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The number of women in national elective leadership positions has grown since 1960 when the first woman became prime minister. As the number of women in high elective office has grown, feminist scholars have worked to fill the “gender gap” in the study of national leadership in the disciplines of history, political science, and international relations. Feminist scholars, for instance, have investigated several gender-based assumptions about what the policy priorities of women leaders will be. The first assumption is that a woman leader will promote social programs and expenditures over military defense; this assumption is based on women’s traditional gender role as caretaker. The second assumption is that a woman leader will be likely to eschew the use of military force in foreign policy. The third is that she will introduce or endorse policies that promote gender equality, that is, that she will pursue a feminist agenda. Thus, the general policy questions scholars approach the study of women leaders with are: Is she a socialist? Is she a pacifist? Is she a feminist? Feminist scholars also consider public perceptions about women’s ability to serve as national leader as well as performance, or women’s style of leadership and effectiveness as leaders. Do women lead in a hierarchical, “top-down” command style or do they tend to be more cooperative, collegial, and collaborative than their male counterparts?

Urban Teen Summit (UTS) is a program that gives high school students the opportunity to amplify the voices of young leaders in search of viable solutions for their school and community progression. These student leaders illustrate efficacy and agency by identifying areas of improvement for their community and proactively develop and implement a community-wide, student-led conversation with stakeholders. Since the advent of UTS in 2016, more than 300 student leaders of color have been trained, and more than 2,000 students, parents, and community leaders have participated. The focus of UTS is to recruit students aged 15–18 years from high-poverty and underserved communities and give them the opportunity to acquire leadership skills that will benefit their communities in real time.

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.

Since around the 1950s, hundreds of articles have been published in social science that are concerned with the concept of authority and authoritarianism and how both relate to religion. Despite this tremendous volume of research, two camps have emerged that have failed to incorporate the ideas of the other. Psychologists contend that deference to authority is primarily a personality-driven variable and is often shaped by subconscious and undetected psychological processes that are unchangeable once established. In contrast, sociologists contend that authoritarianism is largely a product of interaction in a social environment. This perspective suggests that religion is one of many factors that help to shape the authoritarian outlook of individuals, along with political and economic variables. Neither of these approaches has managed to synthesize their perspectives into a unified whole. In addition, while many scholars have included some aspect of religion in their analysis, little scholarship has placed it at the center of the inquiry. As a result, there has been no well-defined and thoroughly tested theory of religious authority, despite the fact that authority has driven two of the most important recent religious movements in the United States: the Religious Right and the Emergent Church Movement. Several suggestions are offered as means to make measurable progress in the field of religion and regard for authority. One way forward is to generate and test a battery of questions that measures authority from a uniquely religious perspective. Another opportunity lies in scholars measuring the deference to authority levels that exist in different religious traditions. These comparisons could be between Jews and Catholics, or even inside the larger Protestant tradition. Finally, scholars should make a concerted effort to connect clergy with their congregations as a means to discern if perceptions of authority are congruent between a religious leader and his or her parishioners.

Research on Black women superintendents has focused largely on their racial and gendered identities and the challenges associated with negotiating the politics of race and gender while leading complex school systems. Regarding the underrepresentation of Black female superintendents, an examination of Black women’s experiences of preparing for, pursuing, attaining, and serving in the superintendency may provide insights regarding their unique ways of knowing and, leading that, inform their leadership praxis. Informed by research on K-12 school superintendency, race and gender in education leadership, and the lived experiences and knowledge claims of Black women superintendents, important implications for future research on the superintendency will be hold. There exists a small but growing body of scholarly research on Black women education leaders, even less on the Black woman school superintendent, who remains largely underrepresented in education leadership research and the field. Although key studies have played an important role in establishing historical records documenting the service and contributions of Black women educational leaders in the United States, the bulk of the research on Black women superintendents can be found in dissertation studies grounded largely in the works of Black women education leadership scholars and practitioners. As a growing number of aspiring and practicing leaders who identify as Black women enter graduate-level leadership preparation programs and join the ranks of educational administration, questions concerning race and gender in leadership are almost always present as the theories presented in leadership preparation programs often conflict with or represent set of perspectives, realities, and strategies that may not align with those experienced by leaders who identify as Black women. For these reasons, their leadership perspectives, epistemologies, and contributions are essential to our understanding of the superintendency and field of educational leadership.

Political Science accounts of international politics downplay the role of political leaders, and a survey of major journals reveals that fewer than 3% of all articles focus on leaders. This is in stark contrast to public discourse about politics, where leadership influence over events is regarded as a given. This article suggests that, at a minimum, leaders occupy a space in fully specified chains of causality as the aggregators of material and ideational forces, and the transmitters of those forces into authoritative political action. Further, on occasion a more important role is played by the leader: as a crucial causal variable aggregating material and ideational energies in an idiosyncratic fashion and thereby shaping decisions and outcomes. The majority of the article is devoted to surveying the comparatively small literature on political leaders within International Relations scholarship. The article concludes by inviting our colleagues to be receptive to the idiosyncrasies, as well as the regularities, of statespersonship.

