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This study aims to investigate the factors influencing team innovation from the perspective of strategic leaders. The study draws from the leader–member exchange (LMX) theory to propose that the quality of exchange the leaders perceive with the team members may provide a useful cue to identify the key elements and processes that may help drive team innovation.

A qualitative study using a hybrid approach was used, and a thematic analysis was performed. The data were based on 25 interviews collected from strategic leaders using the long interview technique.

The findings revealed themes and factors influencing innovation orientation among leaders and team members. Five themes were identified, namely modeling leadership behavior, autonomy and psychological safety for teams, organizational structure and technology, innovation and the decision-making process and innovation during times of uncertainty.

Because of the purposefully chosen sample of only leaders who were involved in the innovation process, the research results may lack generalizability. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to corroborate the finding using a sample of teams involved in the innovation process.

A conceptual model is proposed with guidance for implementing innovation decisions and strategies in practice.

While the strategic leadership and team innovation literature emphasizes the interaction between leaders and team members, research on how these interactions unfold is still nascent. This paper fulfills these needs from a strategic leader’s perspective.

This study aims to adopt a replication strategy based on Cherchem (2017), and hence this study investigates how generational involvement moderates the relationship between organizational culture and entrepreneurial orientation (EO) in Brazilian family businesses, disentangling each of the EO dimensions.

This study developed a survey with 107 Brazilian family businesses operating in the textile and clothing industries. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SmartPLS-SEM).

The results for the direct paths indicate that clan and hierarchical cultures are positively related to EO. As for the moderating effect, only one generation of the family involved in management tends to stimulate a stronger relationship between the clan culture and the EO. In contrast, when multiple generations exist, the positive relationship between the EO hierarchical culture becomes stronger. Furthermore, this study found different relationships between organizational culture and each of the EO dimensions (proactiveness, innovativeness, risk-taking, competitive aggressiveness and autonomy) and differences in the moderating effect of generational involvement.

Unlike the findings of Cherchem (2017), the authors observed that, in addition to clan culture, hierarchical culture can also act as an enhancer of entrepreneurial strategies. On the other hand, generational involvement influences the relationship between organizational culture and the level of EO (and its dimensions), reinforcing those internal family characteristics that can foster entrepreneurial strategies in family businesses, whose findings align with Cherchem (2017). Moreover, it contributes to the investigation of each of the dimensions of EO separately.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an organizing lens for viewing the distinct contributions to knowledge production from those research communities addressing the impact of competitive strategy on company performance in general, and the influence of cost leadership and differentiation strategy on organizational performance in detail.

The research methodology was based on the PRISMA review, and thematic analysis based on an iterative process of open coding was analyzed and then the sample was analyzed by illustrating the research title, objectives, method, data analysis, sample size, variables and country.

The main factor that influenced the competitive strategy is strategic growth; strategic growth has a significant influence on competitive strategy. Furthermore, competitive strategy will boost firm network, performance measurement and organization behavior. In the same way, the internal goal factor will enhance organizational effectiveness. Also, a differentiation strategy will support management practice factors, strategic positions, product price, product characteristics and company performance.

This study contributes to the literature by identifying a framework of competitive strategy factors, company performance factors, cost leadership strategy factors, differentiation strategy factors and competitive strategy with global market factors. This study provides a complete picture and description of the resulting body knowledge in competitive strategy and organizational performance.

In view of the increasing exploration and scattered literature on digital leadership, this study aims to clarify the concept, characteristics and structure of digital leadership, identify its focus research themes and further determine future research directions in this field.

A systematic literature review is adopted in this study using 53 academic documents published in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, which comprehensively combs and analyzes the research achievements.

The key characteristics of digital leadership are vision motivation, digital empowerment, innovation and entrepreneurship, cross-boundary collaboration and dynamic adaptation. Digital strategic thinking, digital insight, digital change and digital talent development are the core dimensions of digital leadership. Besides, there are three main research topics: the application of digital leadership in certain contexts including school education, government governance and business management; the development of digital leadership scale within diverse contexts; and the effectiveness of digital leadership at the organizational, team and individual levels. Digital leadership has a positive role in organizational change and innovation, team effectiveness, and employee creativity and innovation behavior.

This study helps to clarify the connotation of digital leadership and its research progress, status and gaps, which contributes to the thorough knowledge system in the digital leadership area and the promising avenues for future research.

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to explore the role of strategic leadership under conditions of uncertainty and unpredictability. The authors argue that highly improbable, but high-impact events require the upper echelons of management, traditionally the custodians of strategy formulation to offer a new kind of strategic leadership focused on new mindsets, organizational capabilities, more in tune with high uncertainty and unpredictability.

Drawing on strategic leadership, and complexity leadership theory, the authors review the literature and present a conceptual framework for exploring the nature of strategic leadership under uncertainty. The authors conceptualize organizations as complex adaptive systems and discuss the imperatives for developing new mental models for emergent leadership.

Strategic leaders have a key role to play in preparing their organizations for episodic disruptions. These include developing their adaptive capabilities and building resilient organizations to ensure their organizations cannot only bounce back after a disruption but have the capacity for transformation to new fitness levels when necessary. Strategic leaders must engage with complexity leadership by seeing their organizations as complex adaptive systems, reconfigure their leadership approaches and organizations to build strategic adaptive capability.

This is a conceptual paper and the authors cannot make any claims of causality.

