Organizational Communication Commons^™

Beyond Leadership, Kees Rietsema, Daryl Watkins

Publications

Organizational leadership must evolve beyond a focus on those occupying the positions of organizational leadership. Complex systems provide the opportunity to rethink the leadership function in terms which are holistic and comprehensive. Applying the principles of complexity may provide the basis for a more collaborative, distributed and productive “way of being” for today’s organizations.

Leadership In “Confucian Asia”: A Three-Country Study Of Justice, Trust, And Transformational Leadership, Rajnandini Pillai, Jeffrey S. Kohles, Michelle C. Bligh, Melissa K. Carsten, Glen Brodowsky

Organization Management Journal

Increasing globalization and the economic uncertainty inherent in the recent financial crisis have strained the already tenuous commitment of many employees, making followers’ perceptions of justice and trust more critical now than ever before in retaining a loyal workforce. A model of leadership, organizational justice, trust, and work outcomes such as commitment and satisfaction, similar to the one tested in the US, was extended to three countries in the so-called “Confucian Asian Cluster” in the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) study. Data were collected from executives in: Mainland China (N¼131), Singapore (N¼246), and Taiwan (N¼99). Results indicate that …

Leadership Tactics: Enabling Quality Social Exchange And Organizational Citizenship Behavior, Unnikammu Moideenkutty, Stuart M. Schmidt

Organization Management Journal

We examined the relationship between leaders’ positive and negative influence tactics and their subordinates’ organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) directed toward them as well as the quality of the social exchange with them in westernized Middle Eastern organizations. In this study, we used data from 202 supervisor–subordinate dyads in the Sultanate of Oman. Our findings supported the hypothesis that positive leader influence tactics would be positively associated with affirmative social exchange (represented by a combination of leader–member exchange (LMX) and trust) and subordinates’ OCB directed toward supervisors. However, while negative leader influence tactics were related negatively to social exchange, they were …

Top-Level Communication: Behind The Scenes With Famous French Spin Doctor Jacques Seguela, Christophe Haag, Jean-Francois Coget, Tessa Melkonian

Organization Management Journal

This article explores the practice of spin doctoring through the point of view of a practitioner and possible differences between France and America in that practice. We do so by reporting and analyzing an exclusive interview with famous French spin doctor Jacques Seguela, VP of Havas, one of the world’s largest advertising and communications groups. Seguela was involved in 20 political campaigns in France and abroad, advising, among others, French President Francois Mitterrand in 1981, and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barack in 1999. He still advises a number of politicians and top-level executives worldwide. In the interview, Seguela talks about …

Images Of Leadership: A New Exercise To Teach Leadership From A Social Constructionist Perspective, Christopher I. Maxwell, Anne M. Greenhalgh

Organization Management Journal

Adopting a social constructionist approach to the teaching of leadership, we asked students in a required course in management to find or create and submit a digital image that captures leadership as they see it. Our intention was to help students understand their own perceptions of leadership and to see how their perceptions compare to those of others. We have run this exercise for the last 10 years (2000–2009), and to date we have collected 5037 digital images. These images are used throughout the course to demonstrate the relevance of the subject, to enrich the discussion of leadership theories, to …

Revisiting The Behavioral Matrix For Leadership And Team Development, Kathleen Kane

Organization Management Journal

The Behavioral Matrix functions on a variety of levels, as: an introduction to self-awareness; a team building exercise; an ice breaker; an introduction to individual differences; or an opening exercise to a course or leadership development program. This exercise can be adapted for a variety of participants in college courses: undergraduate and graduate, as well as for executive and corporate training. Behavioral styles are categorized on a matrix with two axis. The four quadrants created by the intersection of the axis yield four different categories: Controller (formal/dominant), Supporter (informal/flow-with), Analyzer (formal/flow-with), and Promoter (informal/dominant). Specific guidelines for using the exercise …

A Comparison Of Leadership Traits Across Countries: Taiwan And United States, Chi-Shou Justin Yang

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

With the rise of new technologies, geographical and political boundaries between companies are disappearing. Managers within multinational organizations are faced with the challenge of adapting to new paradigms of leadership while leading employees who may share different backgrounds. With businesses becoming more globalized, it is important to know and understand how to lead and interact with people from other cultures. The purpose of the study is to explore and describe similarities or differences with managers from the United States and managers from Taiwan in relation to the 29 leadership traits overall as well as at individual management levels. As a …

Integrating Counselor Teambuilding And Leadership Training Into The Annual Honors Freshman Orientation Retreat, Alexandria L. Kerns

