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The original concepts and methodology for this study were invented and developed in January, 1973, with the assistance and guidance of D Stuart Conger, Vernon Mullen, Glen Tippett and James Williams.

The culture of an organization can be positive and supportive, or threatening and destructive. A career development culture helps address productivity, competitiveness, affirmative action, and succession planning. It helps people redefine their talents to realize the full potential of their jobs. Supervisors should play a key role in creating a career development culture, but many feel their careers are going nowhere and see career development efforts to be an added burden. Supervisors seldom do performance appraisals properly because they are afraid of their workers and the workers are virtually paranoid about the slightest negative note on their files. A better way is to organize a system of mentorship. Evaluation of initiatives can be calculated on the basis of savings that can be attributed to the program and its actual costs. A managed career development culture can pay great rewards to an organization and the people working in it.

The geographic, economic and social mobility of people today requires that many must be able to adapt or adopt various life styles in accordance with their surroundings and integrity. Today, many people need to be multi‐cultural so they can succeed and survive in ethnic, commercial and other milieux in rapid sequence, often each day. A Canadian Life Skills programme has been designed to help such people adopt a problem solving approach to managing their lives.

When you read an article in ICT, can you easily understand what the writer is saying? Or do you have to struggle through it, wringing the meaning out of each complex sentence, one by one? When someone in the training world writes an article for publishing it is generally because he has something to communicate—some message that he wants to get across to fellow workers in the field of training. (It may just be that this month he needs the money, but let's ignore that reason.) If he has a message to convey, then it is reasonable to expect him to write the article in as clear a manner as possible to make sure that you can understand and remember it. In other words, you might expect the article to be readable!

The purpose of this study was to measure the relationship between followers’ perceptions of the servant leadership of their immediate supervisor and followers’ sense of empowerment in the context of small businesses. A quantitative survey was completed by 116 employees of small businesses, including measures of supervisors’ servant leadership behaviors and followers’ self- perceived empowerment. Followers’ perceptions of being empowered were found to correlate positively with their ratings of the servant leadership behaviors of immediate supervisors. The findings support the researchers’ assertions that followers’ perceptions of being empowered will increase as supervisors’ servant leadership behaviors increase.

The power of servant leadership lies in the leader’s ability to unleash the potential and thus the power in those around them. Greenleaf (1977) ascribed greatness to the leader’s attention to followers, “When it is genuine, the interest in and affection for one’s followers that a leader has is a mark of true greatness” (p. 34). In the foreword to the Anniversary edition of Greenleaf’s Servant Leadership, Covey (2002) related empowerment to servant leadership. He acclaimed the importance of empowerment to the sustainable success of organizations in the 21st century. Organizations structured to support and encourage the empowerment of their employees will thrive as market leaders (Covey, 2002). While other leadership styles have been found to empower followers, it is agreed across current literature, that the focus on developing and empowering the follower as their primary concern is specific to servant leaders (Greenleaf, 1977; Parolini, Patterson, & Winston, 2009; Parris & Peachey, 2012; Stone, Russell, & Patterson, 2004; van Dierendonck, 2011).

The context chosen for the study was small business because of the crucial role it plays regarding job growth in the United States (Howard, 2006) and in “enriching the lives of men and women of the whole world” (Kayemuddin, 2012, p. 27). Servant leadership enables small business leaders to fully discover, develop, and employ follower potential through empowering behaviors.

This study sought to contribute to the empirical research of servant leadership by measuring the relationship between supervisors’ servant leadership behaviors and followers’ perceptions of empowerment within the context of small business.

This paper is derived from a two‐year study that sought to provide a critical understanding of the current state of business leadership development (BLD) and to identify directions for innovative future practice. The first of two companion papers, this contribution aims to examine the issue of achieving business relevance in BLD and the quality of HR/management development strategy formulation.

The paper analyses four organisation case studies of BLD strategy derived from interview data sourced from 103 senior line/HRD managers in 20 organisations.

The findings highlight the need for HRD managers to take a discriminating approach to linking BLD strategy, development method, evaluation and the role of management development. In particular, the cases studied reflect the importance of informal activity and politics in the execution of BLD and the positive effect of individual leadership in moderating the effectiveness of the linkages between business context, BLD strategy and its implementation.