The Selectorate Theory is based upon one simple, perhaps even commonplace assumption: Once in office, leaders want to remain in office. They have a variety of tools to enhance their longevity in office, but the theory hypothesizes the leader’s allocation of two types of goods will be paramount in their efforts. One good is private, meaning that it is enjoyed by those to whom it is allocated and not to others. Such goods would include money, jobs, opportunities for corruption, but their hallmark is that they are not shared. These goods may be given to one individual or to a group, but they are not shared outside those to whom they are given. The second type of good is public and is shared by all those in the state. These goods would include potable water, clean air, education, and, importantly, national defense. There is little unique about the Selectorate Theory’s understanding of these goods, as they approximate ideas from economics. The importance and values of these two goods depend critically on the political institutions of the state. The Selectorate Theory identifies two political institutions of dominant importance: The Selectorate, from which it takes its name; and the Winning Coalition. The former consists of all those people who have a role in selecting the state’s leader. This group may be large, as in the electorate in democratic states, or small, as in the case of an extended family or a junta. In unusual circumstances it can even be a group outside the state, as when a foreign government either imposes or influences choices made inside the state. The winning coalition may be large, but not larger than the selectorate, or it may be as small as an extended family or a junta, groups that essentially constitute the selectorate. Variations in these two institutions can have important consequences for how the state conducts its foreign policy. For example, leaders in states with small winning coalitions should be able to take greater risks in their policies because if these fail, they will be able to mobilize and distribute private goods to reinforce their position. If these goods are not readily available, it is possible to purge non-critical supporters and redistribute their goods to others. These institutions are also important in identifying the kinds of issues over which states are more or less likely to enter into conflict. States with small winning coalitions are more likely to enter into disputes over things that can be redistributed to supporters, such as land or resources. Large winning coalitions will have little use for such goods, since the ratio of coalition size and goods to be distributed is likely to be exiguous. The Selectorate Theory also provides a firm analysis of the foundations for the idea of the Democratic Peace, which has been generally either lacking or imprecise. Despite its clarity, some interpretations of the Selectorate Theory have led to mistaken inferences about what it says. We discuss several of these and close with a consideration of the need for improvement in the measurement of key variables.

International friendship affects the making and conduct of foreign policy, an angle that is largely neglected in the International Relations (IR) literature. Friendship constitutes the Other as familiar rather than foreign and implies a significant degree of trust, and analysts need to pay careful attention to the various ways close bonds develop and “work” across state boundaries. They need to understand how seeking friends can be an explicit goal of foreign policy and how established friendships function by studying their discursive, emotional, and practical expressions and their impact on decision making in concrete situations and as a disposition for cooperation in the long term. Yet, tracing these bonds and associated practices, especially the informal ones, is an analytical challenge. This article presents international friendship as a particular relationship of mutually agreed role identities embedded in a strong cognitive, normative, and emotional bond revolving around a shared idea of order. It discusses three types of practices unique to this relationship: providing privileged/special access, solidarity and support in times of need, and resolve and negative Othering against third parties. These friendship bonds and associated practices can be observed across three levels: political leaders, government bureaucracies, and civil society.

Two important perspectives have come to dominate crisis studies. The first most traditional and dominant is what could be termed the crisis management or “crisis as event” perspective. The second more critical approach to crisis studies is the constructivist “crisis as a social construct” perspective. The purpose, structure, and focus of the two approaches differ significantly in virtually every regard. The crisis management perspective assumes a positivist set of assumptions by adopting an objective epistemology and ontology. Crisis is taken to be a concrete, objective thing. Approaching storms, terrorist attacks, global pandemics, financial upheavals, and so on, are all taken to be crises with objectively threatening and urgent characteristics. Starting with an analysis of the crisis event, crisis management analysis considers the response to the event with the ultimate goal of improving reactions to and preparation for future events. Constructivist crisis studies, conversely, participate in a broad post-modernist project that critiques dominant narratives, disputes epistemological certainty and ontological objectivity, and takes cognizance of language “games” and coded messages embedded in discursive acts. Constructivists take an antipositivist ontological position, insisting that the world as people perceive it is a human invention. The emphasis is not on corporeal things or objectively verifiable facts, but rather on the construction of knowledge and the resulting assignment of meaning. The constructivist crisis perspective shifts analytic focus away from the so-called “crisis event,” itself a contested construct, and to the claim that certain contingencies constitute a crisis. The process by which individuals and groups assert a claim of urgency, as well as the interests behind all such claims, comes into focus in a constructivist perspective. Who are the individuals and groups making the claim that a crisis exists, and what are their interests in so doing? In positivist crisis management studies, the event constitutes the independent variable; for constructivist scholars, it is the claim that is the independent variable.

