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This study set out to empirically investigate the direct effects of leader emotional expressivity on visionary leadership, as well as the moderating effect of leader emotional expressivity on the relationship between visionary leadership and organizational change magnitude.

Cross‐sectional data from 108 senior organizational leaders and 325 of their direct followers were collected from 64 organizations across numerous industries. Leaders completed measures of emotional expressivity and organizational change magnitude, while followers provided ratings of visionary leadership, leadership effectiveness, and organizational change magnitude.

Consistent with expectations, leader emotional expressivity was strongly related to visionary leadership, while leader emotional expressivity moderated the relationship between visionary leadership and organizational change magnitude. Visionary leaders with high emotional expressivity skills facilitated the greatest organizational changes in their respective organizations.

The cross‐sectional research design precludes causal conclusions among the variables of interest, and also suggests the possibility of reverse causality such that perceptions of organizational change may have influenced ratings of visionary leadership.

Managerial selection, promotion, and development practices would benefit from focused assessments of senior leaders' emotional communication and visionary leadership skills.

While prior research includes mostly laboratory studies that manipulate visionary leadership and emotional expressiveness using trained actors, the present study examined a diverse range of senior leaders and their followers from numerous organizations. Addressing a neglected stream of research, findings also demonstrate much needed support for the interactive effects of emotional expressivity and visionary leadership on organizational change magnitude.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how visionary leadership influences employees’ creativity in R&D teams in China, and the role of employee knowledge sharing and goal orientation.

A survey was conducted on 331 professional technical engineers in R&D departments of 62 high-tech corporations in China. Hierarchical regression was used to model the relationships between visionary leadership style, employee goal orientations, knowledge sharing and employee creativity.

The results show that visionary leadership is positively associated with employee creativity in Chinese organizations and the relationship is positively mediated by employee knowledge sharing. Furthermore, employee “learning goal” orientation strengthens the relationship between visionary leadership and employee knowledge sharing, whereas employee “performance-avoid goal” orientation weakens the relationship between visionary leadership and employee knowledge sharing.

This study contributes to the literature on the effects of leadership on employee creativity by showing that, contrary to western organizations, where a less directive leadership style is generally recommended to enhance employee creativity, in Chinese organizations, visionary leadership is positively associated with employee creativity, but the effect is contingent on employees’ goal orientations and knowledge sharing.

This paper proposes the use of the model of visionary leadership adapted by this researcher from Westley and Mintzberg’s 1989 paper “Visionary leadership and strategic management” to view the work of Mary Parker Follet. The model augments Westley and Mintzberg’s model with much earlier work by Mary Parker Follett. Follett’s work on leadership, group membership, contribution, participation and co‐operation are as relevant to the study of human relations today as they were 70 years ago. The model highlights the elements of visionary leadership and group membership. This model was developed to place a framework on the many writings of Follett. The framework is fully discussed and is based on some of the work of Westley and Mintzberg.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between visionary leadership and the perception of organizational effectiveness in nonprofit organizations. Leaders with high levels of transformational leadership were predicted to be reported as having more effective organizations.

Data from 135 executive organizational leaders and 221 of their subordinates were collected from 52 various nonprofit organizations across USA. Leaders completed measures of leadership behavior and perceived organizational effectiveness, while followers provided ratings of their perspective leaders’ leadership style, organizational effectiveness, and organizational change magnitude.

Significant relationships were found between visionary leadership and perceived organizational effectiveness. Regression analysis also showed some significant correlations between high leadership behaviors and perceived organizational effectiveness. Visionary leaders with high leadership skills facilitated the greatest perceived organizational effectiveness in their respective organizations.

Leaders wishing to improve their organization's effectiveness may wish to adopt a visionary leadership style. Visionary leaders develop practices through executive training and development that would hone their skills to significantly impact organizational effectiveness.

