Search results

The purpose of this paper is to draw from data collected as part of the International Successful School Principalship Project (ISSPP) and present cases of democratic and heroic leadership from three countries, discussing to what extent successful school principals in each of their research sites (Melbourne, Australia; Umeå, Sweden; Arizona and Texas in the USA) carry old and new perspectives of heroism in their leadership. In particular the paper explores two questions: first, how do school principals describe aspects of heroic and post-heroic leadership in their practices? and second, how do these heroic and post-heroic leadership practices meet contemporary demands such as accountability standards and build inclusive and collaborative school communities in challenging contexts?

Multiple-perspective case studies involving semi-structured individual and group interviews with principals, teachers, students, parents and school board members were used to understand the contribution of principals and other leadership to school success.

The definitions of heroic and post-heroic leadership are inadequate in defining successful principal leadership. The Australian, Swedish and American principals showed characteristics of both heroic and post-heroic leadership. They showed heroic qualities such as: inspiring and motivating others; challenging the status quo; showing integrity in conflicting situations; putting duty before self; taking risks to champion a better way; showing courage to stand up to those in authority; advocating for students in struggling neighbourhoods under the scrutiny of both district and public expectations; and, showing uncommon commitment. Yet our principals showed post-heroic leadership such as involving others in decision making and recognising that school success depended on collective effort, and being sensitive to community needs through a deep respect for the local culture.

The research shows that we may need to redefine and recast our images of who school principals are today, and what they do to generate academic success for students. Both heroic and post-heroic images of leadership are needed to explain successful school leadership.

In many countries leadership theories and leadership development programs in healthcare have been dominated by individualistic and heroic approaches that focus on developing the skills and competencies of health professionals. Alternative approaches have been proffered but mainly in the form of post‐heroic and distributed forms of leadership. The notion of “hybridity” has emerged to challenge the assumptions of distributed leadership. The paper seeks to explore how the concept of hybridity can be used to re‐theorize leadership in healthcare as it relates to clinician managers (or hybrid‐professional managers).

The theoretical developments are explored and empirical material is presented from research in Australian public hospitals to support the case for the existence of hybridized forms of leadership in healthcare. The paper discusses whether hybridity needs re‐theorizing to adequately account for clinician leadership. It contributes to debates surrounding the role of clinician leadership in healthcare reform particularly in relation to those doctors who occupy management positions at the division or unit levels as distinct to CEOs. The study uses qualitative research, i.e. interactive interviews to present accounts of how healthcare professionals describe leadership. It undertakes both deductive and inductive theme analysis of the interview material.

There is support for hybridized configurations of leadership in interview materials of healthcare professionals but other aspects were also noted that cannot be explained by this approach alone.

The paper is the first to examine the concept of hybridity in the context of clinician leadership. Many approaches to leadership in healthcare fail to address the complexity of leadership within the ranks of clinician managers and thus are unable to deal adequately with the role of leadership in healthcare reform and change.

Systems theory is frequently discussed. The aim of the contribution is to elaborate what is to be advised with the idea of closed systems regarding change management.

This paper follows Niklas Luhmann and his so-called “autopoietic turn.” It provides a profound theoretic basis, from which the needs and requirements of the post-heroic management emerge. The implications of this specific approach to change management are demonstrated by means of the contemporary example of scrum. The applied method is literature review.

This contribution seeks to understand the relevance of closed systems within change management. Especially, the meaning of indirect strategies of control as a requirement for change management will be shown. That means Luhmann emphasizes the pessimism of traditional change management. The findings emphasize the meaning of self-organizing systems predicating by means of observation, which configurates corporate agility.

Systems theory often suffers from lack of empirical evidence, as systems are multi-complex. As an alternative, in this study, a literature-based discussion of the contemporary agile project management technique “scrum” is used.

The meaning of power in management shifts from formal to informal or soft power, e.g. the ability to promote self-binding processes. Thus, closed systems emphasize the need to look for alternatives for change management.

Characterizing Luhmann as a hidden champion of contemporary management as modern management tools like hackathons or crowdsourcing also benefit from closed systems.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the emergence and development of leadership within the context of new ventures.

A qualitative approach was conducted to analyze in-depth the circumstances under which leadership is emerging and evolving in new ventures. In doing so, 55 founder-CEOs from Austria, Liechtenstein and Switzerland were interviewed.

The findings suggest that during the development from new ventures to early growth ventures the founder-CEOs and their organizations experience three major transitions. First, the founder-CEOs’ leadership behavior tends to emerge and evolve alongside firm development from being more transformational in new ventures to more transactional in early growth ventures. Second, the decisive employee selection criteria change over time, and the initially important person-founder fit turns into a person-organization fit. Third, a transition from a rather external perspective of the founder-CEOs in the new venture stage to a more internally oriented perspective in the early stages of growth was observed.

Although the findings advance research on leadership in new ventures, the limitations concerning potential recall biases and subjectivism have to be kept in mind.

In practice, the findings imply that the emergence and development of leadership in new ventures should be seen as a dynamic process.

This paper is one of the first to study in-depth the emergence and development of leadership in the context of new ventures.

The purpose of this paper is to explore leadership styles and patterns in India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and the USA in order to contribute to a greater understanding of global leadership.

The paper uses cultural mythologies as a lens (Kessler and Wong-MingJi, 2009a) to extract the most favored leadership traits within selected countries. In doing so, the paper explores historical trajectories and core values of each country to identify their distinctive characteristics. Additionally, leadership styles of well-known business leaders in each culture are examined to develop a comparative discussion of global leadership patterns and styles.

