoretical and practical understanding of sustainable leadership education by exploring opportunities for re-framing leadership development as a lifelong apprenticeship focussed on personal and professional development. Recognising the resistance that often exists to reflective practice within leadership development contexts, this paper further explores ways of dealing with such resistance.

Examines the relevance of critical reflection practices in leadership development. The article provides suggestions for incorporating critical reflective practices in a leadership development program. A constructivist approach is adopted from educational literature which advocates using critical lenses to enable students to build on previous experiences of leadership and to incorporate new learning. Reflective processes encourage multiple perspectives to be generated that challenge teachers and future leaders to excel in complex and uncertain environments. Consequently, leadership development and good teaching practices depend on reflection‐in‐action.

The maintenance of a distinction between management and leadership behaviours at the conceptual and/or practical level negates the search for a “practical theory” of leadership. If management is viewed as an art, management and leadership behaviours are inextricably intertwined in an organisational setting. Both activities are part of the cultural action of an organisation.

This study aims to offer and validate an integrated marketing capability-product innovations framework. Particularly, it aims to examine the role of adaptive marketing capability in enabling market ambidexterity and incremental as well as radical product innovation. Also it intends to investigate the moderating role of transformational leadership between adaptive marketing capability and market ambidexterity.

Manufacturing firms in Pakistan, an emerging economy, are taken as the context for this study. A designed survey questionnaire is used for data collection. Partial least square technique is employed to empirically validate and test the hypothesized model with a sample of 192 manufacturing firms. Particularly, the two-stage approach in SmartPLS is used to validate measurement models, and structural equation modeling technique is used to test the proposed hypothesis.

The findings not only confirm that adaptive marketing capability is instrumental to both incremental and radical product innovations but also reveal that adaptive marketing capability serves an important antecedent to market ambidexterity shedding new lights on its mediating role in the relationship of adaptive marketing capability with incremental and radical product innovations. Moreover, the results find that the effectiveness of adaptive marketing capability to support market ambidexterity may involve a possible trade-off between exploitation and exploration when the leaders exhibit a low or high level of transformational leadership behavior.

This study contributes to outside-in strategic perspective and contextual ambidexterity literature by revealing the role of adaptive marketing capability as an important enabler of market ambidexterity which, in turn, allows the firm to simultaneously introduce incremental and radical product innovations. In this way, this study advances the current understanding of the antecedents and consequences of contextual ambidexterity. Also, this study provides insight into the types of capabilities needed for the firm's contextual and employees' behavioral adaptation to simultaneously manage exploitation and exploration within the same business unit which was lacking in the previous literature. Further, this study also offers a novel understanding of the conditional role of transformational leadership between adaptive marketing capability and market ambidexterity.

Although youth leadership has been well described within the literature, the dearth of theoretically derived models that specifically reflect ethics and comprehensive nature of youth development still remains. The purpose of this article is to synthesize the existing youth leadership research and theories of personality development to propose a model of youth leadership. The resulting model includes 5 major interconnected components, such as cognitive, socio-emotional, motivational, behavioral, and ethical. As part of the model, ethics is suggested as a core of youth leadership and its development. The model can be used to inform planning of contextually reflective leadership education, specific curriculum and developmental interventions.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate leadership curricula in UAE business and education management programmes and examine the extent to which they are derived from and linked to students’ cultural and Islamic values using Habermas’ critical theory.

The study employs a mixed methods approach that takes classical pragmatism as its philosophical foundation and critical theory as a theoretical lens. Data are collected in four sequential phases using critical discourse analysis of course materials, class observations, student survey and faculty interviews. Results are integrated at the interpretative level and abductive reasoning is used as the logic of justification.

Results show that despite the increasing efforts to incorporate cultural and Islamic values into the curriculum, it is still mainly dominated by Western theories and models of leadership, especially in the leadership courses offered by business schools, mainly because of accreditation requirements and the lack of English resources and theories on UAE and Islamic models of leadership.

The study is limited to leadership curricula in the UAE. Researchers may extend and broaden the scope of the study by investigating leadership curricula in the Gulf and/or the Middle East. Future studies may also look at other theoretical frameworks recommended by other management scholars such as Mezirow’s transformational learning and the socio-constructivist approach (Hotho and Dowling, 2010). This study aims to open an ongoing debate and further investigation on the topic.

The results of the current study may inspire faculty members and programme coordinators to develop critical and culturally relevant curricula that are informed by Habermas’ critical theory and best teaching practices.

The study adds to the current knowledge base through its research design and approach that address an under-investigated topic. None of the current studies empirically investigated leadership curricula in the UAE. The theoretical framework and research findings can be used to develop culturally relevant and value-oriented leadership curricula that reflect indigenous and Western perspectives of leadership.