Sustainable components of leadership effectiveness in organizational performance

Purpose – The objective is to describe a selection of sustainability components of leadership effectiveness in organizational performance.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on a conceptual discussion. Findings – The paper contributes to descriptive models that address sustainability components of leadership effectiveness in organizational performance. The study highlights some common views that exist in the management literature and in prosperous management practice related to the direct impact of the relationship in organizational performance between leadership and effectiveness. In fact, it also highlights the critical or sceptical views of leadership effectiveness in organizational performance raised in the literature. Research limitations/implications – The paper contends that the actual leadership effectiveness in organizational performance varies over time and across contexts. At times, the achievement in organizational performance is the outcome of prosperous and conscious leadership, while it at other times may be the outcome of poor and deficient leadership. The topic at hand is positioned and limited to the interface that may describe and explain the connection between these two views. Furthermore, it is limited to corporate decision making and business behaviour in relation to leadership effectiveness and organizational performance. Practical implications – The leadership of an organization need not only to be successful today, but they also need to be successful tomorrow to stay in control and to flourish. Quality control and quality assurance are no longer enough for most organizations. They need to build an awareness of the sustainability components into processes of their management and business practices (i.e. internal and external ones) in order to be judged as successful in corporate decision-making and business behaviour in organizational performance in the long term. Originality/value – The principal contributions of the study are a model of timely leadership effectiveness, a model of contextual leadership effectiveness, and a typology of leadership effectiveness in corporate decision-making and business behaviour. These contributions provide theoretical and managerial ideas and insights into the sustainability components of leadership effectiveness in organizational performance.

Regional development through the enterprise of arts leadership

The literature in the field suggests that a community without arts-practice risks its future. Contemporaneously, evidence suggests that the future of some communities, specifically regional or rural communities, are at risk because of the withdrawal of essential services, which leads to economic and social decline. There is also evidence that arts practice has revived economic and social activity (and performance measures) in regional cities and towns. In this article, I argue that the arts foster regional sustainability, and I propose that an arts leadership that is collective in nature and associated with vision and creativity is needed if the arts are to achieve regional sustainability.

Aesthetic dimensions of educational administration and leadership

The Aesthetic Dimensions of Educational Administration and Leadership provides an aesthetic critique of educational administration and leadership. It demonstrates the importance of aesthetics on all aspects of the administrative and leadership world: the ways ideas and ideals are created, how their expression is conveyed, the impact they have on interpersonal relationships and the organizational environment that carries and reinforces them, and the moral boundaries or limits that can be established or exceeded.

The book is divided into three sections.
Section I examines various philosophical traditions in aesthetics as they inform administrative life, focussing on major modern traditions arising from Kant, romanticism and Nietzsche, Collingwood, the pragmatic school, and critical theory.
Section II explores four aesthetic sources for administrative critique - architecture, literature, film, and movement - as they serve both to understand the social construction of administration and leadership and provide a critique of values, roles, power and authority.
Section III examines more topical and applied problems of charisma, heroism, and authority in practice, concluding with a discussion of the aesthetic analysis of politics and power within the context of contemporary educational administration and leadership theory.

While presenting a significant departure from conventional studies in the field, the international contributors reflect a continuity of thought on the creation, use and abuse of administrative and leadership authority from the writings of Plato through to contemporary theory. This book should appeal to school administrators and leaders and those aspiring to these roles.