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Teamwork and appropriate leadership skills are essential to anyone aspiring to be an effective leader. For my Capstone Experience/Thesis project, I set out to analyze three defined problems that plague the counselor group of the Honors Freshman Orientation Retreat, and to create and implement a solution for the three problems as a whole. After analyzing each problem, I concluded that the source of the three problems relates specifically to the lack of training. Therefore, the desired situation or goal in approaching these problems was to create a solution that will encourage the counselors to overcome their prescribed ideals about the …

Strategic Recovery Requires Leadership, Christine G. Springer

Public Policy and Leadership Faculty Research

As public managers work toward a successful recovery post-midyear elections, we all must deal with system-wide problems arising from the recession. This requires first recognizing that the crisis continues and must be addressed not just by increasing revenue but by fixing system-wide structural and operational issues.

To do so involves developing the skills required in a recovery, identifying the causes of the crisis so that future crises can be better managed and concentrating on the key areas of leadership expertise needed to effectively communicate and deliver better outcomes.

Antecedents Of Servant Leadership: A Mixed Methods Study, Curtis D. Beck

Department of Agricultural Leadership, Education, and Communication: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The purpose of this mixed methods study was to explore the antecedents of servant leadership. The sequential explanatory research design consisted of two distinct phases: quantitative followed by qualitative. The Phase One quantitative survey collected data from 499 leaders and 630 raters from community leadership programs in the United States using the Servant Leadership Questionnaire (Barbuto & Wheeler, 2006). During Phase Two, selected leaders from phase one (N = 12) were interviewed to explain those results in more depth. The data were coded and analyzed for possible themes. Triangulation was used to analyze the quantitative and qualitative data to validate …

Doing More With Less At Ariens: A Leadership And Transformation Case Study, Jennifer K. Hartwell, George Roth

Organization Management Journal

Ariens is a family-owned manufacturer of lawn and snow equipment that designs, manufactures, sells, distributes, and supports its products in the United States, and more recently, internationally. Ariens faced and overcame a number of difficult challenges over the last decade by adopting and sustaining lean production principles throughout the organization, as well as with its suppliers and customers. This case study describes earlier business challenges, the changes that were made, how they were led, and the response of the workforce. The case study focuses on the period from 1998 to 2005, and a post-script updates what has happened up through …

Nonprofit Leadership. Introduction: Miracle Workers At The Helm. New Ways Of Exercising Leadership, Kristen Mccormack

New England Journal of Public Policy

Leading a nonprofit organization in today’s world requires nothing less than a miracle worker at the helm. That could be the conclusion one might draw from reading the literature on the traits, skills, and characteristics required to lead a nonprofit organization. Today’s leaders should be honest, competent, forward looking, and inspiring as well as intelligent, fair-minded, broad-minded, courageous, straightforward, and imaginative. Leaders should be of high integrity, dedicated, magnanimous, humble, open, and creative while energizing others. Able to cope with change, leaders must establish direction, align people, motivate, and inspire while effectively communicating their story. He or she must be …

Strategic Transformation Process: Toward Purpose, People, Process And Power, Elizabeth B. Davis, James Kee, Kathryn Newcomer

Organization Management Journal

Across the world, public and non-profit sector leaders face an extremely turbulent socio-political-economic environment. This environment creates additional risks and uncertainties for organizations and may hinder a leader’s ability to act strategically. Addressing these complex, constantly evolving conditions requires leaders to develop processes that involve the organization’s stakeholders and that create organizational conditions for self-generation, creativity, resilience and action planning. In this paper we provide an organizational-level, integrative framework for the strategic transformation of public and non-profit organizations to assist leaders who are committed to effective stewardship of their organizations. The Strategic Transformation Process involves an intense dialogue among organizational …

The Great Leader Project, James P. Burton

Organization Management Journal

This paper examines a project that has been incorporated into an undergraduate Leadership and Decision Making class. The project, the Great Leader Project, focuses student attention on the fact that effective leadership is not only a function of the specific traits and behaviors of a leader, but also a function of the characteristics of the followers and the leader’s context. In this project, a leader is randomly assigned to a group of students who are charged with analyzing the leader (both in a written report and an oral debate) using the concepts discussed in class. At the end of the …

Emergency Managers As Change Agents, Christine G. Springer

Public Policy and Leadership Faculty Research

Since 2001, FEMA and others have been defining and refining competencies for emergency management professionals. In so doing, they have addressed directly and indirectly the qualities of leaders. We know that leadership is not a person or a position. It is a complex relationship between people, based on trust, obligation, commitment, emotion, and a shared vision of the good. We also know that transformational or change-based leadership has become an organizational necessity given the fact that emergency management as a profession is just now coming into its own and emergency management jobs are not traditional in terms of the how, …

Lessons In Leadership: Robert Oppenheimer And The Los Alamos Laboratory, Richard C. Ringer

Organization Management Journal

The leadership of Robert Oppenheimer, Director of the Los Alamos Laboratory during WWII, serves as a vivid lesson in leadership. The recollections of those who worked with Oppenheimer at Los Alamos clearly attribute much of the success of the laboratory to Oppenheimer’s leadership. Of specific interest are: Oppenheimer's efforts in recruiting, his ability to create a sense of meaning and purpose at the laboratory, his technical competence, and his ability to generate commitment and involvement among members of the laboratory.

