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Organizational Leaders (organizational + leader)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting	80%

Selected Abstracts

The Climate for Transformation: Lessons for Leaders

CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION MANAGEMENT, Issue 1 2007
Scott G. Isaksen
This article reports insights for organizational leaders based on a series of case studies describing the use of the Situational Outlook Questionnaire as a tool to assist them with their transformation efforts. Leaders often assert the need to change their organizational cultures. This article seeks to clarify and differentiate culture from climate, and then focus on what leaders can do to transform their climate by applying a deliberate assessment tool. As the case studies illustrate, making organizational transformation happen is best approached through a systemic or ecological approach. This approach includes considering the people involved, the methods deployed, the desired outcome of the change as well as the context within which the transformation occurs. The broadest concept within this framework is context, which includes both culture and climate, among other things. Since context is key to initiating and sustaining transformation, emphasis on the leader's role in climate creation will be provided. [source]

Lawyers for Conservative Causes: Clients, Ideology, and Social Distance

LAW & SOCIETY REVIEW, Issue 1 2003
John P. Heinz
Scholars have devoted attention to "cause lawyers" on the political left, but lawyers who work on the conservative side of the American political spectrum have received relatively little academic consideration. This article presents systematic data on the characteristics of and relationships among lawyers affiliated with organizations active on a selected set of 17 conservative issues. We find that the lawyers serve several separate and distinct constituencies,business conservatives, Christian conservatives, libertarians, abortion opponents,and that the credentials of the lawyers serving these varying constituencies differ significantly. The greatest degree of social separation occurs between the business constituency and the abortion opponents, with another clear separation between libertarians and the interest groups devoted to traditional family values and order maintenance. The divisions among these constituencies appear to reflect the difference between "insider politics" and "populism," which is manifested in part in actual geographic separation between lawyers located in the District of Columbia and those in the South, West, and Midwest. In the center of the network, however, we find some potential "mediators",prominent lawyers who may facilitate communication and coordination among the several constituencies. These lawyers and the organizations they serve attempt to merge morality, market freedom, and individual liberty concerns, and they convene meetings of diverse sets of lawyers and organizational leaders to seek consensus on policy goals. Nonetheless, the findings indicate that most organizations are seldom active on issues that lie beyond the relatively narrow boundaries of their own interests. [source]

The Urge to Merge: A Multiple-Case Study

NONPROFIT MANAGEMENT & LEADERSHIP, Issue 2 2002
Martha Golensky
The authors undertook a comparative study of three recent mergers of nonprofit organizations in a Midwestern urban center, within the context of political-economy theory. The research explored the impact of the same environmental factor, managed care, on the initial decisions by organizational leaders and the effects of these early decisions on subsequent actions taken to implement the merger. The study tested the authors' model of the motivations for merging, which proposes that the relationship between the decision-making style of the leadership and the internal and external resources of the prospective partners determines whether the merger is driven primarily by mission, practicality, stability, or fear. Although the findings provide initial support for the hypotheses derived from the model, a demonstration of the differences in the approach to the merger by each organization indicated that other factors emerged as important driving forces during the various phases of the process. [source]

Defining the perfect process

PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT, Issue 8 2009
Arnoud Vermei
Organizational performance is significantly dependent on the effectiveness and efficiency of the organization's processes. Therefore, organizational leaders should focus much of their own and their people's efforts on operating and improving these processes. If you are going to seek to improve, you need some sense of what is better. To this end, Terry Weight sought to define the perfect process in his keynote speech to the 2008 ISPI EMEA Conference in Galway. [source]

Proactivity Directed Toward the Team and Organization: The Role of Leadership, Commitment and Role-breadth Self-efficacy

BRITISH JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT, Issue 3 2009
Karoline Strauss
Employees' proactive behaviour is increasingly important for organizations seeking to adapt in uncertain economic environments. This study examined the link between leadership and proactive behaviour. We differentiated between organizational leadership and team leadership and proposed that transformational leadership by team leaders would enhance commitment to the team, which would predict team member proactivity. In contrast, transformational leadership by leaders of the organization would enhance commitment to the organization, which we expected to predict organization member proactivity. Transformational leadership on both levels was expected to increase employees' role-breadth self-efficacy, the confidence necessary to engage in proactive behaviour. Our results demonstrate the importance of leadership as an antecedent of proactive work behaviour and suggest that leadership at different levels influences proactivity via different mediators. Transformational team leaders seem to facilitate proactivity by increasing employees' confidence to initiate change. Transformational organizational leaders on the other hand increase proactivity by enhancing employees' commitment to the organization. [source]