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The main objective of this paper is to analyze how leadership unity (LU) within universities affects the innovativeness of faculty, with a focus on the potential moderating role of strategic sensitivity (SS).

The conceptual model of this research shows that SS and LU of the university impact the faculty's innovativeness. Meantime, the moderating effect of SS is assessed. A 49-item questionnaire was administered to 350 respondents who were managers and faculties of the university. The hierarchical regression technique was used for analyzing data and testing hypotheses.

The findings support both a curvilinear relationship based on a concave upward pattern and a linear relationship between LU in the university and the innovativeness of faculty. In addition, the university's SS positively influences the faculty's innovativeness. SS negatively moderates the curvilinear relationship between LU and faculty's innovativeness, i.e. the U-shaped effect exists only when the level of SS is high.

The results of this study shed new light on the relationships between LU and SS with innovativeness in the higher education landscape. It underlines the importance of SS as a moderator in the relationship between LU and innovativeness. This study was conducted in a developing country under sanctions with an Eastern culture, Iran. Thus, it is recommended that the conceptual framework of this study be tested in different countries with cultural diversity to generalize its findings.

Administrators of universities need to recognize that creating unity and cohesion among managers of various levels of the university is crucial. They should also be aware that responses to external changes can lead to new opportunities for the university. Embracing transformation within the organizational strategies of the university will have a significant influence on competition, politics, and internal operations.

This research contributes to the academic discussions on the importance of LU and SS and also the moderation effect of SS in driving and promoting innovativeness in among faculties by providing empirical evidence. The results present valuable insights for scholars, practitioners and policymakers seeking to understand innovativeness among faculties in the higher education setting.

In this chapter, two academics from the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan collaborate with the President of their university to present their experiences and ideas about positive strategic leadership. Positive strategic leadership is derived from the juxtaposition of ideas from the growing stream of research on positive organizational scholarship with what is already known from the literature on strategic leadership. The authors embed new views into current theoretical perspectives on strategic leadership to provide an integrative overview and use the president's experiences during the nationally followed Affirmative Action cases as a vehicle for illustrating five themes: (1) A lifetime of experiences shapes who you are, (2) issues commonly choose you before you choose them, (3) begin with a purpose in mind, (4) appreciate divergent views, and (5) be a beacon for the future. Additionally, the authors provide practitioners with some “takeaways” on positive strategic leadership.

Discusses US Army War College approach to including Strategic Leadership in its curriculum. Key aspects emerged from a preliminary, widely based conference: the environment in which a leader must function; their tasks; the competences they require. These are analysed. Competences are subdivided into personal characteristics (robustness, tolerance of uncertainty, willingness to reopen decisions, viewing mistakes as new information), frames of reference (to be wide), and specific capabilities (complex cognitive skills, persuasiveness, lateral networking). Compares effectiveness of academic with on‐the‐job learning, looks at learning methodologies and curriculum design issues, and the importance of practitioner mentoring.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the notion of strategic leadership, that which has been primarily applied to for profit organizations, to nonprofits, specifically the church setting.

The research employs a case study methodology and draws primarily upon qualitative data collected from interviews and observation.

The findings reveal that over the past several years, the organization and its members have undergone a number of incremental and more radical changes. Much of this change has been attributed to the vision and leadership style of the current leader. Four key themes illuminate the processes and content of change under this strategic leader, including unsettlingly the status quo, model of shared leadership, shared vision and culture of community and learning.

The findings are based upon one case study site and this limits the generalizability of the research. In addition, exposure to the organization was limited to short periods of time on-site and the sample size was relatively small.

Achieving success in nonprofits requires leaders to have an intimate understanding of the complex nature of stakeholder relations and measuring success needs to be multi-dimensional in nature and linked directly to the mission and context of the organization, rather than based solely on generic measures.

There is limited research to date that examines the applicability of leadership theories that have been traditionally applied to for profit and public sector organizations to nonprofits. The research extends the notion of strategic leadership from the for profit setting to nonprofit organizations generally, and more specifically to the church setting.

The purpose of this paper is to offer an epistemological vantage point for theory development in the case of strategic leadership, an emerging focus of scholarly attention in strategic management.

The authors invoke Rescher's epistemological platform for making the case, Rescher being one of the most influential philosophers in the USA.

