Age and leadership: The moderating role of legacy beliefs

Age and age-related motivations have been neglected in leadership research. This study examined the moderating influence of legacy beliefs on the relationships between age and transformational, transactional, and passive-avoidant leadership behaviors. Legacy beliefs involve individuals' convictions about whether they and their actions will be remembered, have an enduring influence, and leave something behind after death. It was expected that at higher ages, low legacy beliefs impede transformational and transactional leadership behaviors and boost passive-avoidant leadership behaviors. One hundred and six university professors, between 30 and 70 years old, provided ratings of their legacy beliefs; each professor's leadership behaviors were evaluated by one of his or her employees. Results confirmed the assumptions for overall transformational leadership and its charisma subdimension as well as for overall transactional leadership and its active management-by-exception subdimension but not for passive-avoidant leadership.

Leadership and creativity in higher education

Leadership and creativity have received increasing attention from researchers in the field of higher education; however, empirical studies investigating these topics simultaneously are rare. In this study, the authors examined relationships between PhD students' perceptions of their advising professors' passive-avoidant, transactional, and transformational leadership behaviors and professors' ratings of their students' work-related creativity. Data were provided by 71 dyads of professors and PhD students. Consistent with expectations based on the leadership literature on followers' identification with their leaders, results showed that students' perceptions of professors' transformational leadership positively predicted professors' ratings of their students' creativity above and beyond students' perceptions of professors' passive-avoidant and transactional leadership. Contrary to expectations, students' perceptions of professors' passive-avoidant and transactional leadership did not significantly predict professors' ratings of students' creativity. Implications for future research on leadership and creativity as well as tentative practical applications of the findings in higher education settings are discussed.

A lifespan perspective on leadership

In this chapter, we present a lifespan model of leadership that outlines how leader and follower age as well as age-related changes in leader traits and characteristics, leader behaviors, and follower attribution and identification processes may influence leadership effectiveness. First, we describe how leader traits and characteristics change with age and how these developmental changes may impact on leader behaviors and, subsequently, leadership effectiveness. Specifically, we discuss age-related changes in leaders’ task competence, interpersonal attributes, and motivation to lead. We particularly focus on how generativity – a set of interconnected motives pertaining to establishing and guiding future generations – may emerge as an important concern among older leaders. Second, we review theoretical approaches that help explain how and why leader age and age-related traits and characteristics, follower age, as well as leader-follower age differences may influence follower attribution and identification processes. Third, we outline a number of boundary conditions of the effects proposed by our lifespan model of leadership, including leader-follower relationship duration, situational characteristics, as well as the cultural, social, and historical context. We conclude the chapter by discussing our model’s implications for future research and organizational practice.

A daily diary study on ambidextrous leadership and self-reported employee innovation

Ambidextrous leadership involves a combination of behaviours that stimulate employee exploration (‘opening behaviour’) and behaviours that facilitate exploitation of ideas (‘closing behaviour’). We hypothesized that the interaction between leaders’ daily opening and closing behaviours (i.e., ambidextrous leadership) predicts employees’ daily self-reported innovative performance. Results based on diary data provided by 113 employees across five work days supported this hypothesis: daily self-reported innovative performance was highest when both daily opening and closing behaviours were high.

Leading Beautifully : Educational Leadership as Connoisseurship

Leading Beautifully provides a new dimension to understanding effective leadership. Drawing from lessons in the arts and the humanities, English and Ehrich explore how educational decision-making in schools can be informed by identity, personal competence, and an understanding of the field's intellectual foundations. Based on in-depth interviews of artists and educational leaders, this book provides insight into the inner world of successful leaders who have developed competencies and understandings that extend beyond the standard leadership tool box. This exciting new book explores the theory and practice of leadership connoisseurship as a human-centered endeavor and as an antidote to mechanistic, business-oriented practices. The authors' well-grounded reconsideration of educational leadership will enliven and enhance any educational leader's practice.

