Hubris is a grandiose sense of self, characterized by overconfidence, arrogance, and contempt toward the advice and criticism of others. Hubristic leaders create the conditions that invite unintended negative consequences by overestimating the likelihood of positive outcomes and underestimating the likelihood of negative outcomes from their decisions and actions. The early decades of the 20th century witnessed an upsurge of interest in hubris. The study of hubris in business and management began in behavioral finance, but this has since extended into other subfields of business and management, including strategic management, top management teams, entrepreneurship, leadership, and business ethics.
Article
G. James Lemoine
Because leadership and creativity represent two of the most popular topics in the fields of management and organizational behavior, it should not be surprising that a large body of literature has emerged in which the two are jointly examined. Leadership is a commonly studied independent variable, whereas creativity is an outcome of paramount importance for organizations, and the two are also theoretically connected in several ways, suggesting that leadership could precipitate followers’ creative outcomes. This relationship pattern, called “creative leadership,” is the most common way leadership and creativity interact in the extant scholarship. Most of the existing work has focused on “facilitating” creative leadership, in which followers (but not leaders) generate creative outputs, often as a result of leadership behaviors and styles, relationships, or the characteristics of their leader. This work generally finds that positive leadership precipitates positive creative outcomes, although some findings have emerged suggesting that considerable nuance may exist in these relationships, a promising area for future research. Much less scholarship has examined how leaders might direct others to implement their own creative visions, or how leaders might integrate their own creative efforts with those of their followers to enhance overall creativity. Research on these forms of creative leadership is often limited to specific creativity-relevant industries, such the culinary field and the arts, but there is opportunity to examine how they might operate in more general organizational fields.
Other phenomena linking leadership and creativity are plausible but less understood. For instance, leaders may assemble creative contexts, engage in unconventional behavior, or emerge as leaders regardless of their hierarchical positions. Least explored of all is the idea of an opposite causal order—that of creativity affecting leadership, such that creative acts or experiences by an organizational member might drive or alter leadership emerging from themselves, their managers, or their followers. After review of the extant literature in these areas, potential topics for future scholarship are identified within and among the different research streams.
Article
Lynn R. Offermann and Kira Foley
Women have historically been underrepresented in leadership positions across private and public organizations around the globe. Gender inequality and gender discrimination remain very real challenges for women workers in general, and especially so for women striving for leadership positions. Yet organizational research suggests that female leaders may bring a unique constellation of leadership-related traits, attributes, and behaviors to the workplace that may provide advantages to their organizations. Specific cultural and organizational work contexts may facilitate or inhibit a female leadership advantage. Reaping the benefits of female leadership relies on an organization’s ability to combat the numerous barriers female leaders face that male leaders often do not, including gender-based discrimination, implicit bias, and unfair performance evaluations. Despite these challenges, the literature suggests that a reasoned consideration of the positive aspects of women’s leadership is not only warranted but is instructive for organizations hoping to reap the benefits of a diverse workforce.
Article
H. Michael Schwartz, Pooja Khatija, and Diana Bilimoria
The question of how to efficiently, holistically, and successfully develop leaders has been the focus of scholars and practitioners for several decades. Embedding the process of leader development in organizational contexts allows participants to develop and apply leadership knowledge, skills, and identity awareness. Embeddedness facilitates the holistic integration of the interactive processes of leader development (which focuses on increasing the leadership capacity of an individual) and leadership development (which focuses on increasing the leadership capacity of an organization), which is referred to in this article as leader(ship) development (LD). Two sub-processes involved in LD (i.e., general and situational identity development and knowledge/skill/social capital development) and four mechanisms of embeddedness that facilitate holistic LD (i.e., leader identity integration, opportunities to learn and develop in the organization, organizational support and feedback, and helping relationships) will be described. A discussion on the ways by which management education pedagogy can integrate and facilitate embeddedness and provide guidance for future research will follow.
