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Clearly, the role of front‐line leader (often known as supervisor, team leader, foreman and so on) is a critical, challenging and often unappreciated role. However, the role must be performed effectively if work teams are to optimise their effectiveness. This paper argues that four practices, easily stated but difficult to fully implement, are required in order to fully develop the front‐line leadership function. The practices are: implement a well‐focused system of goals and feedback; employ rigorous leadership selection processes (including the removal of ineffective leaders); maintain well‐developed and evolving human resource management systems; and implement training and development as an ongoing process. The rationale for each practice is provided as well as examples from experience.

Describes a management development programme which has evolved to give middle and upper managers a “bird′s eye view” of their own organization as a total enterprise. Completed over ten to 12 months, the course employs a variety of action learning techniques including a pre‐course workbook (which can only be completed by interviewing key executives in the organization), syndicate teams, a week‐long residential workshop and project teams assigned to complete real‐life projects within the organization with recommendations presented to a panel of top executives.

Describes an action learning programme implemented at Pilkington UK to train supervisors in new and more complex aspects of their jobs. Moving away from a purely technical focus, the role had become much more proactive and focused on productivity improvement. Small groups of from four to eight supervisors completed a six‐month training programme during which they completed a process improvement project within their work area. Reports the outcomes which showed high satisfaction with the training, very high attainment of National Vocational Qualifications and the contribution of at least £1.5 million to the business.

Many organizations now utilize action learning, and it is applied increasingly throughout the world. Action learning appears in numerous variants, but generically it is a form of learning through experience, “by doing”, where the task environment is the classroom, and the task the vehicle. Two previous reviews of the action learning literature by Alan Mumford respectively covered the field prior to 1985 and the period 1985‐1994. Both reviews included books as well as journal articles. This current review covers the period 1994‐2000 and is limited to publicly available journal articles. Part 1 of the Review was published in an earlier issue of the Journal of Workplace Learning (Vol. 15 No. 2) and included a bibliography and comments. Part 2 extends that introduction with a schema for categorizing action learning articles and with comments on representative articles from the bibliography.

Systems of pay have, appropriately, been the result of the demands of organisational structure. The complex hierarchical organisations of yesteryear were supported by the equally complex “factor analysis” system of pay administration. As organisational structures evolved into flatter, simpler designs, so pay systems became less complex. But now organisations are changing in a very fundamental way. They may appear to have little structure at all. They may just grow to meet the current needs; their structure has become organic. Likewise, pay systems will have to adapt. The author discusses traditional methods of pay for the job, pay for skills and incentives as well as team pay in light of the demands of the organic organisation. Ultimately it appears that pay, as a separate system within HR may disappear altogether. Organisations will move toward attracting, rewarding and retaining their employees through the design of a highly individualised “HR Environment”.

This issue is a selected bibliography covering the subject of leadership.

This chapter extends the work of Baltagi, Bresson, Chaturvedi, and Lacroix (2018) to the popular dynamic panel data model. The authors investigate the robustness of Bayesian panel data models to possible misspecification of the prior distribution. The proposed robust Bayesian approach departs from the standard Bayesian framework in two ways. First, the authors consider the ε-contamination class of prior distributions for the model parameters as well as for the individual effects. Second, both the base elicited priors and the ε-contamination priors use Zellner’s (1986) g-priors for the variance–covariance matrices. The authors propose a general “toolbox” for a wide range of specifications which includes the dynamic panel model with random effects, with cross-correlated effects à la Chamberlain, for the Hausman–Taylor world and for dynamic panel data models with homogeneous/heterogeneous slopes and cross-sectional dependence. Using a Monte Carlo simulation study, the authors compare the finite sample properties of the proposed estimator to those of standard classical estimators. The chapter contributes to the dynamic panel data literature by proposing a general robust Bayesian framework which encompasses the conventional frequentist specifications and their associated estimation methods as special cases.

The next month or two behind us and this decade will have passed, to merge in the drab background of the post‐war years, part of the pattern of frustration, failure and fear. The ‘swinging sixties’ some called it, but to an older and perhaps slightly jaundiced eye, the only swinging seemed to be from one crisis to another, like the monkey swinging from bough to bough in his home among the trees; the ‘swingers’ among men also have their heads in the clouds! In the seemingly endless struggle against inflation since the end of the War, it would be futile to fail to see that the country is in retreat all the time. One can almost hear that shaft of MacLeodian wit christening the approaching decade as the ‘sinking seventies’, but it may not be as bad as all that, and certainly not if the innate good sense and political soundness of the British gives them insight into their perilous plight.