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One of the key questions leaders at the top face is how to get their vision for the organization implemented throughout the whole organization. Especially in large, geographically dispersed companies with diverse products and markets, such implementation requires careful consideration and attention as well as considerable local interpretation and adaptation. The challenge of cascading the vision down in a meaningful way while maintaining its intent is the focus of this chapter and the following two specific cases.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the impact that perceptions of integrity have on perceptions of leadership effectiveness in the context of leadership behaviors.

The paper used multi‐source feedback from top‐level public service managers, their direct reports, peers, and bosses to examine two aspects of the relationship between integrity and leadership. The paper used exploratory factor analysis to investigate what qualities different stakeholders – self, direct reports, peers, and bosses – associate with integrity. The paper then used the resulting integrity factor in a hierarchical regression analysis to examine if perceived integrity had a greater impact on perceived leadership effectiveness than leadership behaviors.

The paper shows an association between honesty and integrity for all stakeholder groups. Integrity has an impact above that of leadership behaviors on perceived effectiveness for managers and their peers but not for their direct reports and bosses. For bosses and direct reports, there is a significant relationship between being flexible and perceived effectiveness. Goal orientation is the leadership role that bosses most strongly associate with perceived effectiveness.

The interpretation of integrity is left up to the respondents; the paper does not gather a more in‐depth understanding of what principles guide the respondents; the paper uses same‐source data to examine the associations among values, leadership roles, and effectiveness; and this research only provides a one‐time glimpse of how colleagues perceive their leaders' integrity and their personal effectiveness but does not link these to long‐term organizational effectiveness.

This research shows that what matters to bosses is that managers obtain results. Integrity adds to perceptions of effectiveness for managers themselves and their peers. For bosses and direct reports, flexibility is more important.

This paper articulates the perception of integrity in an organization, tests the axiom that integrity is an essential component of effective leadership, and provides empirical evidence on the role that perceptions of integrity has on the perceptions of leader effectiveness. Integrity may not be as strong as has been suggested.

John Antonakis (PhD, Walden University) is professor of Organizational Behavior at the Faculty of Management and Economics of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. His research is centered on individual-difference antecedents of effective leadership, the measurement of leadership, and the links between context and leadership as applied to neocharismatic and transformational leadership models, and the development of leadership.

We review the literature to determine how discretion, defined as the freedom to make decisions, moderates the relationship between leader personality and organizational performance. Discretion increases with level in organizations so that top executives have the most discretion and the greatest opportunity to impact organizational performance. We describe how personality drives executive actions and decision making, which then impacts organizational performance; the more discretion a leader has, the more leeway there is for his or her personality to operate. Finally, using research and contemporary business examples, we illustrate the dynamics linking personality, discretionary freedom, and destructive leadership in and of organizations.

This part aims to push thinking on strategic leadership one step further. In all of the previous parts we follow quite a hierarchical model, in which leaders at the top outline the vision, the strategy, and the key implementation tools. Here, Russ Marion and Mary Uhl-Bien challenge the validity of this view of strategic leadership. They argue that strategic leadership is about interacting effectively within a complex interplay of environmental and organizational forces to enable fit environments and adaptive organizations. For them this means that strategic leaders need to pay significant attention to the interdependence between their organizations and both competitors and other relevant organizations in the niches in which they operate. It also means that they need to develop adaptive leadership capacity far down in the organization and show a willingness to follow those leaders at the lower levels. Marion and Uhl-Bien then argue both that strategic leaders have a more interdependent view of organizations and that they have a greater willingness to act as followers than we see in any of the leadership and/or strategy literature. As this approach to strategic leadership is quite new, we do not have application chapters here.

As CEOs now communicate with a wide variety of stakeholders, it has become increasingly difficult to ensure that the intended meaning of their messages is received. Boas Shamir focuses on how leaders engage in the management of meanings in order to (1) justify their actions and the changes they introduce to the organization; (2) recruit followers and motivate members of the organization to support their actions; and (3) create shared perceptions and interpretations so that members’ actions are guided by a common definition of the situation. Heike Bruch, Boas Shamir, and Galit Eilam-Shamir show how the leader of a large Swiss-based company actively managed the views, interpretations and energy of more than 100,000 employees through weekly e-mail letters when the company faced grave financial difficulties. Gretchen Spreitzer, Mary Sue Coleman, and Daniel Gruber show how an incoming university president dealt with an ongoing lawsuit regarding the university's use of affirmative action in its admissions processes and worked with various stakeholders to firmly establish the university's identity.

Kimberly B. Boal examines what companies and strategic leaders can do to enhance knowledge acquisition, retention, and dissemination. In doing so, he explores how leaders create environments where people throughout the organization utilize both strong and weak network relationships in the pursuit of finding, exploiting, and protecting new knowledge and ideas. Kazuo Ichijo then hones in on how strategic leaders at electronics manufacturer Sharp Corporation developed processes, systems, and structures that allowed the company to build and exploit its knowledge of and competence in LCD technology.

First and second order learning lie at the center of an organization's ability to exploit its core competencies or explore for new opportunities. Strategic leadership lies at the center of this learning process. Strategic leaders enable organizations to learn by telling stories about what the organization is, what the organization does, and what the organization can become. They also enable competence carriers to come together to solve current and future problems by networking. These processes are explored.