What do people desire in their leaders? The role of leadership level on trait desirability

Do individuals desire different traits in leaders dependent on the leader's position in the organizational hierarchy? To address this question, participants first rated the traits they perceived their current supervisor possessed, traits they desired in their supervisor, and traits they viewed were characteristic of a leader in that role (Study 1). Next, participants rated the desirability of these same traits for 6 high-level and 6 low-level leaders (Study 2). Finally, to force them to prioritize traits, participants designed ideal high-level or low-level leaders by “purchasing” leadership traits using limited budgets of tokens (Study 3). Overall, participants highly and consistently desired trustworthiness and intelligence across leaders, yet they differentially desired other traits depending on the level of leadership. In addition, the desired–current discrepancy predicted leader–member exchange, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment, even after controlling for the prototype–current discrepancy. We discuss the implications of these findings for leadership selection, development, and promotion.     

Entrepreneurial Learning: Past Research and Future Challenges

Entrepreneurial learning (EL) has emerged as an important concept at the interface of entrepreneurship and organizational learning. Although EL research has gained momentum in the past decade, the literature is diverse, highly individualistic and fragmented, hindering the development of EL as a promising research area. In this paper, a systematic analysis of the EL literature is first conducted in order to take stock of the theoretical and empirical development and identify research themes and developmental patterns of EL research. Second, three pairs of key learning types that deserve more attention in future research are discussed, namely individual and collective learning, exploratory and exploitative learning, and intuitive and sensing learning. These learning types correspond to three key challenges that are derived from the EL research gaps identified in the systematic literature analysis, and provide fruitful avenues for future research. Third, by exploring the three pairs of learning types, further insights are drawn from entrepreneurship and organizational learning to help to advance EL research, and also feed back to the entrepreneurship literature by discussing how these learning types can help to understand the challenges at the centre of debate in the entrepreneurship literature.     

Rates of missing responses in personal digital assistant (PDA) versus paper assessments

This article describes rates of missing item responses in personal digital assistant (PDA) assessments as compared to paper assessments. Data come from the evaluation of a classroom-based leisure, life skills, and sexuality education program delivered to high school students in Cape Town, South Africa. Analyses show that the paper assessments had much higher rates of missing-ness than PDA assessments. This association is moderated by item order. Certain analyses also suggest that paper assessments have higher rates of missingness for items pertaining to participants' sexual behavior. Implications of these results for evaluation research will be discussed.     

Genetics After the Act: A Specialist Health Service Amid NHS Reform

This article considers the impact of the recent reform of the National Health Service (NHS) on specialist regional health services. A case study of medical genetic services is presented to highlight some problems arising from the implementation of the 1990 NHS and Community Care Act. New financial arrangements introduced by the Act have led many regional health authorities to devolve the finance and organization of specialist health services to districts. The introduction of competition and devolved budgets may pose especial problems for some specialist health services. In the case of genetic services these difficulties are exacerbated by new pricing rules. The paper explores these issues and suggests that the imposition of the market model on health care overlooks some vital, human elements which do not fit neatly into such a model.     

Patterns of Governance: The Curious Case of Non-profit Community Services in Australia

"Community" has taken on a new significance in Australian social policy discourse. Seemingly sound and morally justifiable, in the context of neo-liberalism the language of community positions non-profit delivery of services as superior to state-provided services. As a consequence, non-profit community services are being centrally positioned to mediate the relationship between the state and citizen subjects. In the first part of this paper we trace some of the key historical developments in Australia's welfare state and patterns of governance that are propelling the non-profit sector from the margins to the centre. The second section examines the relationship between Australia's shifting political landscape and the emerging welfare regime. One key feature of this new regime is the attempt to relocate citizenship away from the domain of the state and into that of civil society. The article concludes by sketching out some research themes, focusing, for example, on the impact of devolution of governance in terms of client rights and public accountability.     

Neighbourhood Life,Social Capital and Perceptions of Safety in the Western Suburbs of Adelaide

In this paper we report on a South Australian study of perceptions of safety and aspects of neighbourhood life including social capital which involved the analysis of 2400 self‐completed questionnaires. A path analysis found that perceptions of safety were directly associated with gender, age, perceptions of neighbourhood pollution and neighbourhood trust, and indirectly associated with age, neighbourhood pollution and neighbourhood connections. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the findings for public policy.     

Analysis of repeated categorical responses from fully and partially cross-classified data

Many follow-up studies involve categorical data measured on the same individual at different times. Frequently, some of the individuals are missing one or more of the measurements. This results in a contingency table with both fully and partially cross-classified data. Two models can be used to analyze data of this type: (i) The multiple-sample model, in which all the study subjects with the same configuration of missing observations are considered a separate sample. (ii) The single-sample model, which assumes that the missing observations are the result of a mechanism causing subjects to lose the informtion from one or some of the measurements. In this work we compare the two approaches and show that under certain conditions, the two models yield the same maximum likelihood estimates of the cell probabilities in the underlying contingency table.