The social construction of strategic coherence: Practices of enabling leadership

The construction of “strategic coherence,” defined as the development of a system of mutually compatible meanings among organization members about desirable organizational directions, is clearly a crucial issue for organizations. Yet, how to achieve it is in part an open question. While previous studies have considered how strategic coherence may emerge across top levels of management through strategic planning activities and negotiations among senior leaders, we know much less about the contribution of other actors and processes behind the scenes (in non-strategy roles). Drawing on an ethnographic study of a public hospital's planning and project management practices, this paper therefore focuses on the bundles of practices, people and tools through which strategic coherence can emerge across different levels and sectors in mundane activities. We build on the concept of “enabling leadership”, grounded in practice theories of leadership, as our analytical lens. The study reveals how strategic coherence is socially constructed by practices of ‘fueling’, ‘shaping’ and ‘entwining’ mutually compatible meanings, in interactions among diverse people and tools. We propose a grounded model of the construction of strategic coherence as the progressive socialization of meanings about organizational direction that is not just administered from the top, nor naturally emergent from the grass-roots, but that is a collective and inherently socio-material accomplishment of enabling leadership.     

Reconciling identity leadership and leader identity: A dual-identity framework

Research exploring the powerful links between leadership and identity has burgeoned in recent years but cohered around two distinct approaches. Research on identity leadership, the main focus of this special issue, sees leadership as a group process that centers on leaders’ ability to represent, advance, create and embed a social identity that they share with the collectives they lead—a sense of “us as a group”. Research on leader identity sees leadership as a process that is advanced by individuals who have a well-developed personal understanding of themselves as leaders—a sense of “me as a leader”. This article explores the nature and implications of these divergent approaches, focusing on their specification of profiles, processes, pathways, products, and philosophies that have distinct implications for theory and practice. We formalize our observations in a series of propositions and also outline a dual-identity framework with the potential to integrate the two approaches.     

Values and behavior orientation in leadership studies: reflections based on findings in three German-speaking countries

The article focuses on two sets of concepts commonly used in the explanation of leadership behavior, including values in one area and behavioral intentions in the other. Most leadership researches concentrate exclusively on one or the other area and there are few integrative approaches. The literature also shows that there are often implicit assumptions of a direct and linear relationship between the two sets of concepts. We introduce a model reflecting this research dichotomy by differentiating between “far-from-action” concepts like values or leadership ideals and “close-to-action” concepts like intended behavior. In a next step, we question the assumption of a direct and linear link between the two sets of concepts and discuss two studies in order to find out whether there is empirical support for our argument. We compare empirical findings on leadership ideals (GLOBE study) and intended leadership behavior (Vroom/Yetton study) collected from managers in the German-speaking countries Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. The results show inconsistencies that suggest quite complex intrapersonal processes influenced by cultural factors. We conclude that the link between “far-from-action” and “close-to-action” concepts is worth pursuing further and expands the initial model, thus paving the way for a more holistic understanding of the intrapersonal processes on which leadership behavior is based. Finally, we discuss the consequences of these processes for the stability of leadership behavior.     

Mind the gap: The role of leadership in multiteam system collective cognition

The increasing prevalence of team-based organizations places a premium on leadership that will “mind the gap” and enable smooth synchronization of activities across multiple distinct teams. Prior work shows that leaders can be trained to directly facilitate between-team coordination processes. Yet, relatively little is known about the intervening psychological mechanisms that enable between-team coordination. Here, we advance multiteam-interaction mental models—cognitive structures containing knowledge of appropriate between-team activities—as one mechanism that facilitates coordination among multiple teams. We use leader and team cognition data gathered in DeChurch and Marks' (2006) MTS study to test these ideas. Results reveal leaders' multiteam-interaction mental model accuracy “transfers” to teams through strategic communication, and leader strategic communication enables between-team coordination by promoting accuracy in followers' mental models. This study highlights the importance of leadership for developing collective cognition that allows teams to “scale up” from small stand-alone teams to larger and more complex systems.     