The paper finds that leaders may share same characteristics across countries, however, their behavioral expressions tend to unfold differently within each context. The paper argues that without context, meanings embedded in cultural mythologies and behaviors often become lost. The paper concludes that a comparative analysis of selected countries reveals a more complex and rich array of cultural meanings, thus offering support to a contextual view of leadership.

Examination of cultural mythologies on leadership makes important theoretical contributions by illustrating that cultural mythologies indeed shape the values, behaviors, and attitudes of global leaders, and provide three important functions that are identified as: cultural bridging, meaning making, and contextual nuancing.

Understanding comparative leadership patterns is critical in international business. The paper offers cultural mythologies as a tool for leaders who seek to cross-cultural boundaries in developing long term and high-quality productive international business relationships.

The value of the study lies in developing a comparative analysis of leadership patterns in three Southeast Asian countries and the USA with the help of cultural mythologies. The paper urges that scholars to move beyond quantification of cultural dimensions to a more contextualized understanding of leadership.

The purpose of this paper is to give some theoretical foundation to leadership function and style for managing knowledge workers whose work, by definition, is non-routine, thrives on innovation, and places a special demand on autonomy for its execution.

Extant search of literature to look for evidence supporting successful leadership theories and practices that are shown to improve performance of knowledge workers. Synthesis of findings to structure a framework in the form of major propositions for their testing by future research.

The authors begin with establishing the first finding that states that leadership of knowledge organizations is different from the leadership of traditional organizations. Then the authors build six additional findings for shaping a successful leadership process for knowledge organizations.

Since it is a theoretical paper built on a search of literature in the field of leadership, there is a need to empirically test the findings to give them their final shape. Each of the seven propositions in this paper would result into many hypotheses that should initiate several empirical studies.

The authors consider individual and organizational/group contexts of the leadership proposed here, and also provide recommendations for carrying out this research further. While the paper is written more specifically with regard to the leadership of knowledge organizations where its findings should be fully implantable, however, to some extent, they would apply to all organizations.

Leadership is a ubiquitous social phenomenon. It affects not only organizations, but also every aspect of human activity. This paper is an attempt to alter the fundamental thinking of leaders, suggesting to not to use authority, and instead, to allow everyone connected with the task the opportunity to lead. This shift in leadership paradigm will have an impact on the behavior of all involved, and steadily, will bring a change in the norms of social behavior.

This paper is a move toward giving the knowledge organization leadership some theoretical framework, as it is still in a state of flux in spite of attracting a lot of research.

As women increasingly enter leadership roles that traditionally have been occupied by men, and with the increasing diffusion of transformational leadership theory, there is growing interest in the relationship between gender and transformational leadership. A wide array of feminist theories that have emerged in the last decades offer conceptual lenses, which can enrich an understanding of the role of gender in the organizational context and the study of leadership. This paper explores how various approaches in feminist thought intersect with the study of gender and transformational/charismatic leadership. I reviewed earlier studies with reference to the different feminist approaches, demonstrating how each reveals a different facet in the understanding of gender and transformational leadership. Finally, I point to the perspectives that have been neglected in this stream of research and offer directions for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of transformational leadership on employee creativity through psychological empowerment, creative process engagement and intrinsic motivation.

Data were collected from 420 employees at 21 telecommunications enterprises in Vietnam directly by questionnaire survey. Statistical methods, such as confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation model (SEM), were used to analyze the data.

This paper shows that transformational leadership indirectly affects employee creativity through the mediating variables. Transformational leadership has a positive relationship with psychological empowerment. Psychological empowerment has a proportional relationship with both creative process engagement and intrinsic motivation. Creative process engagement and intrinsic motivation have been shown to have positive effects with the employee creativity.

The main limitation of this paper is that the study only explores the relationship between transformational leadership and employee creativity through a number of the mediating variables.

The telecommunications industry is an industry that requires constant innovation, so managers need to aim for a leadership style that promotes employee creativity. Therefore, transformational leadership is a style that should be considered during the appointing and recruiting.

This paper contributes to the existing literature by focusing on understanding the relationship between transformational leadership and employee creativity in telecommunications enterprises in an Asian country with an emerging economy like Vietnam.

This paper seeks to use two empirical episodes to investigate gendered critiques of leadership.

The paper uses an action inquiry approach by reflecting on two pieces of work, one collaborative and one individual, to reflect on ideas about women's ways of leading, and women's leadership of groups. The work includes the making of artefacts which it uses as a stimulus for reflection and as a reflective practice in itself. The artefacts which it uses are quilts, and the feminised nature of quiltmaking is also considered.

The paper begins by reflecting on the ability of a leaderless group of women to achieve a task in a highly successful and timely manner. It uses this experience to explore theories of distributed leadership in work groups, and suggests an alternative proxy for leadership. It then uses the creation of a piece of art about Elvis Presley and the Madonna to consider gendered constructions of leadership, including heroic and post‐heroic leadership. Drawing on the work of Fletcher, it considers why feminised post‐heroic leadership is so often vaunted and so seldom seen. It posits the tension between self‐abnegation and self‐promotion and service and individual achievement as an explanation of the slow adoption of this more feminised form of leadership. The paper traces the emergent process of the work itself, and hints at the difficulty of getting the “right answers” from research participants, and reflects on the role of nostalgia as a limiting factor in organisational research.

The collaborative method of the piece synchronises with the ideas under investigation, and builds on the critique of post‐heroic leadership as an observable phenomenon in organisations.

In this innovative practice paper, we will illustrate how discursive practices of Visual Thinking StrategiesTM (VTS) can foster leadership development capacity of college students. We will show how VTS aligns with constructionist perspectives to post-heroic leadership grounded in discursive approaches to leadership development. This arts-based pedagogy advances leadership development through dialogue and sense-making.