Integrative leadership and the creation and maintenance of cross-sector collaborations

This article presents a theoretical framework for understanding integrative leadership and the creation and maintenance of cross-sector collaborations that create public value. We define integrative leadership as bringing diverse groups and organizations together in semi-permanent ways — and typically across sector boundaries — to remedy complex public problems and achieve the common good. Our framework highlights in particular the leadership roles and activities of collaboration sponsors and champions. The framework is illustrated with examples from the development of MetroGIS, a geographic information system that promotes better public problem-solving in the Minneapolis–St. Paul region of the US. A set of propositions is offered to guide further research and to prompt reflective practice.     

How to build social capital with leadership development: Lessons from an explorative case study of a multibusiness firm

The organizational impact of leadership development practices is still not fully understood. Research confirms that in some cases effects can be found and in others not. Most of these attempts search for contribution to a company's human capital. A contribution to social capital development remains an unexplored source of variance in understanding how leadership development impacts organizational performance. This paper therefore explores—from a strategic management perspective—how leadership development practices may contribute to social capital development. We chose the strategic context of a large multibusiness firm in which social capital across business units play an important role for competitive advantage. The exploratory case study reveals that: 1) Social capital differs regarding its intensity and develops through stages characterized by contact, assimilation, and identification experiences. 2) Leadership development practices differ in their potential contribution to social capital development stages and should therefore be designed accordingly.     

What makes leadership,leadership? Using self-expansion theory to integrate traditional and contemporary approaches

Numerous traditional theories and paradigms of leadership purport to describe what leadership is. It is difficult to reconcile these traditional approaches, however, if each one alone, independent of the others, is viewed as capturing the actual identity of leadership. In this article, we take an integrative view of traditional approaches to leadership. To do so, we first identify some underlying ideas common to them. Next, we explain how these underlying ideas lead us to a fundamental theory about close relationships—that is, self-expansion theory, which refers to a psychological process in which an individual incorporates another into the self (Aron & Aron, 1986). We then review the traditional leadership theories to explore whether these theories may be linked through self-expansion theory and whether self-expansion may help to explain why boundary conditions have been discovered for all of them. In this process, we explore whether traditional approaches to leadership might also be linked with more contemporary approaches through self-expansion theory. Finally, we discuss the implications for future research and professional practice of the integration of traditional approaches to leadership.     

The effectiveness and specificity of change management in a public organization: Transformational leadership and a bureaucratic organizational structure

There is an extensive private sector literature on organizational change management. However, recent studies have suggested that the specific context of public organizations may have consequences for the management organizational change. This study examines to what extent different change approaches and transformational leadership of direct supervisors contribute to the effective implementation of organizational change in public organizations, and to what extent the bureaucratic structure of public organizations makes the implementation of organizational change s3pecific. The implementation of an organizational change in a Dutch public organization is studied using quantitative methods and techniques. The results indicate that bureaucratic organizations may effectively implement organizational change with both planned and emergent change approaches. The contribution of transformational leadership depends on the type of change approach and organizational structure. Transformational leadership behavior of direct supervisors contributes little to planned processes of change, but is crucial in emergent processes of change in a non-bureaucratic context. Although the literature on change management mostly emphasizes the leadership of senior managers, the leadership role of direct supervisors should not be overlooked during organizational change in public organizations.     

Civic capacity: Building on transformational leadership to explain successful integrative public leadership

An emerging stream of work has been investigating the leadership processes necessary to guide public multi-sector collaborations. This stream of work argues that new leadership theory about integrative public leadership is needed because the context is different from that traditionally investigated by leadership researchers. In this paper, we advance the study of integrative public leadership by arguing that transformational leadership theory does apply to multi-sector collaborations, but needs to be augmented with an additional construct called “civic capacity.” We elaborate on this construct and suggest that it consists of three components: civic drive, civic connections, and civic pragmatism.     

The recent literature on public leadership: Reviewed and considered

The purpose of the article is to review the academic literature on public leadership. The discussion is generally confined to books and articles in which leadership in the public realm is explicitly at the center of the discussion; and it is limited to materials published in 1999 and 2000. The literature on leadership is divided into five groups: individuals, groups/organizations, nations, transnational arrangements, and cross-cutting themes (diversity, ethics, mass movements). The article concludes by noting that although the literature on public leadership, at least as generated by contemporary academicians, remains meager, it is growing in richness and diversity. In fact, this review demonstrates that scholars, teachers, and practitioners have a range of relevant materials from which to draw information and ideas. An enormous amount of work remains to be done before the literature on public leadership reaches a critical mass. But some good work is being accomplished in a field that is clearly expanding, and that is of increasing interest to constituencies both within and outside academia.     