Article
Carol T. Kulik and Belinda Rae
The “glass ceiling” metaphor represents the frustration experienced by women in the 1980s and 1990s who entered the workforce in large numbers following equal opportunity legislation that gave them greater access to education and employment. After initial success in attaining lower management positions, the women found their career progress slowing as they reached higher levels of their organizations. A formal definition of the glass ceiling specifies that a female disadvantage in promotion should accelerate at the highest levels of the organization, and researchers adopting this formal definition have found mixed evidence for glass ceilings across organizations and across countries. Researchers who have expanded the glass ceiling definition to encompass racial minorities have similarly found mixed results. However, these mixed results do not detract from the metaphor’s value in highlighting the stereotype-based practices that embed discrimination deep within organizational structures and understanding why women continue to be underrepresented in senior organizational roles around the world. In particular, researchers investigating the glass ceiling have identified a variety of obstacles (including glass cliffs, glass walls, and glass doors) that create a more complete understanding of the barriers that women experience in their careers. As organizations offer shorter job ladders and less job security, the career patterns of both women and men are exhibiting more downward, lateral, and static movement. In this career context, the glass ceiling may no longer be the ideal metaphor to represent the obstacles that women are most likely to encounter.
Article
Bret Bradley, Sam Matthews, and Thomas Kelemen
“Strategic leadership” is the umbrella term used to describe the study of an organization’s top leaders—what they do, their interactions, and how they influence important organizational outcomes. The three major areas of focus within this field are the chief executive officer (CEO), the top management team (TMT), and the board of directors. Although each area has vibrant bodies of literature on important topics of inquiry, the integration of research findings, frameworks, and insights across the three areas remains underdeveloped. For example, the study of leader personality is a rich line of inquiry within the broader management literature, and all three areas are developing, albeit at different rates and with little integration across the three areas.
The work on CEO personality is the most developed, and the work on board personality is the least developed. CEOs personality traits that have been studied include the Big Five personality traits (conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, and emotional stability), locus of control, core self-evaluations, narcissism, overconfidence, hubris, humility and regulatory focus (a person’s general approach to goals as either promotion focused or prevention focused). TMT personality traits that have been studied include the Big Five, trait positive affect, propensity to innovate, and competitive aggressiveness. Finally, board of directors’ personality traits that have been studied include only personality diversity.
Article
Alexander Newman, Shenjiang Mo, and Matthew Lupoli
Unethical behavior in organizations persists in many forms across industries and nations. What often unites these behaviors is an underlying motivation to benefit oneself, typically for financial reasons, and frequently at the expense of others. However, unethical behaviors are not only committed with selfish intentions. Sometimes, employees commit unethical behaviors with the motivation to aid the organization or its members. These actions are known in the literature as unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB). Despite their benevolent intentions, UPB has the potential to yield detrimental outcomes for individuals and organizations—including those it is intended to help. As such, a growing body of research has been devoted to better understanding the antecedents and consequences of these actions.
Article
Alex Murdock and Stephen Barber
What is the state of what can be described as management in the third sector? At its heart, it discusses the long-held assertion that these organizations are reluctant to accept the need for ‘management’. After all, what makes third sector organizations different, by their own estimation, from their commercial equivalents is the deeply embedded concepts of mission and values together with a distinctly complex stakeholder environment.
For all that, there are also “commercial” pressures and an instinct for survival. To serve the mission necessarily needs resources. And there is a perennial tension in high-level decision-making between delivery of the mission and maintaining solvency. Third-sector organizations, like any other, are innately concerned with their own sustainability. It is here that the analysis is located and there is an opportunity to examine the topic theoretically and empirically. By introducing the concept of the “Management See-Saw” to illustrate the competing drivers of values and commercialism before exploring these identified pressures through the lens of three real-life vignettes, it is possible to appreciate the current state of play.
Given all this, it is important for modern organizations to be able to measure value and impact. From a managerial perspective, the reality needs to be acknowledged that this environment is complex and multi-layered. In drawing the strands together, the discussion concludes by illustrating the importance of leadership in the sector, which is a powerful indicator of effectiveness.
Nevertheless, with a focus on management, the core contention is that management remains undervalued in the third sector. That said, commercial focus can increasingly be identified and the longer term trend is squarely in this direction.
