Between tradition and modernity – The overlooked dimension of informal networks in female leadership in Korea

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of gender on the effectiveness of transformational leadership. Drawing on role congruity theory, it elucidates the moderating effects of leader gender, subordinate gender, and leader-subordinate gender dyad on the relationship between transformational leadership and psychological empowerment.Design/methodology/approachEmployees of companies in Korea responded to a paper-pencil survey, rating their psychological empowerment and leadership behaviors of their direct leader on a five-point Likert-type scale. The analysis includes 339 responses.FindingsThe results indicate that a leader’s gender has no significant moderating effect on psychological empowerment, but the gender of the subordinate has a significant moderating effect, with male subordinates more strongly influenced by transformational leadership than female subordinates. Notably, the findings show that the effectiveness of transformational leadership is contingent on the leader-subordinate gender dyad. Specifically, transformational leadership has as significant an effect on female leader-male subordinate dyads as on male leader-male subordinate dyads.Research limitations/implicationsThis study contributes to leadership and gender studies in the management field by investigating the effect of gender roles on the effectiveness of transformational leadership. Future research should extend this study and explore whether these findings are generalizable.Practical implicationsThe remarkable finding of the effect of female leadership on employee empowerment suggests organizations should use more female leaders.Originality/valueThis is the first empirical study to shed light on gender issues in relation to transformational leadership in Korea.

Using a qualitative interview approach, this study analyzes the experiences of women in academic leadership positions in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. An exploration of the extent of the relevance of Western research on female academic leadership is used to explain the experiences of female leaders in Kazakhstan. The results of the study are consistent with the results of prior studies conducted in other countries and can be largely explained by existing theories. One distinctive feature of the experiences of female leaders in Kazakhstan is the superimposition of three dominant cultures – traditional, Soviet, and Westernized neo-liberal, which impose multiple conflicting expectations. Kazakhstani women are obliged to maintain multiple identities when communicating with their colleagues, superiors and extended family members. The exact outcome of the work–life balance negotiation depends, among other factors, on the type of ownership and geographic region of a university. The study also reveals that neo-institutional theory, not conventionally used in the analysis of female leadership in academia in the West, may be particularly relevant for explaining female experiences in transitional and developing contexts; specifically, in explaining the constraints imposed by informal policy networks and corruption.

The Arab world is very diverse when it comes to leadership practices. The females’ level of participation in leadership positions in Arab countries ranges from very restricted to fully engaged. Taking on leadership roles imposes many challenges both on micro and macro levels. The aim of this study is to explore the leadership practices of Arab female educational leaders and understand the impact that environment and culture have on their leadership practices. Using an ethnographic approach, seven female educational leaders, who lived and worked in leadership positions in eight Arab countries, revealed that they practice a combination of transformational, servant and instructional leadership dimensions. However, a new leadership style emerged ensuring that these leaders and their followers are valued for who they are and rewarded for what they do. This study highlights the combination of both aspects of change and leadership as critical to female educational leaders success in addition to mentoring, informal networking and social connections. Furthermore, having partner and family support were identified as a cornerstone to their career advancement. This study suggests the need to design policies that support teachers to become involved in decision making and to promote them into leadership positions.

This chapter examines the perceptions of Black female educational leaders and teachers regarding the advancement and sustainability of Black female leaders. The findings revealed a need for informal and formal mentorship and networks to assist with navigating the challenges and obstacles to advance and sustain in leadership. The chapter reviews the literature on Black female educators' history, mentorship, barriers, and obstacles to educational leadership. The end goal was to discover common challenges Black female leaders in educational leadership face, identify concepts in increasing the number of Black female leaders in the districts, and provide support systems for survival and employment advancement opportunities.

On 25 January 2015, the fourth anniversary of the uprising that toppled Hosny Mubarak and brought the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) into power, Egyptian security forces arrested Aya Alaa Hosny in front of the Journalists Union in central Cairo. Aya is one of the spokeswomen and leader of the Women against the Coup, one of the most active women-only movements established by the Muslim Sisterhood following the Egyptian coup d’état in 2013. Since then, thousands of Islamist women and sympathisers have joined the Sisters in street demonstrations, human rights advocacy and anti-regime protests, notwithstanding the high risk associated with political activism in a context of retrenched authoritarianism. This article offers a gendered analysis of the Egyptian MB by examining the activism of the Muslim Sisterhood, its female wing, post July 2013. Contrary to mainstream academic literature on Islamist women’s activism, which considers Islamist movements’ conservative gender ideology and sexual division of labour as an impediment to female political leadership, this study argues that Islamist informal networks can be conducive to female leadership under ‘negative’ political circumstances. As the case of the Muslim Sisterhood demonstrates, the repression of Islamists following the coup favoured the emergence of women’s leadership, firstly within women-only movements and subsequently, as the very survival of the MB became increasingly compromised, in the MB movement as a whole.

Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America

This article explores knowledge search strategies of technology-based small firms (TBSFs) and the role that informal and proximate relationships play in the development of knowledge networks, through which knowledge exchange occurs. Drawing on interfirm relationship and social network theory, we contend that TBSFs participate in informal networks to exchange technology, market and managerial knowledge, to the extent that these knowledge configurations facilitate acquisition of external knowledge critical for their learning processes by TBSFs. Results indicate that a firm’s engagement in the exchange of various sources of knowledge is directly related to its economic activity and strategic knowledge priorities, which shape the structural dimensions of interfirm informal networks. While informal networks remain informal, certain TBSFs formalize their participation as they obtain and combine knowledge resources that are important for their activity. In examining how different interests and roles impact participation in informal interfirm networks, this study contributes to the literature on small firms and collaborative relationships.