The paper provides a conceptual framework to enable practitioners to discriminate between different bundles of development practices that can, over time, be translated into behaviours that suit the changing needs of an organisation. A list of useful starting points is provided for managers to review and improve BLD strategy and practice in their own organisation.

The paper provides a framework that shows the importance of different development populations, different sponsors, interest groups and strategic timeframes in enabling more informed discussion about the strategic alignment of BLD.

Many higher education institutions have not invested in leadership succession planning despite suggestions for such action. In this article, the authors discuss the relevance of succession planning to the senior levels of leadership in higher education institutions, proposing that the role of succession planning and accompanying leadership development must be carefully considered based on the internal and external context of an institution. The authors present a modified model of succession planning for the higher education context.

This article includes arguments for and against succession planning and leadership development in higher education using relevant literature and theory.

The literature reviewed highlights the need for each educational institution to find its own optimized mix of external hiring and internal succession planning and leadership development to replace outgoing leaders based upon factors such as the institution's culture, needs, external environment, talent pool, and levels of leadership.

This article makes a unique contribution by questioning succession planning's utility in higher education and guiding practitioners and researchers on the risks and benefits of such practices. The article also provides a model to guide selective implementation of succession planning.

Many organizations around the world currently are facing board diversity issues and challenges. Hence, this empirical paper investigates the relationship between board diversity and firm’s financial performance. We use a sample of 35 companies from five countries in Southeast Europe (Macedonia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Greece) for the period between 2008 and 2012 to find that, on average, companies with well-educated board members are more profitable and overvalued on the market. When running the regression again to test the levels of heterogeneity, we also find that the companies with more women on board tend to be overvalued on the market, while those with more foreigners on board are subject of undervaluation. The paper mostly contributes to the literature on corporate governance and board diversity. First, we postulate the impact of each of the board diversity variables on the financial performance and then show the extent of this impact and its economic interpretation. Our findings have important practitioners’ implications for corporate regulators and policy-makers since the demonstrated positive impact of the well-educated board members on firm’s financial performance gives a new impetus in building a corporate strategy that will intend to engage more people holding PhD on board.

This article explores how employees can perceive and be impacted by the fakeness of their company slogans.

This conceptual study draws on the established literature on company slogans, employee audiences, and fake news to create a framework through which to understand fake company slogans.

Employees attend to two important dimensions of slogans: whether they accurately reflect a company’s (1) values and (2) value proposition. These dimensions combine to form a typology of four ways in which employees can perceive their company’s slogans: namely, authentic, narcissistic, foreign, or corrupt.

This paper outlines how the typology provides a theoretical basis for more refined empirical research on how company slogans influence a key stakeholder: their employees. Future research could test the arguments about how certain characteristics of slogans are more or less likely to cause employees to conclude that slogans are fake news. Those conclusions will, in turn, have implications for the morale and engagement of employees. The ideas herein can also enable a more comprehensive assessment of the impact of slogans.

Employees can view three types of slogans as fake news (narcissistic, foreign, and corrupt slogans). This paper identifies the implications of each type and explains how companies can go about developing authentic slogans.

This paper explores the impact of slogan fakeness on employees: an important audience that has been neglected by studies to date. Thus, the insights and implications specific to this internal stakeholder are novel.

The interplay between accounting and organisational change has been a topic of considerable interest in recent years. This paper is concerned with exploring the ways in which managers’ attitudes towards budgets may be influenced by processes of organisational change. Traditionally a high reliance on accounting measures of performance has generally been associated with provoking unfavourable reactions from managers on account of the pressure they experience to meet pre‐determined budgetary targets, with concomitant dysfunctional consequences for the achievement of organisational objectives. In contrast the paper argues that processes of organisational change, particularly the increasing use of “stretch” targets and empowerment strategies, may be prompting a more positive disposition towards budgets amongst managers. Drawing on recent research evidence, and building on notions of “psychological empowerment”, the paper suggests that managers may value the existence of pre‐determined budgetary targets as an “empowerment facilitator” in conditions of uncertainty. This possibility opens up new directions in behavioural accounting research.