Elma Francois (1897–1944) was renowned for her Afro-Caribbean activism against the deplorable living conditions of the poor in the British colonies of the English-speaking Caribbean. She led many public demonstrations to highlight the plight of persons living in poverty. She made her greatest contribution as one of the first women in the trade union movement in Trinidad. Francois worked as a community organizer in grass-roots communities, educating persons about the importance of exercising their voices. Her approach to community organizing followed what has been taught about Jane Addams’ Settlement House Movement, where she immersed herself in communities and built strong relationships with members so she could really understand their plight and so gain their trust. Unlike Addams, Francois was from a very deprived background and was not formally educated. She is renowned as the first woman to be charged and acquitted for sedition in Trinidad during the rise of the trade union movement.

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.

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.

What choices do political leaders make in the international arena? And why? In what ways do the patterns of politics in the international arena shape the selection and prospects of leaders in power? These questions frame a thriving research agenda that has emerged over the last 20 years in political science and international relations. This agenda seeks to answer the fundamental questions of war and peace and cooperation and contestation from a perspective that focuses on leaders, leaders’ motivations, and leaders’ characteristics. Two major approaches frame the analysis of leaders and foreign policy: the survival approach and the personal attribute approach. These two approaches are not mutually exclusive, but they are analytically distinct. The survival approach starts from the premise that leaders seek to remain in power. It then assesses the reciprocal relation between leaders’ quest to remain in power and their foreign policy choices. Specifically, research in the survival approach analyzes how leaders’ choices can be explained in light of the assumption that leaders seek power and how, in turn, leaders’ survival in power can be explained by their choices in the international arena. With the survival approach, leaders have agency but, in the end, they are exchangeable: they all seek power. The personal attribute approach, on the other hand, points to the many features that distinguish the personal profiles of leaders and seeks to provide a systematic explanation of how those features account for leaders’ foreign policy choices. In particular, research in the personal attribute area has explained leaders’ choices in terms of their orientation toward the use of force, their psychological traits and beliefs about the world, and their personal characteristics and background experiences. The study of politics from the perspective of leaders integrates insights from the subfields of American politics, comparative politics, and international relations, and in so doing holds the promise to foster a productive and fruitful dialogue across the discipline of political science. Scholars who study politics from the perspective of leaders have generated a number of new theoretical developments, new typologies, new data collections, and new findings. Overall, the study of leaders and foreign policy has proved to be analytically fruitful, empirically rich, and politically relevant.

Victoria Earle Matthews (1861–1907), civic leader and activist in the Black women's club movement, became the first president of the Woman's Loyal Union of New York and Brooklyn. In 1897, she also organized the White Rose Industrial Association.

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.

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.

Ethnic cleavages are present in many elections across the continent, and scholars frequently view ethnic mobilization as the default way in which politicians appeal to African voters. Ethnic electoral patterns already emerged in many countries during the first mass elections around the time of independence and they continue to be visible to this day. The prevalence of ethnic politics has been commonly seen as a result of limited ideological and programmatic debates in African elections and the centrality of ethnic networks in voters’ access to scarce resources. Yet, early-21st-century scholarship increasingly reveals the varied degrees in which ethnicity plays a role in African political contests, raising the question of when do politicians engage in alternative forms of electoral mobilization? And when are voters inclined to vote for candidates outside their ethnic group? Emerging scholarship suggests that it is easier for politicians to pursue programmatic and populist campaigns that do not cater to specific ethnic groups in cities rather than in rural areas where politicians rarely avoid clientelist strategies. Other research also suggests that the nature of social organization and the composition of rural areas can determine whether clientelist strategies are organized along ethnic lines or not.

Agathe Uwilingiyimana was the first woman prime minister of Rwanda and only the second woman prime minister on the African continent. A Hutu from southern Rwanda, she was among the first Rwandans killed in the 1994 genocide of Tutsi. She was a political moderate from an opposition political party who rejected ethnic extremism. As the constitutional leader of the country in the wake of the president’s assassination, Hutu extremists killed her so that they could take control of the government. Born to uneducated parents, Uwilingiyimana was among the first women to obtain a bachelor’s degree from the National University of Rwanda in 1985. Before entering politics, she taught high-school science for over a decade. She dedicated her life to promoting women’s equality, removing obstacles to girls’ education, and speaking on behalf of the poor. As one of Rwanda’s first prominent women politicians, Uwilingiyimana faced intense misogyny, particularly from members of extremist Hutu political parties. The media frequently portrayed her naked or in sexual contexts. She was attacked in her own home on multiple occasions and menaced when she appeared in public. She was killed on April 7, 1994, along with her husband and an aide. The Belgian United Nations peacekeepers guarding her were also killed. Her death paved the way for Hutu extremists to take over the government and carry out a genocide targeting Tutsi, members of opposition political parties, human rights activists, and journalists.

In recent years the number of women executives has increased globally, and academic focus on these actors has grown accordingly. While some of the earliest research offered descriptive analyses of women leaders, concentrating particularly on their career preparation or political inspirations, this has given way to more systematic assessments of topics including paths, powers, and impacts. Global methodical studies have been supplemented by similarly rigorous country case studies and regional analyses. These works offer quantitative examinations, rich qualitative investigations, and often a combination. Consequently, factors facilitating women’s rise to power and authorities exercised in their capacities as presidents and prime ministers are illuminated. Much more research, however, must be conducted to evaluate the myriad effects women in power exert on societies.