Article
Wei-Wen Vera Chang
Faced with global challenges, organizations have invested heavily in leadership development, but the impact of such a large investment has been of continual concern. Studies have suggested that effective leadership development relies on the interconnection of the top leader, senior managerial team, line managers, and human resource specialists; however, the perspective of learning and learners has received relatively limited examination. Leadership development must also look at the education, adult, and human resource development (HRD) paradigms. The three key components that comprise the intersection between adult education and HRD are experience, social context, and transformation. Learning directions in leadership development have both external and internal aspects, including using invisible force to accomplish work, managing paradoxical social dynamics, extending self-identity, and integrating multiple factors. For learning approaches, the ACT model, where A stands for acquire and apply, C stands for clean and calibrate, and T stands for transform and transcend, can assist in achieving these.
Article
Ronald K. Mitchell, Bradley R. Agle, and J. Robert Mitchell
Stakeholder-focused research seeks to explain relationships among firms and stakeholders, using approaches that predominantly follow normative, instrumental, or descriptive pathways. Following circulation of the 1963 Stanford Memo and the 1984 publication of Freeman, the stakeholder perspective has become a sizable area of research in diverse fields, with growing influence in the business community as indicated in 2019 by the commitment of the US Business Roundtable to stakeholder principles. Still, the tendency to offer stakeholder theory as a replacement for neoclassical theories of the firm somewhat limits its adoption. An approach more likely to advance the trend toward an increasing stakeholder orientation is one of theory collaboration, in which researchers explore how self-interested action in the market system can be tempered by others-interested action. To this aim, the three stakeholder research pathways might be extended, as follows: (a) adding a moral and ethical leadership component to normative stakeholder theory research to move from a philosophy-centric literature toward one that better explains the how and why of normatively based actions toward stakeholders; (b) adopting a stakeholder-work-focused approach to instrumental stakeholder theory research to afford it the benefits of moral neutrality; and (c) returning the focus of descriptive stakeholder theory research to stakeholders as “natural persons,” as compared to corporations as “juristic persons.” With these extensions, scholars can encourage the ongoing reorientation in society toward the stakeholders of firms.
Article
Danuse Bement and Ryan Krause
Boards of directors are governing bodies that reside at the apex of the modern corporation. Boards monitor the behavior of firm management, provide managers access to knowledge, expertise, and external networks, and serve as advisors and sounding boards for the CEO. Board attributes such as board size and independence, director demographics, and firm ownership have all been studied as antecedents of effective board functioning and, ultimately, firm performance. Steady progress has been made toward understanding how boards influence firm outcomes, but several key questions about board leadership structure remain unresolved.
Research on board leadership structure encompasses the study of board chairs, lead independent directors, and board committees. Board chair research indicates that when held by competent individuals, this key leadership position has the potential to contribute to efficient board functioning and firm performance. Researchers have found conflicting evidence regarding CEO duality, the practice of the CEO also serving as the board chair. The effect of this phenomenon—once ubiquitous among U.S. boards—ranges widely based on circumstances such as board independence, CEO power, and/or environmental conditions. Progressively, however, potential negative consequences of CEO duality proposed by agency theory appear to be counterbalanced by other governance mechanisms and regulatory changes.
A popular mechanism for a compromise between the benefits of CEO duality and independent monitoring is to establish the role of a lead independent director. Although research on this role is in its early stage, results suggest that when implemented properly, the lead independent director can aid board monitoring without adding confusion to a unified chain of command. Board oversight committees, another key board leadership mechanism, improve directors’ access to information, enhance decision-making quality by allowing directors to focus on specialized topics outside of board meetings, and increase the speed of response to critical matters. Future research on the governance roles of boards, leadership configurations, and board committees is likely to explore theories beyond agency and resource dependence, as well as rely less on collecting archival data and more on finding creative ways to access rarely examined board interactions, such as board and committee meetings and executive sessions.