The analysis suggests that since strategic leadership differs from supervisory leadership, both on organizational reach and incorporation of external elements, defining the strategic leadership problem exclusively as a difference in context – what Weick referred to as a strategy of knowledge growth by extension – is likely to prove unproductive. Rescher's platform can be put to use for specifying the two critical though inter‐related epistemological challenges in the beginning of the theory development project: the choice of concepts, and the type of relations among the concepts. These epistemological challenges may be reframed as opportunities to capture the phenomenal variety embedded in these concepts, and to deploy a diversity of approaches to examine their correspondence.

Contending and complementary views on strategic leadership, and hence concepts representing alternate views should be allowed. Bridges should be built between islands of scholarship, but these bridges are likely to be found in special issues of journals (devoted deliberately to nurture multiple perspectives), edited books and invited conferences.

Engagement with “strategic” leaders is an epistemological necessity for both theoretical and pragmatic reasons.

This paper demonstrates how epistemology can strengthen theory building in the case of strategic leadership. Given the signal importance of this phenomenon, good theories and, therefore, epistemological challenges should occupy a central stage of discussions in this early stage.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the nature of strategic leader competencies and the learning methodologies that should be used to develop them.

A review of the literature on strategizing was done to formulate a model of strategic leadership competencies. This paper also draws from various work on learning to propose how strategic leadership competencies program should be designed.

The literature highlights the importance of incorporating deliberate practice, experience density, reflective learning and mentoring into strategic leadership development programs.

This is a conceptual work that draws from secondary material. Further empirical examination can help validate the ideas proposed here.

This paper provides a better understanding of how developing strategic leadership competencies are distinct from other leadership programs. It also provides practitioners with an understanding on how to design their strategic leadership development programs.

This paper adds a new dimension to the discourse on strategic leadership development programs by bringing together learning theories from sports education and managerial learning.

The aim was to explore the existing literature on emotion and strategic leadership in a systematic review and to synthesize it into a theoretical model. A literature review on emotion in connection to strategic leadership was undertaken. After adhering to the search strategy and exclusion criteria, 46 peer-reviewed texts consisting of articles and relevant book chapters remained. The texts were analyzed according to the grounded theory method (GTM) to generate a new theoretical model and a core variable was identified, organizational emotion shaping. The model attempts to show how the interaction of individual and organizational framing factors with the strategic leader's tasks and challenges lead to emotion shaping internal and external of the organization. Suggestions for future research were formed and suggestions of practical implications were given. This literature review and theoretical integration offers a starting point for potential areas of further exploration.

The aim of this paper is to determine whether leadership affects strategic flexibility and business performance taking into consideration the mediating role of talent management in these relationships.

The proposed framework is tested by confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and finally structural equation modeling (SEM), using the survey data from 462 Greek firms. The mediation effect of talent management was tested by the Sobel test.

The results show that leadership drives firms to strategic flexibility and business performance, but the introduction of talent management fully mediates these relationships. Strategic flexibility also affects business performance positively.

This study explores a formal style of leadership; many leadership styles remain unexplored. The field of talent management is in urgent need of more empirical research to explain its importance and how talent management is handled in the 21st-century.

This study proves that managers should invest more in talent management; outstanding talent can be leveraged to implement the best operational practices while managers' motivation for talent management contributes to a deeper anchoring of strategic flexibility and performance efforts in firms.

The current state of knowledge of both theory and practice for critical organizational factors such as strategic flexibility and talent management will be extended.

Most of the thousands of studies of leadership as well as strategic leadership in organizations choose as the unit of analysis the individual leader. This choice runs contrary to the often-observed fact that organizations have numerous leaders at all levels of the organization – in other words, a network of leaders, which permeates the formal organizational structure. The purpose of this paper is to re-conceptualize strategic leadership by advancing understanding of: the effects of variations in internal complexity and external turbulence and the effects of choices by the strategic leadership based on those variations.

The paper advocates a network approach to strategic leadership where there is a set of highly dynamic role changes, based on both human and social capital. The typology and propositions in the paper emerged over a period of many years of observation of organizations (direct and indirect) as well as reflection of theories on how strategic leadership actually occurs in medium to large-size profit-oriented organizations.

The paper proposes a model of strategic leadership based upon four modes of single actor and shared leadership (stars, clans, teams, and leadership networks). The paper sets forth propositions for the situational appropriateness of each of these four forms and identifies avenues for future research to advance the theory.

The paper cross-fertilizes extant research streams in leadership and strategic management to create a contingency theory of strategic leadership that is closer to what executives actually experience in the workplace.