Interpersonal team leadership skills

To say that a team leader's job is a tough one is certainly not saying enough. It is up to the team leader to manage a group of people to be individuals but yet work as a team. The team leader must keep the peace and yet create a revolution with this group all at the same time. The good leader will require a lot of education, training, and tons of practical application to be a success. The good news, however, is that the team leader's job is a rewarding one, one that they'll always feel good about if they do it right. How many of us get the opportunity to take a group of wonderful, thinking individual minds and pull from them ideas that a whole team can take to success? Yes, the job is indeed tough, but the paybacks are many.     

Understanding leadership for cross‐cultural knowledge management

This article examines the role of leadership in cross‐cultural knowledge management (CCKM) because both knowledge management and cross‐cultural management are now regarded as popular topics in both academic and practical research in the age of globalization. We discuss the existing literature on the relationship between leadership and cross‐cultural management as well as the relationship between leadership and knowledge management to illustrate the importance of leadership in each field. The concept of cross‐cultural knowledge management—an ambiguous term—will be presented from Nguyen, Umemoto, and Medeni's (2007) work, establishing an expanded role of cross‐cultural management, which could be viewed as a subset of knowledge management. To emphasize the impact of leadership on CCKM, we discuss the influence of leadership on each factor in the theoretical model of CCKM. Our understanding of the role of leadership in CCKM suggests that international leaders should pay careful attention to managing fragmentation, integration, and differentiation when they want to create and manage the cross‐cultural knowledge of their employees.     

Initial assessment and validation of an instrument to measure student perceptions of leadership skills

This article reports on development and validation of an instrument for use in measuring student perceptions of leadership skills. The article describes the development process of an instrument through use of subject matter experts for measuring leadership skill perception among students and use of an exploratory factor analysis technique to validate the resulting instrument. These data were obtained from a survey of 214 students in a small liberal arts college of business. The article presents an instrument for assistance with measuring leadership skill perception, development, and importance as well as further reports on the initial validity and reliability measures resulting from the analysis. In addition, the usefulness of the instrument for educators and workplace trainers is explored.     

Understanding the elements of empathy as a component of care‐driven leadership

Empathy plays a pivotal role in educational leadership practice. It creates and maintains a sound and dynamic interpersonal milieu in dynamic social enterprises such as schools, colleges, and universities. A phenomenological study was conducted to probe deeper the meaning of empathy as it is lived and constituted in the awareness of a select group of 13 Filipino academic administrators representing colleges in the Philippines. Anchored on the central question, “how do Filipino academic administrators collectively typify in their school leadership practices the elements of empathic concern, perspective taking, and empathic matching,” semistructured (Patton, 1990) and in‐depth interviews were conducted. Field texts were analyzed via a repertory grid. Through constant comparative analyses, an interesting set of conceptual categories notably describes the human and humane side of a caring leader, typified in the ability to effect listening, confluencing, and scaffolding in the journey with the faculty.     

Why executives fail abroad

Three areas of problem-origin cause an executive to fail abroad –these are discussed as well as the ramifications of such a failure on the executive, his company, and his country.     

Strategies for materiel management executives

With a more centralist political philosophy emulating on Capital Hill, this article focuses on potential effects on materiel management executives of a half-competitive (managed care) and a half-regulatory (Medicare and Medicaid) environment in organizing and financing health services. It predicts a far more contentious field; further cutbacks in nonpatient care personnel, including senior positions for material management executives; the centralization of tertiary services; and the possibility of additional regulatory approaches to protect the public.     

Changing compensation for top corporate executives

Salaries of a quarter of a million dollars or more are not rare in this country. Although-such salaries are criticized from many directions, this level of pay is justifiable when executives' functions are considered, and the level is bound to increase in the period ahead.     

The role of executives in hostile takeover attempts

This paper proposes a two-stage game theoretic model where the discretionary power of executives acts as an implicit defense against hostile takeovers. Following managerial enterprise models, this paper analyzes the effects of discretionary power of target’s executives over R&D and advertising expenditures in defeating hostile takeover attempts. It is shown that in vertically differentiated industries, in equilibrium, target’s executives keep low level of R&D and advertising expenditures to make their firm an unattractive target for hostile takeovers. The model reveals that executives are influenced by their self-interest of monetary and non-monetary benefits and this self-interest makes the industry more differentiated.     