Leader development across the lifespan: A dynamic experiences-grounded approach

Previous research has established leader development as an ongoing process across the entire lifespan. Experience, especially on-the-job experience, has been increasingly acknowledged as a needed condition for leader development. From a life span developmental perspective, however, individuals are exposed to a variety of critical experiences across their life course—from preschool, childhood, through adolescence, emerging adulthood, adulthood and well into late adulthood. These time periods, characterized by specific developmental experiences, serve as potential windows of opportunity for one's leader development. However, the extant research primarily focuses on the development of leadership through on-the-job experiences in adulthood; there is little integration of leader developmental experiences that occur before and after adulthood, as well as those that occur beyond the workplace. Additionally, the influencing mechanism of experiences during the leader development process has been understudied. Using an interdisciplinary perspective, we present a framework that explores the critical developmental experiences at each stage in the lifespan. These experiences influence one's expertise in leadership through the mediating role and dynamic interaction of the leader experience processing system and the leader self-view system that are introduced in the model of this framework. This theoretical study systematically explores experiential opportunities across the course of life and within multiple contexts, as well as the underlying mechanisms that foster leader development. There are important implications for enhancing process-oriented leadership research and leadership pedagogical practices.     

Changing Leadership and Gender in Public Sector Organizations

The aim of this paper is to examine the ways in which leadership at middle management level in the public realm is gendered. This is attempted largely through a consideration of academic literature, supported by some empirical findings from a research investigation into higher education and social work in Sweden and England and a review of literature that reveals varying types of leadership characterized as masculinist. Taking the position that context shapes social relationships and subject positions, and provides opportunities as well as constraints, we consider leadership in the public sector under the sway of new public management, framed by neo‐liberalism and the valorization of competition, self‐interested instrumentality, uncertainty and risk, operationalized in public sector organizations through performative regimes. It is argued that while some women and men are willing participants in the new regimes, others are antagonistic or ambivalent, finding themselves mired in neo‐bureaucratic processes of surveillance and control, often stuck in occupational cul‐de‐sacs. It is contended that neo‐liberalism and new public management are associated with masculinist forms of rationality that elevate individual winners and losers and divert attention from collective issues of gender. Rather than focus on gendered styles of leadership it is suggested that it is more important to look at their gendered performance and effects.     

Toward a theory of spiritual leadership

A causal theory of spiritual leadership is developed within an intrinsic motivation model that incorporates vision, hope/faith, and altruistic love, theories of workplace spirituality, and spiritual survival. The purpose of spiritual leadership is to create vision and value congruence across the strategic, empowered team, and individual levels and, ultimately, to foster higher levels of organizational commitment and productivity.I first examine leadership as motivation to change and review motivation-based leadership theories. Second, I note the accelerating call for spirituality in the workplace, describe the universal human need for spiritual survival through calling and membership, and distinguish between religion and spirituality. Next, I introduce a generic definition of God as a higher power with a continuum upon which humanistic, theistic, and pantheistic definitions of God can be placed. I also review religious- and ethics-and-values-based leadership theories and conclude that, to motivate followers, leaders must get in touch with their core values and communicate them to followers through vision and personal actions to create a sense of spiritual survival through calling and membership.I then argue that spiritual leadership theory is not only inclusive of other major extant motivation-based theories of leadership, but that it is also more conceptually distinct, parsimonious, and less conceptually confounded. And, by incorporating calling and membership as two key follower needs for spiritual survival, spiritual leadership theory is inclusive of the religious- and ethics and values-based approaches to leadership. Finally, the process of organizational development and transformation through spiritual leadership is discussed. Suggestions for future research are offered.     

‘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.     

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.     

Organizational and contextual influences on the emergence and effectiveness of charismatic leadership

The literature on charismatic leadership in organizations has neglected the organizational context in which such leadership is embedded. The purpose of this article is to enrich and refine charismatic leadership theory by linking it to its organizational context. We argue that while charismatic leadership principles and processes potentially apply across a wide variety of situations, the emergence and effectiveness of such leadership may be facilitated by some contexts and inhibited by others. We develop and present a series of propositions linking contextual variable to the emergence and effectiveness of charismatic leadership. Among the contextual variable we examine are the organizational environment, life-cycle stage, technology, tasks, goals, structure, and culture, as well as the leader's level in the organization and the circumstances surrounding his or her appointment.     

The role of public health in population health

The role of public health is central in population health. What distinguishes public health from clinical medicine is that it's focus is on the entire population--not the individual patient. To achieve the goal of population health, healthy communities, or Healthy People 2000 requires physician leadership in medicine and public health at all levels--local, state, and national. The challenge is formidable, but the goals are attainable through strategies that focus on the goal of the common good and through collaboration of public health, medicine, and the community.     

Contemporary public leadership in China: A research review and consideration

China garners great international attention due to its rapid economic development, unprecedented nationwide political reform, and significant social progress over the last 25 years. Contemporary public leadership in China is arguably a major force for the myriad of recent economic, political, and social transformations in the country. This article reviews the academic literature on that leadership, providing an overview of interest to scholars, teachers, and practitioners whose work deals with cross-cultural studies of leadership development. The review focuses primarily on materials published between January 1999 and June 2004 that explicitly address public leadership in China. The review identifies six areas of research to date: (1) leadership transition, (2) democratization, (3) prominent political figures, (4) local leadership, (5) cultural and historical traditions, and (6) other identified forms of public leadership (military versus Party leadership, women as public leaders, religion and public leadership, and student leadership). The article concludes with discussions of characteristics of the literature and directions for future theoretical and empirical work.     

