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Directing schools of high complexity in disadvantaged social contexts with high rates of emigration requires skills for emotional leadership. Directors with self-managing capacities are needed to manage their own emotions. They also need to mobilise people (teachers, students and families) by focussing on their feelings of satisfaction, identification with the group, belonging, joy, success, unity and cohesion.

The content of this chapter presents the study of the emotional management of directors who perform their work in two highly complex schools in Catalonia, Spain. The views of these directors as well as teachers and families examine: (1) the construction of their professional identity, (2) their social and ethical commitment to the community, (3) the orientation towards the values of social justice and (4) their emotional leadership practices focussed on personal attention towards all of the actors in the school community.

The chapter concludes with 10 suggestions that can be useful to improve the professional practice of school directors. These should also be taken into account when designing and implementing initial and ongoing training programmes for school leaders and to inspire ideas for future research.

This study presents two ideas. The first is that schools supported by public funds are challenged to help ensure that all students, without exception, have opportunities to develop their skills, especially for those who are in more precarious situations and at risk of social exclusion. The second idea is that respecting the rights of all students is a prerequisite for achieving desirable social justice.

The content of the chapter communicates the process, results and conclusions of data obtained in four schools in Catalonia Spain. On the one hand, it is a study of the conceptions of directors, teachers and families on social justice and respect for rights in school, and on the other hand, it is an analysis of the professional practices of managers and teachers.

There were two fundamental conclusions. The first conclusion identifies the professional practices carried out in the schools to attend to the cultural and linguistic rights of the students. The second conclusion provided steps that could be taken to move towards social justice, especially in disadvantaged contexts.

Are the effects of school size transmitted in measurable quantities to the personalities of pupils? Having argued that the learning environments of small and large schools could differ in predictable ways, the authors examined the effects of these differences on the personality development of pupils. Multiple regression analysis revealed the effects of school size to be reflected in only two of eight personality outcomes — sense of cohesion and concern for persons. Two variables — attitude towards school and fear of failure — are regarded as “not proven” and four variables — functional identity, sense of internal control over events, breadth of role constructs, and cognitive complexity showed no evidence of the effects of school size.

Improving the performance of health care organizations is now perceived as essential in order to better address the needs of the populations and respect their ability to pay for the services. There is no consensus on what is performance. It is increasingly considered as the optimal execution of four functions that every organization must achieve in order to survive and develop: reach goals; adapt to its environment; produce goods or services and maintain values; and a satisfying organizational climate. There is also no consensus on strategies to improve this performance. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper intends to analyze the performance of primary health care organizations from the perspective of Kauffman’s model. It mainly aims to understand the often contradictory, paradoxical and unexpected results that emerge from studies on this topic.

To do so, the first section briefly presents Kauffman’s model and lays forward its principal components. The second section presents three studies on the performance of primary organizations and brings out the contradictory, paradoxical and unexpected results they obtained. The third section explains these results in the light of Kauffman’s model.

Kauffman’s model helps give meaning to the results of researches on performance of primary health care organizations that were qualified as paradoxical or unexpected. The performance of primary health care organizations then cannot be understood by only taking into account the characteristics of these organizations. The complexity of the environments in which they operate must simultaneously be taken into account. This paper brings original development of an integrated view of the performance of organizations, their own characteristics and those of the local environment in which they operated.

Addresses the standardization of the measurements and the labels for concepts commonly used in the study of work organizations. As a reference handbook and research tool, seeks to improve measurement in the study of work organizations and to facilitate the teaching of introductory courses in this subject. Focuses solely on work organizations, that is, social systems in which members work for money. Defines measurement and distinguishes four levels: nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio. Selects specific measures on the basis of quality, diversity, simplicity and availability and evaluates each measure for its validity and reliability. Employs a set of 38 concepts ‐ ranging from “absenteeism” to “turnover” as the handbook’s frame of reference. Concludes by reviewing organizational measurement over the past 30 years and recommending future measurement reseach.

Lesson study (LS) is a professional development approach that has been attracting attention as an educational innovation since the late 1990s. The purpose of this paper is to investigate factors that contribute to the adoption of LS by schools in developing countries without development assistance.

The diffusion of innovation theory was used as an explanatory device. The study examined the characteristics of LS perceived by 28 teachers in an Indonesian primary school, where LS was actively and autonomously adopted without development assistance. Data were collected from multiple sources, including interviews with some teachers and a questionnaire for all 28 teachers.