Article
Clara Kulich and Michelle K. Ryan
A wealth of research has previously shown that gender stereotypes and discrimination keep women from climbing the corporate ladder. However, women who do break through the “glass ceiling” are likely to face new barriers. Research on the glass cliff phenomenon shows that, when women reach positions of power, they tend to do so in circumstances of crisis and instability. A number of archival, experimental, and qualitative studies have demonstrated that women are more likely to rise in the professional hierarchy in difficult, and for these women, potentially harmful, situations. For example, compared to their male peers, women are seen as more desirable for managerial or political leadership positions in times of instability and crises, or following scandals. Such appointments expose women to a higher risk of failure, criticism, and psychological distress, thus a danger of falling off an “invisible” cliff.
Article
There are trends in the use of teams in the classroom that stimulate both theory development and pedagogical innovation in this important area. In particular, three classroom applications are (1) building group process skills, (2) developing team leaders, and (3) using teams to learn course content. Of particular interest are new possibilities for utilizing leadered rather than leaderless groups, systematizing team coaching interventions, and enriching team-based learning. In this field of study, it is clear that pedagogical innovation and theoretical development interact to enhance student learning. Continued exploration in both aspects is encouraged.
Article
Ann Peng, Rebecca Mitchell, and John M. Schaubroeck
In recent years scholars of abusive supervision have expanded the scope of outcomes examined and have advanced new psychological and social processes to account for these and other outcomes. Besides the commonly used relational theories such as justice theory and social exchange theory, recent studies have more frequently drawn from theories about emotion to describe how abusive supervision influences the behavior, attitudes, and well-being of both the victims and the perpetrators. In addition, an increasing number of studies have examined the antecedents of abusive supervision. The studied antecedents include personality, behavioral, and situational characteristics of the supervisors and/or the subordinates. Studies have reported how characteristics of the supervisor and that of the focal victim interact to determining abuse frequency. Formerly postulated outcomes of abusive supervision (e.g., subordinate performance) have also been identified as antecedents of abusive supervision. This points to a need to model dynamic and mutually reciprocal processes between leader abusive behavior and follower responses with longitudinal data. Moreover, extending prior research that has exclusively focused on the victim’s perspective, scholars have started to take the supervisor’s perspective and the lens of third-parties, such as victims’ coworkers, to understand the broad impact of abusive supervision. Finally, a small number of studies have started to model abusive supervision as a multilevel phenomenon. These studies have examined a group aggregated measure of abusive supervision, examining its influence as an antecedent of individual level outcomes and as a moderator of relationships between individuals’ experiences of abusive supervision and personal outcomes. More research could be devoted to establishing the causal effects of abusive supervision and to developing organizational interventions to reduce abusive supervision.
Article
M. Taner Albayrak and Alper Ertürk
Empowerment is considered one of the best managerial approaches to foster employees’ effectiveness, creativity, commitment, performance, and other positive work-related attitudes and behaviors while providing an essential tool for leadership development and succession planning. Empowerment involves delegation of authority, sharing of information and resources, and allowing employees to participate in decision-making processes. Empowerment practices result in positive outcomes through psychological empowerment, which comprises meaning, impact, self-determination, and competence. However, empowerment should be exercised with care, and before doing so, leaders should understand their employees’ competences, willingness, and characteristics, as well as the organizational culture and industrial dynamics. With the increasing use of information and communication technologies, inevitable influence of globalization, and continuously changing dynamics of interconnectedness among industries, the business environment has become more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA). In order to survive in this environment, companies try to increase diversity in their workforce to make the best use of a broad variety of skills, experiences, and opinions, thus boosting creativity and innovativeness, which makes leadership more difficult than ever.
With empowerment, the concept of delegation of power is important. Therefore, comparing the concept of personal empowerment with managerial empowerment helps in understanding that these concepts are different, although interconnected. Delegation of authority ensures that the manager transfers decision-making authority to subordinates under certain conditions. In delegation, authority is retained by the manager, who has the ultimate responsibility. On the other hand, in empowerment, authority is fully transferred to the person who is already doing the job, with all the rights and responsibilities to take the initiative as necessary.