The neuroscience of inspirational leadership: the importance of collective-oriented language and shared group membership

Effective leaders are believed to inspire followers by providing inclusive visions of the future that followers can identify with. In the present study, we examined the neural mechanisms underlying this process, testing key hypotheses derived from transformational and social identity approaches to leadership. While undergoing functional MRI, supporters from the two major Australian political parties (Liberal vs. Labor) were presented with inspirational collective-oriented and noninspirational personal-oriented statements made by in-group and out-group leaders. Imaging data revealed that inspirational (rather than noninspirational) statements from in-group leaders were associated with increased activation in the bilateral rostral inferior parietal lobule, pars opercularis, and posterior midcingulate cortex: brain areas that are typically implicated in controlling semantic information processing. In contrast, for out-group leaders, greater activation in these areas was associated with noninspirational statements. In addition, noninspirational statements by in-group (but not out-group) leaders resulted in increased activation in the medial prefrontal cortex, an area typically associated with reasoning about a person’s mental state. These results show that followers processed identical statements qualitatively differently as a function of leaders’ group membership, thus demonstrating that shared identity acts as an amplifier for inspirational leadership communication.

Ambidextrous leadership and employees' self-reported innovative performance: The role of exploration and exploitation behaviors

The ambidexterity theory of leadership for innovation proposes that leaders' opening and closing behaviors positively predict employees' exploration and exploitation behaviors, respectively. The interaction of exploration and exploitation behaviors, in turn, is assumed to influence employee innovative performance, such that innovative performance is highest when both exploration and exploitation behaviors are high. The goal of this study was to provide the first empirical test of these hypotheses at the individual employee level. Results based on self-report data provided by 388 employees were consistent with ambidexterity theory, even after controlling for employee reports of their leaders' transformational and transactional leadership behaviors as well as employees' openness to experience, conscientiousness, and positive affect. The findings extend previous research on ambidexterity at the team and organizational levels and suggest a possible way for leaders to enhance employee self-reported innovative performance.

Literacy leadership and accountability practices: Holding onto ethics in ways that count

Despite the rhetoric of schools serving the needs of specific communities, it is evident that the work of teachers and principals is shaped by government imperatives to demonstrate success according to a set of standard ‘benchmarks’. In this chapter, we draw from our current study of new forms of educational leadership emerging in South Australian public primary schools to explore the ways in which test-based accountability requirements are being mediated by principals in schools that serve high poverty communities. Taking an institutional ethnography approach we focus on the everyday work of a principal and a literacy leader in one suburban primary school to show the complexity of the impact of national testing on practices of literacy leadership. We elaborate on the inescapable textual framings and tasks faced by the principal and literacy leader, and those that they create and modify – such as a common literacy agreement and ‘literacy chats’ between a literacy leader and classroom teacher – in order to ‘hold on to ethics’. We argue that while leaders’ and teachers’ everyday work is regulated by ‘ruling relations’ (Smith, 1999), it is also organic and responsive to the local context. We conclude with a reflection on the important situated work that school leaders do in mediating trans-local policies that might otherwise close down possibilities for engaging ethically with students and their learning in a particular school.

Targeting antigen to diverse APCs inactivates memory CD8+ T cells without eliciting tissue-destructive effector function

Memory T cells develop early during the preclinical stages of autoimmune diseases and have traditionally been considered resistant to tolerance induction. As such, they may represent a potent barrier to the successful immunotherapy of established autoimmune diseases. It was recently shown that memory CD8+ T cell responses are terminated when Ag is genetically targeted to steady-state dendritic cells. However, under these conditions, inactivation of memory CD8+ T cells is slow, allowing transiently expanded memory CD8+ T cells to exert tissue-destructive effector function. In this study, we compared different Ag-targeting strategies and show, using an MHC class II promoter to drive Ag expression in a diverse range of APCs, that CD8+ memory T cells can be rapidly inactivated by MHC class II+ hematopoietic APCs through a mechanism that involves a rapid and sustained downregulation of TCR, in which the effector response of CD8+ memory cells is rapidly truncated and Ag-expressing target tissue destruction is prevented. Our data provide the first demonstration that genetically targeting Ag to a broad range of MHC class II+ APC types is a highly efficient way to terminate memory CD8+ T cell responses to prevent tissue-destructive effector function and potentially established autoimmune diseases. Copyright © 2010 by The American Association of Immunologists, Inc.