Organizational leaders need to reconfigure their mental models and leadership approaches to reflect the new normal of uncertainty and unpredictability. Developing the strategic adaptive capability of organizations should prepare them for dealing with high impact events. To assure business continuity in the face of disruptions requires building flexible, adaptable business models.

The paper focuses on how managers can offer strategic leadership for a new normal that challenges some of our most cherished leadership and strategic management paradigms. The authors explore the new mental models and leadership models in an era of great uncertainty.

Successful digital transformation involves all areas which bring new impacts and challenges to the leadership of the enterprise. From the perspective of organizational identification, the authors construct a theoretical model of digital leadership–digital strategic consensus–digital transformation and explore the different moderated mediation effects of diversity types.

This paper obtains data from 351 Chinese science and technology enterprises and uses regression analysis and bootstrap analysis to test the research hypotheses.

The results demonstrate that digital leadership has a positive impact on digital transformation. Digital strategic consensus partially mediates the linkage between digital leadership and digital transformation. Disparity diversity and variety diversity positively moderate the mediating role of digital strategic consensus between digital leadership and digital transformation, respectively; and separation diversity negatively moderates the mediating role of digital strategic consensus between digital leadership and digital transformation.

The research innovatively measures digital leadership and digital transformation. It expands the application of leadership, strategic consensus, diversity and other related theories in a digital context and provides a decision-making basis for enterprises' digital transformation.

This study aims to conceptualize and measure strategic leadership capabilities within research and development (R&D) teams pursuing high-tech innovation at public-funded R&D organizations in India.

A rigorous five-stage multi-method approach defines, conceptualizes and validates the core construct “strategic leadership capabilities for innovation” (SLCI). The first stage correlates the insights generated from theoretical analysis and expert opinions on the importance of leadership for innovation. The second study identifies a three-dimensional factor structure underlying the SLCI construct and the third validates it through a confirmatory factor analysis. Replication provides additional validation.

SLCI emerges as a three-dimensional construct with sub-dimensions: dynamic envisioning, ambidextrous resource utilization and empowering support for innovation.

Conceptualization of the SLCI construct and its measurement through a 15-item scale that has been empirically validated in the public-funded R&D organizations in India.

Diversity in boards has gained attention as a reflection of societal imbalances. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of diversity in terms of both gender and nationality in management boards of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) on firm performance from an upper echelons perspective. The authors also examine how board-specific characteristics influence the structural makeup of boards in gender and nationality diversity terms.

The authors focus on the UK because of its individualistic society and flexible labour market and assess 309 SMEs in the manufacturing industry over 2009–2019. A 3-stage least squares (3SLS) estimator is used to analyse the data, the Shannon index to measure board diversity, return on assets as proxy for firm performance, and owner-manager presence, board member age and tenure are the board-specific characteristics of primary interest.

Both gender and nationality diversity contribute to firm performance and represent distinct upper echelon characteristics that change the cognitive and psychological dynamics of boards. Firms with larger boards do not perform better, but diverse boards reduce the narrowing view of CEOs. Yet the presence of owner-managers, despite their performance-enhancing contribution, holds firms back from benefitting from diversity as a strategic choice.

This study extends the upper echelons theory to include board diversity as an important aspect that should become more central in upper echelon thinking when understanding firm performance. The authors’ findings suggest that theoretical developments in search of understanding firm behaviour must proceed by accounting for diversity and not simply focusing on decision-making styles.

The COVID-19 pandemic has generated a significant impact on several aspects of public relations practice. By adopting the theoretical framework of adaptive leadership, this research is designed to explore how an organization’s top leadership can support related adaptive action in strategic communication. Particularly, we hope to explore whether the application of adaptive leadership could facilitate a higher level of communication transparency as well as deliver a sense of caring and empathy in COVID-19 communication.

An international online survey was designed and conducted for this study. The first sample consists of 776 full-time communication professionals in the United States of America with 435 women (56.1%) and 341 men (43.9%). The second sample consists of 268 full-time communication professionals in Canada, with 110 women (41.0%) and 158 men (59.0%). The two samples were merged into the final sample of 1,044 for the data analysis.

Results confirmed that the perceived impact of the COVID-19 pandemic increased communication professionals’ challenges in building trust. It also drives adaptive changes in their coping actions in strategic communication. More importantly, the top leadership within the organization played a key role in this adaptive leadership environment by demonstrating commitment to transparency in COVID-19 communication and delivering a sense of empathy during the pandemic.

This study contributes to our understanding of strategic communication in times of crisis, such as the COVID-19 global pandemic, by focusing on the adaptive nature of communication leadership. More importantly, our study confirms the important roles of two leadership attributes (i.e. the sense of empathy and the commitment to communication transparency) in supporting adaptive leadership, which eventually influences trust building.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of a team’s personality faultlines on entrepreneurial performance. Additionally, this paper verifies the moderating effect of shared leadership on the connection between the two varies. The authors focus on the upper echelons theory and social identity theory as well as personality faultlines in entrepreneurial teams.

An online survey was conducted using data collected in China. Data from 618 members from 144 new venture teams were collected to examine the authors’ hypothesis.

The authors find a U-shaped relationship between the strength of entrepreneurial teams' personality-faultline and entrepreneurial performance. Additionally, shared leadership negatively moderates this U-shaped relationship. Specifically, when the entrepreneurial team has a high level of shared leadership, both the positive and negative relationships between the strength of the personality faultlines and entrepreneurial performance are weaker.

The research offers important theoretical and practical implications for the formation of entrepreneurial teams.