Empowerment is also closely related but different from the concept of motivation. In motivation, decision-making authority and control stays with the manager. Empowerment, on the other hand, gives employees the opportunity to participate in management, solve problems, and participate in decision-making processes. In this context, the concepts of delegation of authority, motivation, participation in management, and job enrichment are the domain dimensions of personal empowerment, and thus they are interrelated, yet different.
It is important to create a common vision and to have common values in order to establish the empowerment process. Subordinates and supervisors need to trust each other, and empowerment needs to be seen as a philosophy, not a technique. It is necessary to create business conditions that enable the development of knowledge and skills in personnel empowerment. These conditions affect the perceptions and attitudes of the staff, such as, support, loyalty, identification, and trust. Empowering employees promotes organizational commitment, increases engagement, and reduces turnover intentions of key personnel. Because empowerment involves encouraging participation of subordinates in the decision-making process, it also helps to enhance the effectiveness of the decisions and reduce decision-making time. In the VUCA world, limited decision making could be a critical obstacle to establish and maintain sustainability in highly competitive business environments.
Article
Lize A. E. Booysen
With the development of an integrated cross-disciplinary framework to study workplace identity construction, the current theoretical discussion on workplace identity construction is extended—first, by focusing on intersectionality as theoretical lens and methodology in our thinking about workplace identity, highlighting the significance of an individual’s intersections of social locations in the workplace embedded in socio-historical and political contexts, and second, by focusing on the influence of national culture and societal landscapes as important macro contextual factors, adding a super-group level and a cross-cultural perspective on how individuals navigate their identities at work.
Using an intersectional-identity-cultural conceptualization of workplace identity formation elucidates the personal, social identity, sub-group, group, and super group level of influences on identity formation. It focuses on the interplay between individual, relational, collective, and group identity, and emphasizes social identity as the bridge between personal identity and group identity. It highlights the multiplicity, simultaneity, cross cutting, intersecting, as well as differing prominence and power differences of social identities based on differing contexts. It illustrates the relatively stable yet fluid nature of individual (intra-personal and core) identity as it adapts to the environment, and the constant changing, co-constructed, negotiated, and re-negotiated nature of relational (inter-personal), collective identity (social identity) as it gets produced and re-produced, shaped and reshaped by both internal and external forces, embedded in socio-historical-political workplace contexts.
Understanding the interplay of the micro-level, individual (agency), relational, and collective identity levels (social construction), nested in the meso level structures of domination, and group dynamics in the workplace (control regulation/political) in its macro level societal landscape context (additional control regulation) will help us to understand the cognitive sense-making processes individuals engage in when constructing workplace identities. This understanding can help to create spaces where non-normative individuals can resist, disrupt, withdraw, or refuse to enact the limited accepted identities and can create alternative discourse or identity possibilities.
Article
Joan V. Gallos
The arts have played a major role in the development of management theory, practice, and education; and artists’ competencies like creativity, inventiveness, aesthetic appreciation, and a design mindset are increasingly vital for individual and organizational success in a competitive global world. The arts have long been used in teaching to: (a) explore human nature and social structures; (b) facilitate cognitive, socioemotional, and behavioral growth; (c) translate theory into action; (d) provide opportunities for professional development; and (e) enhance individual and systemic creativity and capacities for change. Use of literature and films are curricular mainstays. A review of the history of the arts in management teaching and learning illustrates how the arts have expanded our ways of knowing and defining managerial and leadership effectiveness—and the competencies and training necessary for them.
The scholarship of management teaching is large, primarily ‘how-to’ teaching designs and the assessments of them. There is a clear need to expand the research on how and why the arts are and can be used more effectively to educate professionals, enable business growth and new product development, facilitate collaboration and team building, and bring innovative solutions to complex ideas. Research priorities include: the systematic assessments of the state of arts-based management teaching and learning; explorations of stakeholder attitudes and of environmental forces contributing to current educational models and practices; analyses of the learning impact of various pedagogical methods and designs; examining the unique role of the arts in professional education and, especially, in teaching for effective action; mining critical research from education, psychology, creativity studies, and other relevant disciplines to strengthen management teaching and learning; and probing how to teach complex skills like innovative thinking and creativity. Research on new roles and uses for the arts provide a foundation for a creative revisiting of 21st-century management education and training.