This paper contributes to the existing literature focussed on the relationship between leadership styles and organizational effectiveness. Different aspects of these variables were tested in order to provide a wider and more comprehensive understanding of the factors affecting nonprofit organizations and their employees.

Describes the background behind the development of a new leadership self‐assessment instrument, the dynamic leader inventory and how the authors were able to confirm much current thinking on “visionary” leadership. They found leadership situations were enormously variable – what was appropriate behaviour in terms of visionary leadership varied from one situation to another, particularly with respect to the leader’s influence over others and influence over change. This led to the development of a new model of leadership, the “dynamic” leader which builds on, but goes beyond, the “visionary” model. This development is explained and a framework is outlined, identifying four types of leadership situations. Findings have clear implications for thinking about leadership and for the practice of leadership development.

Recent decades have seen a change in the environment of business schools. These changes place great responsibility on deans as the leaders of schools to act. To date, there has been a dearth of literature dealing specifically with visionary responses on the part of the deans of business schools to those changes in the institutional environment. The purpose of this paper is to address the most recent institutional pressures in the business education field and present a framework linking it to the visionary leadership deans may demonstrate.

This paper is conceptual in nature and bases its analysis on institutional theory. The use of an institutional lens offers a new perspective on possible visions deans may lead and on the nature of their leadership.

The article proposes an institutional framework of visionary leadership in business schools and suggests that vigorous visionary leadership among deans is required in order to generate a unique school identity and reputation. The paper concludes by outlining steps leaders can take while shaping their vision in order to create a unique organizational identity.

The institutional framework has a central place in organizational and educational literature. So far, the literature has not dealt with the links between institutional theory and visionary leadership as a whole, or in business schools in particular. The present paper addresses this gap and offers new insights for researchers and practitioners alike.

In the early twenty‐first century organization scholars and managers face an economic outlook full of daunting challenges. With investors, workers, and other stakeholders distressed and hostile toward corporate executives and boards due to recent corporate scandals, the future for many industries and firms appears grim. In what ways can business history help corporate managers and new venture entrepreneurs overcome these leadership challenges? This paper seeks to uncover practices throughout the Boeing Company's management history that offer today's executives and board members numerous examples of industry vision and leadership.

Visionary leadership theory is used to help understand Boeing's actions. A theory of visionary entrepreneurial leadership is proposed based on Boeing's history. Four specific cases of aircraft design and development decisions and actions are presented as examples of executive and board directors' vision and leadership.

Boeing has served as the aircraft industry's innovator and leader for over nine decades by designing and building path‐breaking airplanes when no other aircraft manufacturer would venture similar risks to their reputation and capital. Furthermore, Boeing executives and board directors have repeatedly made risky decisions that – if the prototype literately crashed and burned – would probably bankrupt the company. Management's vision was always on the next great airplane, never on individual image or personal wealth.

Future research directions are presented suggesting a focus on firm executives and boards of directors' decisions and how these decisions influence industry wide innovation and development.

The paper analyses the leadership attributes of Boeing executives over the last nine decades.

The current Industry 4.0 era is considered not only as a process that dominates technological developments but also as a process that influences the leadership styles. Management 4.0 is essential for businesses to find and apply the appropriate technologies in the age of Industry 4.0. The leadership styles that business managers will adopt in order to be successful in this process and to survive in an intensely competitive environment can play an important role. At this point, a significant problem arises: identifying leadership styles that will bring success. In this context, the primary purpose of this chapter is to explain the modern leadership styles that business managers can adopt or follow in the age of Industry 4.0. In line with this purpose, the chapter first describes the historical development of leadership, leadership theories and modern leadership styles, such as transactional, transformational, technological, strategic, visionary and agile leadership, and all these concepts are discussed based on the Industry 4.0 perspective.

Building on the contributions of chaos and complexity theories, this paper aims to conceptualize how the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela were able to transform chaos (randomness) into order (integration). More specifically, it aims to identify the qualities by which such leadership worked in the context of conflict and cultural confrontations, which is, leading at the edge of chaos.