Futures in education

Futures education (FE) in a rapidly changing world is critical if young people are to be empowered to be proactive rather than reactive about the future. Research into young people's images and ideas of the future lead to the disturbing conclusion that, for many, the future is a depressing and fearful place where they feel hopeless and disempowered. On the other hand, as Richard Slaughter writes, 'young people are passionately interested in their own futures, and that of the society in which they live. They universally 'jump at the chance to study something with such intrinsic interest that also intersects with their own life interests in so many ways'. FE explicitly attempts to build on this interest and counter these fears by offering a profound and empowering set of learning strategies and ideas that can help people think and act critically and creatively about the future, without necessarily trying to predict it. Futures educators have, over the past decades, developed useful tools, ideas and a language for use with students of all ages to enable them to develop foresight literacy. Most of us tend to view the future as somehow beyond the present and rarely consider how decisions and choices made today profoundly affect not just one fixed future but any number of futures. The underlying goal of FE is to move from the idea of a single, pre-determined future to that of many possible futures, so that students begin to see that they can determine the future, that they need not be reactive and that they are not powerless. How does one do that? Ideas include, but are not limited to: timelines and Y-diagrams, futures wheels and mind maps, and 'Preferable, possible and probable' futures - a.k.a. the 3Ps. Current Australian curricula present education about the future in various implicit or explicit guises. A plethora of statements and curriculum outcomes mention the future, but essentially take 'it' for granted, and are uninformed by FE literature, language, ideas or tools. Science, the humanities and technology tend to be the main areas where such an implicit futures focus can be found. It also appears in documents about vocational education, civics and lifelong learning. Explicit FE is, as Beare and Slaughter put it, still the missing dimension in education. Explicit FE attempts to develop futures literacy, and draws widely upon futures studies literature for processes and content. FE provides such a wide range of ideas and tools that it can be incorporated into education in any number of ways. Programs in two very different schools, one primary and one secondary, are described in this article to provide examples of some of these ways. The first school, Kimberley Park State Primary School in Brisbane, operates with multi-age classrooms based on a 'thinking curriculum' developed around four organisers: change, perspectives, interconnectedness and sustainability. The second school, St John's Grammar School in Adelaide, is an independent school where FE operates as an integrated approach in Year Seven, as a separate one-semester subject in Year Nine and in separate subjects at other levels. Teachers both at Kimberley Park and St John's are very positive about FE. They say it promotes valuable and authentic learning, assists students to realise they have choices that matter and helps them see that the future need not be all doom and gloom. Because students are interested in the Big Questions, as one teacher put it, FE provides a perfect opportunity to address them, and to consider values that are fundamental for them and the future of the planet. Like any innovation, the long-term success of FE in schools depends on an embedding process so that the innovation does not depend on the enthusiasm and energy of a few individuals, only to disappear when they move on. It requires strong leadership, teacher knowledge, support and enthusiasm, and the support and understanding of the wider school community.

The perceptions of expert coaches about effective leadership in sport

Research on effective leadership in sport has identified a number of characteristics and situations that impact on coaching effectiveness. These include coach effect on athlete satisfaction and performance, self-esteem and trait anxiety. This research has focused on athletes' perceptions of or preferences for specific leadership behaviors and actual coach behaviors identified by observing coaches. Few studies have recognized the views of the expert coach as a potentially valuable source of information regarding effective leadership and the coaching process. The present study investigated expert coaches' perception and interpretation of the leadership process. Twenty successful coaches working with Australian junior elite sport participants were purposefully sampled to cover a diversity of sports (team and individual) and provide a gender balance across sports. Through in-depth interviews, based on Grounded Theory, the study examined three aspects of coaching, which provided the basis of the interview guide. These were coaching history and influences, effective coaching behaviors, and coach training and accreditation. Eight major themes emerged: (a) influence of history on coaching behaviors, (b) knowledge of the sport, (c) pedagogy skills, (d) coaches' personal qualities, (e) coach-athlete relationships, (f) coaches' evaluation of the athlete, (g) coach and athlete outcomes, and (h) enjoyment of the coaching process. The results highlight the important role coaches play in future coach development, the impact of coach self-efficacy attributed to athlete self-efficacy, and how coach-related outcomes drive the coaching process. These results have noteworthy implications for coach education programs.

Women primary principals : leadership between the flags

The purpose of this paper is to outline my research project and share some of the perspectives that have emerged during the process of analysis and reflexivity. This is a case study of twelve female primary school principals in the independent sector in Victoria. Independent schools are generally referred to as the private sector or non-government schools to distinguish them from the government sector. Also the reference to primary principals’ is generally used to refer to a ‘Junior School Head’ position within a K – 12 School. Many schools often combine the role of the Junior Head’s position and / or the Deputy Principal or Assistant Principal’s position.

This paper introduces the work narratives of successful professional women in senior leadership positions in independent schools. The analysis of the narrative process itself and how these women shape and are shaped by their cultural discourses about leadership provides the focus for this study. In particular how the context and discursive strategies they use to tell their stories are instrumental in their construction of professional identity and its relationship to subjectivity. Thus professional work narratives offer insights into subjectivity and identity as the women tell their leadership stories. Initially Clandinin and Connelly’s (1994) ‘narrative inquiry’ approach provided a useful conceptual basis from which to gather the written responses to a questionnaire collected during 2004, interviews (taperecorded and transcribed) and my reflexive journal maintained during and after the interview process.