Organizational learning and knowledge in public service organizations: A systematic review of the literature

This paper is a systematic review of the literature on organizational learning and knowledge with relevance to public service organizations. Organizational learning and knowledge are important to public sector organizations, which share complex external challenges with private organizations, but have different drivers and goals for knowledge. The evidence shows that the concepts of organizational learning and knowledge are under-researched in relation to the public sector and, importantly, this raises wider questions about the extent to which context is taken into consideration in terms of learning and knowledge more generally across all sectors. A dynamic model of organizational learning within and across organizational boundaries is developed that depends on four sets of factors: features of the source organization; features of the recipient organization; the characteristics of the relationship between organizations; and the environmental context. The review concludes, first, that defining 'organization' is an important element of understanding organizational learning and knowledge. Second, public organizations constitute an important, distinctive context for the study of organizational learning and knowledge. Third, there continues to be an over-reliance on the private sector as the principal source of theoretical understanding and empirical research and this is conceptually limiting for the understanding of organizational learning and knowledge. Fourth, differences as well as similarities between organizational sectors require conceptualization and research that acknowledge sector-specific aims, values and structures. Finally, it is concluded that frameworks for explaining processes of organizational learning at different levels need to be sufficiently dynamic and complex to accommodate public organizations.     

Paternalistic leadership and employee voice in China: A dual process model

Drawing from social exchange and self-concept-based leadership theories, we investigate how paternalistic leadership — authoritarian, benevolent, and moral — affects employee voice from leader–member exchange (LMX) and status-judgment perspectives in the Chinese context. Data from 402 employees and their supervisors show that LMX and status-judgment mechanisms could work simultaneously in transmitting the influences of paternalistic leadership behaviors to employee voice. Authoritarian paternalistic leaders reduce employee voice by reducing their status judgment. Benevolent paternalistic leaders encourage employee voice by enhancing both LMX and status judgment. Moral paternalistic leaders positively influence employee voice mainly through LMX processes. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of the findings.     

Conceptualizing leadership with respect to its historical–contextual antecedents to power

An attempt is made here to build on the ideas and arguments presented in a recent Leadership Quarterly journal article written by Hunt and Dodge [Leadership Q. Yearly Overview Leadership 11 (2000) 435]. In their article, these authors argue that contemporary leadership researchers tend to neglect the historical–contextual antecedents of the field and as a result are developing many theories that reflect little more than a form of “academic amnesia” and “leadership déjà vu”. The importance of Hunt and Dodge's argument is reinforced through the use here of a form of deconstruction to reveal a lacuna in the leadership literature—the insufficient coverage of power, particularly at what is termed a deep structure level. With the current context of organizational change in mind, this lacuna is shown to have problematic consequences for leadership theory in general. More specifically, the increasing use of dispersed leadership strategies is shown to be particularly problematic. The article proposes a new conceptual framework that begins to address these problems and in so doing provides ideas and challenges for future research in the field.     

Leaders’ influence on collective action: An identity leadership perspective

What makes followers act collectively when called upon by their leaders? To answer this question, participants were randomly allocated to leader–follower relationships embedded either in a partisan group or a workgroup context; and the relationship between identity leadership and collective action through ingroup identification (Study 1: N = 293) or both ingroup identification and group-efficacy (Study 2: N = 338) were assessed. Based on the model of identity leadership, we predicted and found that identity leadership was positively related with intentions for collective action when called upon by the leader, both via ingroup identification and belief in group efficacy. As predicted, the social identity process for the effectiveness of identity leadership was more important in partisan groups than in workgroups. The efficacy related process was group context invariant. These results have implications for our understanding of group processes involved in the leadership in collective action.     

An Empirical Model for Managing Quality in the Electronics Industry

Much of the empirical research in the past two decades has suggested that quality management (QM) is context dependent. This research develops an empirical QM model in a technology‐based sector—electronics manufacturing. Based on quantitative and qualitative investigations of 225 electronics firms in Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region of China, a path analytic model is developed. The empirical model shows that a typical quality management system (QMS) in the electronics industry is composed of four major modules, namely leadership, cultural elements, operational support systems, and process management. These modules create a series of chain effects on organizational performance, rather than acting as parallel elements with an equal impact. By quantifying their effects on organizational performance and comparing the model to others in the literature, we identify those QM constructs that are context dependent. In electronics manufacturing, process management and customer focus are more important than other elements (e.g., cultural factors) for garnering business results. This study contributes to contingency theory and research by identifying the key constructs and their relationships in a competitive, volatile, and technology‐based industry with complex supply networks.