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This chapter presents empirical evidence on the effects of attributional retraining (AR), a motivation-enhancing treatment that can offset maladaptive explanatory mind-sets arising from adverse learning experiences. The evidence shows that AR is effective for assisting college students to adapt to competitive and challenging achievement settings.

This chapter describes the characteristics of AR protocols and details three primary advances in studying AR efficacy in terms of achievement performance, psychosocial outcomes, and processes that mediate AR-performance linkages. The psychological mechanisms that underpin AR effects on motivation and performance are outlined from the perspective of Weiner’s (1974, 1986, 2012) attribution theory.

Laboratory and field studies show that AR treatments are potent interventions that have short-term and long-lasting psychosocial, motivation, and performance benefits in achievement settings. Students who participate in AR programs are better off than their no-AR counterparts not just in their cognitive and affective prospects, but they also outperform their no-AR peers in class tests, course grades, and grade-point-averages, and are more persistent in terms of course credits and graduation rates.

This paper contributes to the emerging literature on treatment interventions in achievement settings by documenting key advances in the development of AR protocols and by identifying the next steps critical to moving the literature forward. Further progress in understanding AR efficacy will rest on examining the analysis of complex attributional thinking, the mediation of AR treatment effects, and the boundary conditions that moderate AR treatment efficacy.

This chapter is about how leaders attempt to move from traditional to shared leadership and why they often cannot. We develop a new theoretical framework to examine whether leaders are willing to shift control from themselves to their followers and thus promote shared leadership in their teams. We argue that control shifts, while necessary for shared leadership, are particularly difficult for leaders to enact. This is because leadership is often closely bound with power and status in the organization, a reality of organizational life that is often overlooked in the quest for new forms of leadership, such as shared leadership. Our contribution lies in examining leaders’ ability to enact shared leadership through the lenses of primary and secondary control, and situating control shift in the context of global leadership including selected cultural dimensions, complexity, and paradoxes.