This research follows a qualitative approach in data collection and analysis; it narrates and analyses biographic data as well as literature about these three prominent leaders. Common qualities of these leaders are explored in-depth, discussed and linked.

Success in leading at the edge of chaos was attributed to the following leadership qualities: vision, non-violence and tolerance. This paper conceptualizes Gandhi, King and Mandela's embodiment of these qualities in transforming difference and disagreement to unity and how they inspired and developed their societies at home and all over the world. This paper concludes with the following results: Dr King, Gandhi and Mandela were visionary leaders; the three leaders had a vision about the future of freedom, equality and peace. More importantly, they were able to hearts and minds, and convey their visions to followers and to society at large. They struggled to achieve their goals non-violently, but knew that violence could destroy society due to unbalanced power structures. In the fight for their people's emancipation/freedom, they avoided ethnic, racial and religious discrimination. The three leaders were politically, culturally and socially tolerant.

By identifying their leadership qualities and analyzing their leadership mechanisms, this paper stresses the necessity of the emergence and preservation of leadership as exhibited by King, Gandhi, Mandela and many other influential leaders. Leaders, committed to enrichment and sustainability of cultural diversity and nurturing of tolerance, can play a role in unifying nations. Practically put, today’s leaders need to rethink their strategies, by taking into consideration what Gandhi, King and Mandela have contributed to leadership in dealing with cultural diversity and conflict. Furthermore, leaders must extend the applicability of such leadership to include the ending of violence in every facet of people's lives, and work publicly to overcome the challenges encountering human kind such as nuclear weapons, war, poverty, racism, global warming, drugs, religious bigotry and violence of any kind. That is, today's leaders need to lead at the edge of chaos due to the ongoing conflicts around the globe.

This paper uniquely conceptualizes leadership qualities by analyzing and comparing literature and biographical data of the above-mentioned leaders. The study also contributes to the existing literature on leadership using an interdisciplinary approach by proving the mechanisms by which leadership transforms chaos into order within the context of cultural diversity and confrontation, where studies are rare. This research contributes to the theory of leaderships at three levels. First, it offers an interdisciplinary theory on leadership qualities by linking these qualities with chaos and complexity theories. Second, unlike the majority of literature which views leadership from a business or public leadership perspective, this research provides a new perspective of leadership for cultural diversity. Third, it highlights the role models of three exemplary leaders for each of whom previous literature is lacking.

This study investigated whether the direct supervisor's leadership style affects employee engagement using Avery's classical, transactional, visionary, and organic leadership paradigms as the theoretical framework. The study also investigated how many and which components of employee engagement (“say”, “stay” and “strive”) contribute to the construct. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A sample of 439 retail sales assistants in Sydney, Australia, responded to a mixed-mode questionnaire survey. Factor analysis, independent t-tests, analysis of variance and structural regression models were used in the data analysis.

Both research questions were supported. Results showed that the visionary and organic paradigms are likely to enhance employee engagement, whereas classical and transactional styles negatively affect employee engagement. Furthermore, the data confirmed that the three behavioral-outcome factors all do contribute to the employee engagement construct.

One implication for researchers is that an employee engagement measure with demonstrably high reliability and validity, and known components has been developed. This study could be replicated in different national and occupational contexts, the leadership measures reconfirmed and expanded, follower characteristics included as moderating variables, and links to organizational performance investigated.

The findings suggest that direct supervisors should be encouraged to use visionary and/or organic leadership wherever possible to drive employee engagement.

This paper is original in several ways. It resolves an ongoing dispute in the literature about the components of employee engagement, namely whether all three components contribute to the concept. In answering this question, a valid and reliable questionnaire was developed. Using four leadership paradigms, including classical and organic leadership that are rarely investigated, this study demonstrates that employee perceptions of the leadership style used by their direct supervisor are linked to employee engagement.