Article
D. Christopher Kayes and Anna B. Kayes
Experiential learning describes the process of learning that results from gathering and processing information through direct engagement with the world. In contrast to behavioral approaches to learning, which describe learning as behavioral changes that result from the influence of external factors such as rewards and punishments, learning from experience places the learner at the center of the learning process. Experiential learning has conceptual roots in John Dewey’s pragmatism. One of the most influential approaches to experiential learning in management and management education is David Kolb’s experiential learning theory (ELT) and the learning cycle that describes learning as a four-phase process of direct experience, reflection, abstract thinking, and experimentation.
Experiential learning has been influential in management education as well as adult education because it addresses a number of concerns with traditional education and emphasizes the role of the learner in the learning process. It has been adopted by over 30 disciplines across higher education and has been extensively applied to management, organizations, and leadership development. The popularity of the experiential learning approach is due to many factors, including the growing discontent with traditional education, the desire to create more inclusive and active learning environments, and a recognition of the role that individual differences plays in learning. A renewed interest in experiential learning has brought about new and expanded conceptualizations of what it means to learn from experience. Variations on experiential learning include critical approaches to learning, brain science, and dual-processing approaches.
While the term “experiential learning” is used by scholars to describe a specific philosophy or theory of learning, it often refers to many management education activities, including the use of experiences outside the classroom such as study abroad, internships, and service learning. Experiential learning also includes educational “experiential” learning activities inside the classroom. Within organizations, experiential learning provides an underlying conceptual framework for popular learning and leadership development programs such as emotional intelligence, strengths-based approaches, and appreciative inquiry.
There is a growing recognition that experiential learning is the basis for many management practices such as strategy creation, research and development, and decision-making. Applications of experiential learning and education in management include simulations and exercises, learning style and educator roles, learning as a source of resilience, learning attitudes and other learning-based experiences, learning flexibility, cross-cultural factors, and team learning.
Emerging research interest is also found in the relationship between experiential learning and expertise, intuition, mastery, and professional and career development, decision-making, and judgment in organizations.
Article
Terri A. Scandura and Kim Gower
In 1975, the phrase “vertical dyad linkage” (VDL) was introduced to begin examining the quality of the roles between the leaders and direct reports, and it was soon discovered that the linkages ranged between high quality and low quality. That linkage progressed into “leader–member exchange” (LMX) in 1982. In essence, research reached a point where it found a continuum of the quality of the relationship between the two members. High-quality relationships put the employees into the leader’s “ingroup,” while low-quality relationships left employees on the outside looking in. It followed that those in the ingroup would have some say in the decision-making, would have easier access to the leader, and would garner more respect and “liking.”
Researchers have used the LMX-7 to examine how the quality of superior/subordinate relationships affects individual, interpersonal, and organization factors like job satisfaction, communication motives, and organizational identification (as did the original LMX scale). Although the LMX-7 remains one of the most prominent psychometric measures of LMX, researchers still debate whether the construct should be considered unidimensional or multidimensional.
While the intricacies of LMX-7 versus LMX have been argued, and with teams becoming more of an organizational resource, team–member exchange (TMX) was found to be a supported extension of LMX. While at this point TMX is lacking in the volume and pace of research, due to the difficulties of measurement among a group of people who might have a variety of leaders during the process, the existing research has produced some results that are extremely relevant, now and in the future. Examples of what has been found when the team exchange relationship is high include reduced stress, increased psychological empowerment, increased creativity, increased team performance, increased individual performance, increased organizational citizenship behaviors, increased organizational commitment, and increased job satisfaction, just to name a few.
In sum, the investigation into LMX provides a history of the field of LMX and its many iterations and the role it plays in leadership studies. This research includes LMX antecedents, consequences, moderators, mediators, and outcomes, as any field in which over 4,500 papers have been published needs an effective way to highlight the progress and pathways.