Lessons In Leadership: Robert Oppenheimer And The Los Alamos Laboratory, Richard C. Ringer

Organization Management Journal

The leadership of Robert Oppenheimer, Director of the Los Alamos Laboratory during WWII, serves as a vivid lesson in leadership. The recollections of those who worked with Oppenheimer at Los Alamos clearly attribute much of the success of the laboratory to Oppenheimer’s leadership. Of specific interest are: Oppenheimer's efforts in recruiting, his ability to create a sense of meaning and purpose at the laboratory, his technical competence, and his ability to generate commitment and involvement among members of the laboratory.

Fostering Emotional And Social Intelligence In Organizations, Craig R. Seal, Richard E. Boyatzis, James R. Bailey

Organization Management Journal

This paper integrates diverse research to provide a theoretical model of the process whereby emotional and social intelligence (ESI) is fostered in organizations. The purpose of this paper is to provide: (1) an overview of the theory of ESI, including the historical contributions and current conceptualizations; (2) the impact of ESI on performance, including the research evidence and examples of organizations using ESI; (3) developing ESI competencies and a model for desirable, sustainable change; and (4) a call to action for education and management, including guidelines for fostering ESI in organizations. Unlike general intelligence or personality, the key assumption and …

Fostering Emotional And Social Intelligence In Organizations, Craig R. Seal, Richard E. Boyatzis, James R. Bailey

Organization Management Journal

This paper integrates diverse research to provide a theoretical model of the process whereby emotional and social intelligence (ESI) is fostered in organizations. The purpose of this paper is to provide: (1) an overview of the theory of ESI, including the historical contributions and current conceptualizations; (2) the impact of ESI on performance, including the research evidence and examples of organizations using ESI; (3) developing ESI competencies and a model for desirable, sustainable change; and (4) a call to action for education and management, including guidelines for fostering ESI in organizations. Unlike general intelligence or personality, the key assumption and …

Effective Empowerment In Organizations, Gary A. Yukl, Wendy S. Baker

Organization Management Journal

Psychological empowerment is the perception that workers can help determine their own work roles, accomplish meaningful work, and influence important decisions. Empowerment has been studied from different perspectives, including employee perceptions, leadership behaviors, and management programs. Despite positive rhetoric, programs designed to increase empowerment seldom achieve the benefits promised. Inconclusive and seemingly contradictory outcomes stem from the fact that few companies give employees significant control and access to management information. A half century of research suggests that empowerment strategies can offer real benefits. We outline facilitating conditions for effective empowerment, including characteristics of organizations, leaders, employees, and the work itself.

Effective Empowerment In Organizations, Gary A. Yukl, Wendy S. Baker

Organization Management Journal

Psychological empowerment is the perception that workers can help determine their own work roles, accomplish meaningful work, and influence important decisions. Empowerment has been studied from different perspectives, including employee perceptions, leadership behaviors, and management programs. Despite positive rhetoric, programs designed to increase empowerment seldom achieve the benefits promised. Inconclusive and seemingly contradictory outcomes stem from the fact that few companies give employees significant control and access to management information. A half century of research suggests that empowerment strategies can offer real benefits. We outline facilitating conditions for effective empowerment, including characteristics of organizations, leaders, employees, and the work itself.

The Leader’S Imperative: Ethics, Integrity, And Responsibility, J. C. Ficarrotta

Purdue University Press Books

Drawn from the "Alice McDermott Memorial Lectures in Applied Ethics" held at the United States Air Force Academy, these 20 essays contribute to our understanding of ethics and leadership. Contributions come from a distinguished and diverse group of individuals including, Allan Bloom, Reverend Edward A. Malloy, John T. Noonan, Jr., James F. Childress, Christina Hoff Sommers, General Ronald R. Fogelman, and William J. Bennett. The range of topics include moral certainty and sensibility, professional and personal integrity, emergency ethics and the responsibility of war criminals, the just war and public policy, unethical adversaries and military obligation, and liberal education and …