While previous studies have indicated that LS as an educational innovation lacks the ideal sets of perceived characteristics that could promote its adoption, this study found that such negative characteristics were mitigated in the Indonesian school. It also found that some of the factors facilitating LS adoption may be information on the outcomes of LS and less hierarchical relationships among teachers and professors. Furthermore, active school leadership was found to be a significant factor in this adoption.

Regarding adoption of LS in developing countries, previous studies focused on how development assistance works, what strategies of development assistance are necessary for introducing LS and how development assistance programs can be sustained. However, scant attention has been paid to how schools in developing countries have fared without development assistance. This study sheds light on this missing point.

There is a tacit understanding among social studies teachers and educators that incorporating primary source documents in planning and teaching is desirable for many reasons, most prominent among them the ways in which it challenges students to think at higher levels. This study is a descriptive study of public school teachers’ uses of primary source documents in social studies planning, in which we review lesson activities of various grade level teachers to evaluate their use of primary documents for higher order cognitive purposes. Given the salient theme of critical thinking in the literature, we established a baseline continuum of uses that served as our framework for evaluating these activities. We asked the following questions: When history teachers incorporate the use of primary source documents in their planning, to what degree do they promote development of higher level critical thinking? What might a planned activity look like when they do? We found that the majority of the activities examined here employ primary source documents for lower order purposes but held the promise of easy transition to higher order uses.

For start-ups or growing firms, to effectively navigate the unpredictable nature of digital development and achieve superior innovative performance, it is crucial to have a workforce comprised of creative and innovative employees. Drawing upon the principles of social information processing theory, this study aims to investigate whether specific combinations of organizational internal and external environments, as well as work characteristics in the digital age, can foster a high level of employee innovative behavior.

By collecting a multilevel and multisource data set comprising 693 employees and 88 CEOs from 88 start-ups or growing firms, this study used fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to examine the distinctive configurations associated with achieving a high level of employee innovative behavior.

The study found that six solutions enabled employees to innovate more effectively, but six solutions led to the absence of employee innovative behavior.

The findings of this study offer important theoretical and practical implications to motivate employee innovative behavior in Chinese enterprises.

First, this study contributes to the literature on employee innovative behavior by addressing the need to explore the impact of the digital context on promoting innovation among employees. Second, this study adds to the existing literature on employee innovation and entrepreneurship by examining multiple organizational contexts and their influence on innovative behavior. Third, this study makes a significant contribution to the field of employee innovative behavior by examining the macroenvironment surrounding digital transformation within enterprises and integrating both internal and external organizational factors.

The education system in Kenya is continually challenged to adapt and improve, in part because its mission has become far more ambitious than it once was due to the massive investment in education by successive governments over the last two decades. Today, most Kenyans expect schools to prepare all students to succeed in postsecondary education and to prosper in a complex, fast-changing global economy. To identify the most important measures for education and other issues and provide quality data on them to the country, there is a need for the ministry of education to establish a National Education Indicators framework. This criterion is hoped to enable policy makers and the public better assess the position and progress of the country across the education sector. The key task in developing education indicators will be to identify a clear and parsimonious set of measures and data that will be easy for non-specialists to understand but which will also do justice to the complexities of the ailing education system. These indicators will amplify the existing situation and will be drawn from a large, and sometimes conflicting, body of information about students, teachers and schools. The purpose of this study is to propose and urge the government to develop a national framework of indicators that will inform stakeholders on the performance of the education system, both at school and national level.

This paper aims to describe the levels and type of contingency faced by school principals in Chile and the way certain aspects of the Chilean school system result in a greater or lesser presence of these contingencies.

The results reported here are based on the application of a structured questionnaire to 381 elementary school principals in Chile. A “Leadership Contingency Index” was created to analyze the extent and characteristics of this phenomenon, which was complemented with a multiple regression analysis to observe the variables that influence the levels of contingency.

This study has shown that the main contingencies faced by school leaders in Chile revolve around the relationship between actors: assist families, relationship with and among students and resolution of school staff problems. Also shows that the level of contingency faced by principals is strongly conditioned by the socio-educational context of the school and is not related to the individual characteristics of the leaders. This level of contingencies is significantly higher in the public system, although the most recurrent contingencies are the same in each type of school administration (public, private subsidized and privately funded schools).

This paper addresses an important but relatively unexplored dimension in specialized research on leadership: variable contingencies under which the leadership role is performed daily, including significant gaps between schools. Understanding and analyzing school leadership from the perspective of the complexity of tasks currently faced by principals, many of them highly unpredictable, ensures a realistic view of the possibilities and limitations of leadership in action and, consequently, provides better tools to strengthen the school leadership role and its contribution to improving student learning.