Non-destructive discrimination of Bell states by NMR using a single ancilla qubit

Discrimination of Bell states plays an important role in a number of quantum computational protocols such as teleportation and secret sharing. However, most of the protocols dealing with Bell state discrimination in the literature either involve performing correlated measurements or destroying the entanglement of the system. Here, we demonstrate an NMR-based experimental realization of a protocol for Bell state discrimination, following a scheme proposed by Gupta et al (quant-ph/0504183v1, 23 April 2005), which does not destroy the Bell state under consideration. Using the proposed protocol, one can deterministically distinguish the Bell states, without performing a measurement using the entangled basis. State discrimination is performed through two independent measurements on one ancilla qubit, which leaves the Bell states unchanged.

The Finnish Leadership Style in Transition - A Study of Leadership Criteria in the Insurance Business, 1997-2004 (summary section only)

The aim of the study was to explore the importance of evaluating leadership criteria in Finland at leader/subordinate levels of the insurance industry. The overall purpose of the thesis is tackled and analyzed from two different perspectives: - by examining the importance of the leadership criteria and style of Finnish insurance business leaders and their subordinates - by examining the opinions of insurance business leaders regarding leadership criteria in two culturally different countries: the US and Finland. This thesis consists of three published articles that scrutinise the focal phenomena both theoretically and empirically. The main results of the study do not lend support to the existence of a universal model of leadership criteria in the insurance business. As a matter of fact, the possible model seems to be based more on the special organizational and cultural circumstances of the country in question. The leadership criteria seem to be quite stable irrespective of the comparatively short research time period (3–5 years) and hierarchical level (subordinate/leader). Leaders have major difficulties in changing their leadership style. In fact, in order to bring about an efficient organizational change in the company you have to alternate the leader. The cultural dimensions (cooperation and monitoring) identified by Finnish subordinates were mostly in line with those of their managers, whilst emphasizing more the aspect of monitoring employees, which could be seen from their point of view as another element of managers’ optimizing/efficiency requirements. In Finnish surveys the strong emphasis on cooperation and mutual trust become apparent by both subordinates and managers. The basic problem is still how to emphasize and balance them in real life in such a way that both parties are happy to work together on a common basis. The American surveys suggests hypothetically that in a soft market period (buyer’s market) managers employ a more relationship-oriented leadership style and correspondingly adapt their leadership style to a more task-oriented approach in a hard market phase (seller’s market). In making business better Finnish insurance managers could probably concentrate more on task-oriented items such as reviewing, budgeting, monitoring and goal-orientation. The study also suggests that the social safety net of the European welfare state ideology has so far shielded the culture-specific sense of social responsibility of Finnish managers from the hazards of free competition and globalization.

Leadership through the Gender Lens: Women and Men in Organisations

Leadership and management remain highly gendered. Recent decades have seen a major international growth of studies on gender relations in leadership, organisations and management, in both empirical research and theoretical analysis. The differential relations of women and men to leadership and management are a key question for both theory and practice. Recent research and discussion on the gendering of leadership have been influenced by and have addressed: feminism; recognition of women and women’s situations, experiences and voices in leadership; organisational culture; communication; divisions of labour, hierarchy, power and authority; imagery and symbolism; information technology; sexuality, harassment, bullying and violence in organisations; home-work relations; men and masculinities in leadership; globalisation, transnationalism, intersectionality and post¬¬colonialism – amongst other issues. Having said that, the vast majority of mainstream work on leadership retains little or no gender analysis. In most business schools and other universities the position of gender-explicit work on leadership is still not well established. Leadership through the Gender Lens brings together critical analyses and debates on gender, leadership and management with contributions from 13 countries and five continents. How leadership and management are gendered can mean more gender equal or more gender unequal conditions for women and men. This includes how education and training can contribute to gendered leadership and management. The volume is organised in three main sections, on: careers and leadership; management, hierarchy and leadership: and interventions in leadership.