Knowledge intensive organizations often rely on knowledge sharing networks. Such networks, often called ‘communities of practice’ are found in many organizations but their forms and functions appear to be quite diverse. In this article we determine and discuss a number of basic types of knowledge networks. A literature analysis and a study of 38 networks in large organizations yielded two dimensions of networks, institutionalization and proximity. On the basis of these dimensions four basic types of knowledge networks were discerned: strategic networks, informal networks, question and answer networks, and on‐line strategic networks. The recognition of this variety of knowledge networks highlights the different ways in which knowledge sharing and creating can be organized and shows that these different forms of organizing require different technological and organizational support. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Research on the informal support networks of older persons recognizes that network size and composition (i.e., family vs. nonkin) may have important consequences for care. Factors that determine these aspects of networks among older blacks, however, have not been explored systematically. The present study examined the relationship of a group of sociodemographic, health, family, and availability factors to the size and composition of the informal support network. The data were taken from the National Survey of Black Americans and constitute a nationally representative sample (N = 581) of older blacks (55 years and older). The results for several of the sociodemographic factors (i.e., sex and marital status) are consistent with previous work. Regional differences in network dimensions, however, suggest new areas of inquiry. The findings underscore the importance of availability and family factors in support relationships and the relative ineffectiveness of health factors as predictors of network size and composition.

Women face gendered barriers to union leadership. In‐depth interviews with UK and Australian female senior trade union leaders investigated how mentoring strategies can help women overcome barriers to leadership. Formal mentoring is most important, but the interaction of mentoring and informal support networks bolsters gender equality and workplace democracy.

We study the spread of information in small-world networks generated from different d-dimensional regular lattices, with d=1, 2, and 3. With this purpose, we analyze by numerical simulations the behavior of the coordination sequence, e.g., the average number of sites C(n) that can be reached from a given node of the network in n steps along its bonds. For sufficiently large networks, we find an asymptotic behavior C(n) approximately rho(n), with a constant rho that depends on the network dimension d and on the rewiring probability p (which measures the disorder strength of a given network). A simple model of information spreading in these networks is studied, assuming that only a fraction q of the network sites are active. The number of active nodes reached in n steps has an asymptotic form lambda(n), lambda being a constant that depends on p and q, as well as on the dimension d of the underlying lattice. The information spreading presents two different regimes depending on the value of lambda: For lambda>1 the information propagates along the whole system, and for lambda<1 the spreading is damped and the information remains confined in a limited region of the network. We discuss the connection of these results with site percolation in small-world networks.

Several studies of frail older people have focused on the relationship between formal and informal care, while others have examined the character of inter-generational relationships. Yet knowledge of the significance of the informal-support networks of older people who receive formal care is still scarce. The aim of this paper was to explore how older Swedes who receive formal elder-care experienced their informal support networks. The findings presented emanate from a qualitative case study. The structural, interaction and functional dimensions of the support networks were the main analytical tools. In the study population, the size of the formal support network varied from one to 12 people (or categories of people), and the size of the informal support network varied from one to six people (or categories of people). The main results demonstrate the importance of informal support with reciprocal relationships, and the value of confidants and emotional support, both of which contribute to feelings of belonging, security and wellbeing. A well-functioning formal and informal support network allows individuals to maintain autonomy in old age, even when they have to depend on help from others.

Background: The link prediction issue is one of the most widely used problems in complex network analysis. Link prediction requires knowing the background of previous link connections and combining them with available information. The link prediction local approaches with node structure objectives are fast in case of speed but are not accurate enough. On the other hand, the global link prediction methods identify all path structures in a network and can determine the similarity degree between graph-extracted entities with high accuracy but are time-consuming instead. Most existing algorithms are only using one type of feature (global or local) to represent data, which not well described due to the large scale and heterogeneity of complex networks.Methods: In this paper, a new method presented for Link Prediction using node embedding due to the high dimensions of real-world networks. The proposed method extracts a smaller model of the input network by getting help from the deep neural network and combining global and local nodes in a way to preserve the network's information and features to the desired extent. First, the feature vector is being extracted by an encoder-decoder for each node, which is a suitable tool for modeling complex nonlinear phenomena. Secondly, both global and local information concurrently used to improve the loss function. More obvious, the clustering similarity threshold considered as the local criterion and the transitive node similarity measure used to exploit the global features. To the end, the accuracy of the link prediction algorithm increased by designing the optimization operation accurately.Results: The proposed method applied to 4 datasets named Cora, Wikipedia, Blog catalog, Drug-drug-interaction, and the results are compared with laplacian, Node2vec, and GAE methods. Experimental results show an average accuracy achievement of 0.620, 0.723, 0.875, and 0.845 on the mentioned datasets, and confirm that the link prediction can effectively improve the prediction performance using network embedding based on global similarity.

Determinants of Informal Coordination in Networked Supply Chains

This paper explores the gender dimensions of group membership and social networks using a unique longitudinal data set from the rural Philippines. We investigate two types of social capital: membership in groups, or ‘formal’ social capital, and size of trust‐based networks or ‘informal’ social capital. Because men and women may have different propensities to invest in social capital, we analyse the determinants of group membership for men and women separately. We also disaggregate the analysis by type of group. The paper also examines the determinants of the density of social capital, proxied by the number of groups and the number of network members. Finally, it explores whether groups contribute to increased sizes of social networks. We find that men and women do not differ significantly in their probability of participating in groups or the number of groups they join. However, there are clear gender differences in the types of groups to which men and women belong. We also find that group membership does not, in general, increase network density. The size of one's informal networks is influenced by the location and migration decisions of one's sons and daughters, suggesting that sons and daughters play different roles in providing support to their households of origin. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.