‘Physicians to a dying planet’: Helen Caldicott,Randall Forsberg,and the anti-nuclear weapons movement of the early 1980s

This article profiles two important leaders of the anti-nuclear weapons movement in the United States during the early 1980s. Helen Caldicott and Randall Forsberg were visionary, transformational leaders who crossed a variety of boundaries for the common good, and as such are prime exemplars of integrative leadership in action. Caldicott was a charismatic figure who used her status as physician and mother to rally a worldwide movement opposed to the ongoing proliferation of nuclear weapons and talk of “winnable” nuclear war. Forsberg was the main architect of the nuclear “Freeze” campaign whose humanitarian vision and common-sense approach to political action helped unite diverse segments of the American public around the Freeze proposal and push the Reagan administration towards disarmament talks with the Soviet Union. The article analyzes the leadership of both women in historical and social–scientific context, shedding light on two relatively unknown — yet important — social movement leaders whose stories have much to tell us about integrative public leadership, the challenges faced by women leaders, and the strengths and pitfalls of charismatic leadership.     

Traditional Chinese philosophies and contemporary leadership

We discuss three traditional Chinese philosophies—Daoism, Confucianism, and Legalism—as they relate to Western-originated leadership theories. We analyze articles reporting interviews with fifteen contemporary Chinese business leaders to determine how their leadership practices reflect the traditional philosophies. We discuss future research directions for Chinese and global leadership. In a response to world-wide call for developing indigenous theories and knowledge about management, we encourage scholars to consider cultural settings and traditional wisdom in their studies of contemporary leadership practices.     

Developing business buccaneers: employer expectations of emergent leaders

This study investigates employer expectations of graduates to inform pedagogical practice within a context of industry–university collaboration. Employers’ views of graduates as future leaders are explored through interviews, focus groups and a survey, with a regional sample of 146 managers. Findings show employers have different understandings and diverse expectations of leadership traits and generic competencies. Employers anticipate future graduates will need greater adaptability and flexibility for volatile business contexts; with some highlighting rule breaking that implies a buccaneer approach rather than responsible leadership. The dissonance between an academic aim to educate socially responsible, global citizens and industry demands potentially undermines the coherence of partnership. Consequently, this study casts doubt on implicit assumptions that practice-informed, industry–university, collaboration will deliver better leaders. The main implications are that educators need to clearly communicate to employers how university learning transfers into actual work practice, and for graduates to better articulate their broad capabilities. The research offers fresh insight into on educators’ responsibility to nurture critical thinking in graduates with the learning agility to question and responsibly navigate organisational rules. The study also contributes to the industry–university partnership debate by revealing the academic complexity of developing future leaders given the multiple lenses of practice-informed views.     

Was Gandhi “charismatic”? Exploring the rhetorical leadership of Mahatma Gandhi

This study explores a deceptively simple question: was Gandhi a “charismatic” leader? We compare Gandhi's rhetorical leadership to social movement leaders and charismatic U.S. presidents to examine whether any consistencies in charismatic rhetoric emerge across historical and cultural contexts. Our findings indicate that charismatic themes of articulating the intolerable nature of the present and appealing to values and moral justifications emerged in similar levels across all three samples. In addition, Gandhi's speeches contained comparable levels of language that emphasized his similarity to followers, followers’ worth, links between the past and future, and abstract, intangible themes as compared to other leaders. In contrast, themes of collective focus and active, aggressive speech varied significantly across the three samples. Recognizing that content analysis should be utilized with caution across cultural settings, we suggest a number of possible explanations for Gandhi's pervasive appeal and implications for future research into the universality of visionary rhetoric.     

