Search results

Exercising human resource (HR) leadership has always been difficult in challenging times, but the unique stressors facing organizations throughout the world today call for a new approach to HR leadership and its development. We propose a multifaceted model that redefines the role of strategic HR leadership and for understanding connections between authentic HR leadership and sustainable organizational performance. We argue that to build enduring organizations and motivate employees to provide superior customer service and create sustainable value for their organizations, we need HR leaders who know themselves, who lead with integrity and demand conformance to higher ethical values.

Inherent in the meaning of global mindset is the dilemma of an appropriate level of analysis at which we define, measure, and research this construct. This chapter addresses the individual level of analysis using social cognition, which explains how the development process of global mindset helps individuals make sense of unfamiliar stimuli, broaden their cognitive capacities, adjust their behavior accordingly, and have a positive influence on others. Our recently developed core construct of positive psychological capital, or PsyCap (Luthans, Youssef, & Avolio, 2007), and the overarching process of authentic leadership development (Avolio & Luthans, 2006) are used to explicate the theoretical social cognitive framework. The “influence on others” implies a leadership process, and that is why we address the role that global mindset may have in the authentic leadership development process (Avolio & Luthans, 2006).

Serious questions have been raised regarding the necessity to continue focusing our research on what constitutes individual, or what the authors refer to as singular leadership. Although the authors consider these questions to be important to advancing the field of leadership theory, research, and practice, they also suggest that attempts to minimize the relevance of singular leadership may hinder progress in other domains of leadership research. In this chapter, the authors explore how and why singular leaders and their leadership matter, and how they may influence follower, peer, and organizational outcomes. The authors use a paradoxical framework to present a theoretical model and propositions that allow us to clarify the influence of different forms of singular leadership within organizations. In our examination of singular leadership, the authors consider both positive and harmful modes of attributes, cognitions, and behaviors.

The characteristics which differentiate transactional from transformational leadership are discussed, highlighting the differences between managers and leaders. Four distinct characteristics – the Fours I′s – associated with transformational leadership are described with respect to their evolution and influence on follower development, effort and performance. The advantages of combining transactional and transformational leadership styles into an overall framework of leadership development for leading in the 1990s are also discussed.

European management must become more transformational with respect to its leadership if it is to address the challenges confronting the European community after 1992. The question arises, can transformational leadership be trained? The answer is affirmative. A number of successful training experiences in North America are described in this article. These experiences form the basis for a prototype training programme now being conducted in a large European conglomerate at the junior, middle and senior management level. A general overview of these programmes are provided, as well as evidence that they are having strong beneficial effects on the participants in the workshops, and in their performance back on their jobs.

We argue in this chapter that quantitative techniques alone cannot enable appropriate verification of the levels in which a construct should be defined and validated. We propose a process model that takes advantage of qualitative and quantitative methods when specifying and measuring the level(s) of analysis in construct development. The model implies that operationalizing a construct and its measurement should involve both qualitative and quantitative methods. Level specification begins with induction of constructs and continues with qualitative or quantitative operationalizations that are verified through the convergence of using triangulation and aggregation tests. Construct development continues until the level of analysis is accurately specified. We provide a theoretical example of construct development from the leadership literature and an empirical example to represent the verification process.