Advances in leader and leadership development: A review of 25 years of research and theory

The development of effective leaders and leadership behavior is a prominent concern in organizations of all types. We review the theoretical and empirical literature on leader and leadership development published over the past 25 years, primarily focusing on research published in The Leadership Quarterly. Compared to the relatively long history of leadership research and theory, the systematic study of leadership development (broadly defined to also include leader development) has a moderately short history. We examine intrapersonal and interpersonal issues related to the phenomena that develop during the pursuit of effective leadership, describe how development emerges with an emphasis on multi-source or 360-degree feedback processes, review longitudinal studies of leadership development, and investigate methodological and analytical issues in leader and leadership development research. Future research directions to motivate and guide the study of leader and leadership development are also discussed.     

Proportional hazard regression models for point processes: an analysis of nuclear power plant operations in Europe

The safety and reliability of nuclear power have been hotly debated in the last 30 years. Compared with physical outputs of production, such as electricity, safety and reliability are not easily measurable. This paper considers reliability, defined as the hazard of an unplanned shutdown, and addresses the measurability problem by introducing a generalization of Poisson regression models to analyze the occurrence of unplanned shutdowns interrupting operating spells in European nuclear power plants between 1981 and 1986.     

The Power of Jonckheere's Test

This paper discusses the power of Jonckheere's test under the ordered alternative hypothesis. It is shown that the power of the test is bounded significantly away from one under certain shift alternatives and sample sizes.     

The Economics of Density: Evidence From the Berlin Wall

This paper develops a quantitative model of internal city structure that features agglomeration and dispersion forces and an arbitrary number of heterogeneous city blocks. The model remains tractable and amenable to empirical analysis because of stochastic shocks to commuting decisions, which yield a gravity equation for commuting flows. To structurally estimate agglomeration and dispersion forces, we use data on thousands of city blocks in Berlin for 1936, 1986, and 2006 and exogenous variation from the city's division and reunification. We estimate substantial and highly localized production and residential externalities. We show that the model with the estimated agglomeration parameters can account both qualitatively and quantitatively for the observed changes in city structure. We show how our quantitative framework can be used to undertake counterfactuals for changes in the organization of economic activity within cities in response, for example, to changes in the transport network.     

The faces of local TV news in America: youth,whiteness, and gender disparities in station publicity photos

TV news is a visual medium that requires its on-air journalists to look good, but a history of lawsuits and survey research suggests that this burden is spread unevenly. Critics charge that women are expected to look younger and sexier, and minority broadcasters are held to a White standard of beauty. This project investigated the reality behind those complaints by examining the faces of on-air journalists working for local stations in the US according to race, gender, and attractiveness. The resulting content analysis of more than 400 online publicity photos suggests that a certain look dominates for men and for women and that the range of appearance standards is wider for men than women.     

The entanglement of leader character and leader competence and its impact on performance

Whereas the micro- and macro-oriented leadership literatures have often studied leader competencies necessary for effective performance, the role of leader character in relation to competencies and performance has been to a large extent neglected. Our work seeks to shift the scholarly dialogue by introducing the concept of character-competence entanglement, which reflects the binding between character and competence over time. The highest degree of entanglement represents the deep and more persistent interconnection and mutually-reinforcing effect between highly-developed leader character and highly-developed leader competence, whereas in cases of low entanglement, character can be activated temporarily in a particular context to help strengthen the relationship between competence and performance. Our core proposition is that high character-competence entanglement will lead to extraordinary performance over time. In addition, we emphasize that relying on naturally-occurring learning opportunities and the processes of “learning-by-living” both outside and inside the organization will positively impact the development of character-competence entanglement.     

Religion as nationalism: the religious nationalism of American Christian Zionists

The term ‘religious nationalism’ is often theorized, at worst as antithetically conjunctive where religion is defined as the allegiance to God and nationalism is the allegiance to the nation, and at best as instrumental. I argue here that this fusion of religion and nationalism takes place most convincingly if we understand religion as adherent performance rather than solely as a theological container of tenants. I illustrate this through American Christian Zionist performances and discourses regarding their self-imagined identity as being in a national diaspora for Israel. I argue this religious nationalism is possible because Christian Zionist performances of a national allegiance to Israeli Jews are grounded in an apocalyptic narrative of the future.     

Contractual relations and organizational structure in franchising

In this paper, we employ a new dataset based on a sample of 123 franchise systems originating from Germany to empirically test hypotheses stemming from agency theory and capital scarcity considerations on the contractual relations and the organizational structure in franchising. We include proxies for the franchisor’s capital scarcity as well as for moral hazard on the franchisee’s and the franchisor’s side. Furthermore, we distinguish between initial and ongoing franchisor support. Our results indicate that agency models based on double moral hazard do explain the design of franchise contracts and the organizational structure in terms of the proportion of franchised outlets. We find that the incentive component of the franchise contract (the royalty rate) is not influenced by moral hazard on the franchisee’s side, but rather by moral hazard on the franchisor’s side. Furthermore, the proportion franchised is strongly influenced by moral hazard on the franchisee’s side. Hence, after providing incentives to outlet managers by turning them into franchisees, thereby granting them residual claimancy, the royalty rate mainly serves to ensure ongoing franchisor input. The franchisor’s capital scarcity influences the fixed fee in franchise contracts and the proportion of franchised outlets, thus supporting standard capital scarcity arguments.