On becoming a leader in Asia and America: Empirical evidence from women managers

In concordance with recent calls for cross-cultural leadership research as well as research on women leaders, this study investigated how women in Asia and the U.S. become leaders and how they enact their leadership. In-depth interviews with 76 mid- to upper-level female managers in Asia (China, India, Singapore) and the U.S. were conducted. Analyses revealed that a simple dichotomy of “Asian” versus “Western” leadership did not appropriately describe the data. Rather, factors such as achievement orientation, learning orientation, and role models emerged as crucial success factors for advancement to leadership positions across continents. However, the particular meaning differed between countries. Furthermore, with regard to women's leadership style differences between Asian countries were more salient than between Asia and the U.S. Implications for leadership theory and practice are discussed.     

Perceptions of effective leadership among Central Eurasian managers: A cultural convergence–divergence examination within a globalization context

The purpose of this study is to report on a research project that examined the responses of leaders from eight Central Eurasian countries concerning their perceptions of work-related values of effective organizational leaders. The respondents were participants in a two-week leadership development program held in Istanbul, Turkey. Content analysis of interview protocols and SYMLOG assessment methodology were used to explore two inter-related research questions regarding effective leadership concepts. The results yielded a profile of effective leadership for those interested in working in cross-national settings. The results also provided a cursory indication of the extent of trends in the processes of globalization and cultural convergence of Central Eurasian values, norms, and practices toward those of Western cultures regarding how effective leadership in organizations ought to be executed.     

Solving the crisis: When agency is the preferred leadership for implementing change

Glass-cliff research shows that female leaders are preferentially selected in a crisis to signal change and not for their leadership qualifications. In parallel, the management literature urges for agentic “masculine” leadership to turn around organizations in crisis. We hypothesized that, regardless of their gender, agentic leaders should be preferred to communal leaders if leadership qualifications and actual change potential motivate leader selection. Three experimental studies demonstrated that agentic (vs. communal) candidates were perceived to match poorly-performing (vs. strongly-performing) companies. This effect was accounted for by perceptions of agentic candidates' higher suitability, higher task-orientation (versus person-orientation), and higher change potential. We discuss that women face ambiguity as to why they become leaders in crisis contexts: because they are perceived as signaling change, stereotypically linked to their gender, or for their perceived agentic qualities as leaders. In contrast, men become crisis leaders due to their perceived agentic change potential.     

Upbeat leadership: A recipe for – or against – “successful” leadership studies

In the last 40 years, leadership studies (LS) have moved from a condition of near despair, where complaints of slow progress were commonplace, to a situation of self-confidence and self-praise. However, during recent years we have seen an upsurge in criticism alongside a contradiction between positive leadership ideas and a working life bearing little imprint of the upbeat messages said to characterize successful leaders. LS primarily produces results where “positive” leadership is correlated with various “positive” outcomes. This is made possible through peculiar conventions characterizing LS, which produce a recipe for flawed, but publishable, research and career progress. This paper points at 20 elements of this recipe and argues for a radical rethinking of LS norms and practices to develop more complex and sophisticated knowledge that is intellectually and methodologically sounder, facilitating less ideological and more relevant and insightful studies and research results.     

From genes to minds to cultures: Evolutionary approaches to leadership

Evolutionary perspectives are part of any comprehensive explanation of leadership and, more generally, hierarchy formation in groups. This editorial describes contributions to a special issue on the theme of “The evolution and biology of leadership: A new synthesis”, and we reach four main conclusions. First, leadership has been a powerful force in the biological and cultural evolution of human sociality. Humans have evolved a range of cognitive and behavioral mechanisms (adaptations) that facilitate leader-follower relations, including safeguards against overly dominant leaders. Second, how these adaptations interact with local ecological and cultural contexts produces cultural variation in leadership preferences, and in the structure of human organizations more broadly. Third, an evolutionary perspective creates consilience between the social and natural sciences, by integrating leadership theory from diverse fields such as biology, psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, economics, and political science. Fourth, evolutionary approaches – and specifically the collection of articles in this theme issue – produce and test novel hypotheses, such as regards (i) the critical role of leadership in cooperation, (ii) the importance of contextual factors in leader emergence and effectiveness, (iii) interactions between genetic and cultural influences on leadership, and (iv) obstacles and opportunities for women leaders.     