Leader support for gender equity: Understanding prosocial goal orientation,leadership motivation,and power sharing

We focus on how interpersonal characteristics should influence leader support for gender equity in organizations. Recognizing gender disparities in organizations and the “labyrinth” that women face when they advance in their careers (cf. Eagly & Carli, 2007), we develop a model for how interpersonal characteristics of leaders, both men and women, influence power construal and thus their use of empowerment, mentoring, and performance feedback, ultimately affecting career opportunities for women in organizations. The model proposes that leaders who are high on communal goal orientation, a prosocial characteristic, are more likely to construe power through a responsibility lens and behave in ways that ultimately support gender equity in organizations. In contrast, leaders with an exchange goal orientation are more likely to construe power through a freedom lens and behave in ways that are self-serving. Prestige motivation will increase the extent to which leaders, especially those who are communally oriented, share power. Dominance motivation will increase the extent to which leaders, especially those who are exchange oriented, act in self-interest and retain power, ultimately imposing barriers to women's career advancement. Organizations can potentially increase leader power sharing by encouraging and reinforcing leaders' prosocial characteristics of communal orientation and prestige motivation. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Virtual communication,transformational leadership,and implicit leadership

This research was designed to test the theoretical relationship among personality, implicit leadership, and transformational leadership in a setting devoid of face‐to‐face communication, which we entitled virtual communication. Specifically, the study was designed to link, by using the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), traits from the 5‐factor model of personality (the Big 5) to followers' perception of the leadership style of a virtual leader on the basis of Bass and Avolio's MLQ‐5X (1994). A voluntary sample consisted of undergraduate and graduate students from two universities in the south Texas area (N = 306). Respondents to the virtual communication rated Leader 1's communication, which used previously identified transformational language (Salter, Carmody‐Bubb, Duncan, & Green, 2007), as significantly more transformational than Leader 2's communication, using words not associated with transformational leaders. Participants who scored high in the Big 5 personality traits of agreeableness, openness to experience, conscientiousness, and extraversion rated the leader as more transformational while those high in neuroticism rated the leader as less transformational.     

Supply chain management executives in corporate upper echelons

Supply chain strategies and their implementation have been recognized as a source of competitive advantage. According to the principle “structure follows strategy”, we expect the number of firms having supply chain management (SCM) functions represented on their top management team (TMT) to have increased in the past years. However, little is known about the degree to which executives responsible for SCM functions (i.e., Chief Supply Chain Officers) are present or absent in TMTs and if their presence is related to firm performance. Therefore, we study the TMTs of large US corporations and show that SCM is present in upper echelons, either through executives whose responsibilities explicitly include SCM or indirectly by executives, especially CEOs, who had acquired SCM experience in their previous positions. However, firms׳ operating margins are lower when a Chief Supply Chain Officer is present in the TMT.     

Repatriation of European female corporate executives: an empirical study

The increased internationalization of business in recent years has made the understanding of international human resource management problems more important for executives in multinational companies. In recent years, researchers have paid considerable attention to the issues of adjustment of managers to international assignments. Interestingly, comparatively little research has been undertaken on the topic of repatriation, i.e. re-entry and readjustment of international managers and their families to their home countries. Despite the growth of women in international management there are very few studies that document the repatriation experiences of female international managers. In particular, very few studies have been conducted outside North America on the topic of repatriation of female corporate executives. This paper reports on the experiences of re-entry to home organizations and home countries by an exclusively senior sample of female international managers in Western Europe. Based on extensive empirical research, the findings establish that the repatriation phase of the international career move may be even more stressful than expatriation. The findings also establish that female international managers experience more difficulties than their male counterparts because of their pioneering roles. Finally, the paper suggests that home-based mentors and access to networks while abroad are important factors in contributing to the successful repatriation of international managers. The research findings make a theoretical contribution, not only to the analysis of gender and international human resource management but, also, to wider debates within the contemporary women in management and career theory literatures.