Does shared and differentiated transformational leadership predict followers' working conditions and well-being?

Transformational leadership has been widely researched and is associated with followers' performance, attitudes, and subjective well-being at the individual level. Less research has focused on transformational leadership as a group phenomenon. In a survey study (425 followers and 56 leaders), we examined how group-level and differentiated transformational leadership shape followers' perceptions of their working conditions and individual subjective well-being. There was stronger evidence that differentiated transformational leadership's relationships with indicators of well-being was mediated by perceptions of working conditions, in that 10 out of 20 tests for mediation using differentiated transformational leadership were significant, compared to just three out of 20 for group-level transformational leadership. The results suggest that transformational leadership needs to be studied as a group phenomenon considering how group-level perceptions may impact on followers' well-being and that leaders need to realize that there is an “I” in groups and addition to a “we” in groups.     

When the Minority Rules: Leveraging Difference While Facilitating Congruence for Cultural Minority Senior Leaders

The inclusion of cultural minorities as senior leaders is of growing importance and relevance to contemporary organizations with increasingly international composition, but much is to be learned about how and when such leaders impact the workplaces they lead. We draw on the “cultural difference” and “cultural congruence” propositions (Dorfman and House, 2004) to build a model for understanding whether and under what conditions cultural minority senior leaders have an impact on the elaboration of task-relevant information and relationship conflict in their workplaces. Hierarchical regression results from a study of 315 Australian workplaces and their senior leaders suggest that, regardless of whether the senior leader is a member of a cultural minority group, an organizational climate for innovation and flexibility increases information elaboration – an effect that is stronger when the organization faces greater environmental turbulence. The results further provide support for a three-way interaction effect, whereby employees in workplaces led by a cultural minority leader have less relationship conflict when climate for innovation and environmental turbulence are both low. We conclude with a discussion of the scholarly contributions and practical implications of our conceptual and empirical work, the limitations of our study, and future directions for this research.     

Crafting effective environmental strategies: A “model of learning” from the chemical and pharmaceutical industries

While creating and implementing effective environmental strategies, firms collect and process information from many interconnected “learning environmental.”These “models of learning” serve to develop environmental knowledge and cultural beliefs that guide, coordinate and synchronize actions at the corporate and subsidiary levels. In this way, best environmental practice becomes institutionalized within the organization.This article examines both the formal and informal processes that firms use to identify and transform environmental strategies into accepted organizational practices. Environmental, health and safety (EH & S) managers, in particular, should embrace the notion that systematically gathering and sharing such information across the organization can have profound implications for a firm's environmental performance. Firms that capture and disseminate the critical environmental knowledge of their members can be well positioned to attain environmental leadership roles in their industries.     

The relationship between vision strength,leadership style,and context

This investigation examined the relationship between leadership style and the content of vision tapes produced in a comprehensive leadership workshop with community leaders. The transformational leadership style of 141 leaders positively predicted the inspirational “strength” of their vision statements, as reflected in the level of optimism expressed in the videotaped presentation of their visions. Organizational size was related to vision strength and moderated the relationship between passive leadership style and vision strength.     

Effective leadership in the Mexican maquiladora: challenging common expectations

This article reports a cross-cultural study of Mexican and U.S. leaders in Mexican maquiladoras. The research builds on relational demography to determine if leader ethnicity, regional Mexican culture, and organizational affiliation moderate the impact of leadership behavior on important organizational outcomes. We examined the impacts of specific leader behaviors on follower attitudes and performance. Contrary to expectations from the current cross-cultural leadership literature, managerial leaders from the United States had approximately the same effects on the Mexican workforce as managerial leaders from Mexico. However, regional differences within Mexico and organizational affiliation were significant moderators. We postulate that there are at least two leader prototypes in Mexico: the “transitional” leader and the more “traditional” leader. Additional implications of these findings for leadership in Mexico are discussed.