External Leaders Research Articles

Follow the leader? A field experiment on social influence

We conduct an artefactual field experiment in endogenously formed groups in rural Malawi to investigate social influence in risk taking. Treatments vary whether individuals observe the behavior of a formally elected leader, an external leader, or a random peer. Results show social influence in risk taking with differential influence by leader type. The decisions made by peers are most influential, followed by those made by formal leaders, and then external leaders. Exploratory analysis suggests that participants follow peers because they extract information from their choices and share risks with them; while other forms of social utility are gained from following the example of leaders.

Gender differences in the perceived impact that athlete leaders have on team member emotional states

ABSTRACT Emotional contagion has been recognized as a variable influencing individual behaviour and team functioning. In particular, leaders within the team have been suggested to have a significant impact on their teammates through the expression of their emotions. As a result, the aim of this study was to provide greater insight into how different athlete leaders impact the emotional state of their team members, and whether gender differences existed in these relationships. Participants were 295 university student-athletes (200 male and 95 female) recruited from four universities in the UK. Data were collected in a two-step process. First, a voting/rating procedure was conducted within team to identify dominant task, motivational, social and external leaders. Then, participants completed the emotional contagion subscale of the Measure of Empathetic Tendency to rate the impact different athlete leaders had upon their emotional state. A MANOVA was conducted to explore gender differences in reported emotional susceptibility by leadership role. Subsequent ANOVAs highlighted significant differences between leadership role scores for female participants only. The results suggest that female athletes are more susceptible to emotional influence than male athletes. Furthermore, female athletes experienced a greater variation in the perceived emotional influence of different leadership roles in the team.

Дискурсы внешнего информационного давления в Крымском и Севастопольском сегментах Рунета: особенности, адресаты, конфликтогенный потенциал

The article presents the results of an applied study of discourse formations in information flows of external origin, targeted to the Crimean and Sevastopol social media audiences. The features of external information pressure on the Crimea and Sevastopol as target regions, the methods of information aggression, information domination, carried out with the aim of deconsolidating the peninsula community, undermining the trust of its representatives of the Russian government, biasing ideas and stereotyping the motives of the leaders of the Russian state, are studied. The research design is based on a comprehensive, hybrid empirical analysis strategy and includes methods of quantitative and qualitative approaches. Cognitive mapping of the content of messages of digital communities moderated by external leaders involves a structural analysis of contextual, thematic characteristics of information related information flows, establishing a relationship between the thematic palette of external information pressure and manipulation techniques, message tonality and user resonance on these information flows. The study of discursive practices of selected digital groups is aimed at a meaningful analysis of discourse formations of various genres, discourse techniques focused on the formation of stereotypes of target groups thinking in relation to the problems of the development of Crimea as part of the Russian Federation. Based on the results of the study, a conclusion is made about thematic dominants, leading methods for the formation of discourses, the relationship between the leading techniques of stereotyping consciousness of a user audience – a target of external forces and characteristics of public resonance. At the end, as one of the many perspectives of the study, the creation of a program of recommendations aimed at counteracting anti-Russian rhetoric and stopping the negative socio-political effects of external information pressure in the social media of Crimea and Sevastopol is announced

Making ‘us’ better: High-quality athlete leadership relates to health and burnout in professional Australian football teams

Overtraining, exhaustion, and burnout are widely recognized problems amongst elite athletes. The present research addresses this issue by exploring the extent to which high-quality athlete leadership is associated with elite athletes’ health and burnout. Participants (120 male athletes from three top-division Australian football teams) were asked to rate the quality of each of their teammates in four different leadership roles (i.e. as task and motivational leaders on the field and as social and external leaders off the field), and also to indicate their identification with their team as well as their self-reported health and burnout. Findings indicated that (a) being seen to be a good athlete leader by other members of the team and (b) having a good athlete leader on the team were both positively associated with better team member health and lower burnout. This relationship was mediated by athletes’ identification with their team, suggesting that leaders enhance athletes’ health and reduce athlete burnout by creating and maintaining a sense of shared identity in their team. This, in turn, suggests that coaches can foster an optimal team environment by developing the leadership potential of their athlete leaders – in particular, their skills that foster a sense of shared team identification. This is in the interests not only of team performance but also of team members’ health and burnout.

How many leaders does it take to lead a sports team? The relationship between the number of leaders and the effectiveness of professional sports teams.

This study aimed to analyze the number of task, social and external athlete leaders within sports teams, and to examine the effectiveness of different leadership structures in male and female teams. The participants were 317 male and 214 female soccer players belonging to 18 teams playing in the third highest male division and to 13 teams playing in the highest female division in Spain, respectively. First, we identified the leadership structure in each team (i.e., having zero, one, two or three leaders); second, we grouped the teams according to these leadership structures; and third, MANOVA was used to compare different leadership groups in terms of their effectiveness. The results demonstrated that: (a) the most common structure within the teams was to have one task leader, one social leader, and two external leaders; (b) shared leadership across and within leadership roles was seen as the most effective leadership structure for male and female teams; and (c) male teams showed more benefits when having more task and external leaders, while female teams experienced more benefits when having more task and social leaders on the team. Based on these findings, coaches can optimize their team’s functioning by implementing a structure of shared leadership within their teams, both across and within the different leadership roles.

Slicing the Cake: Exploring How Self-Leading Agile Teams and External Leaders Share Leadership

While management and organizational behavior related research emphasizes the relevance of leaders in general and external leaders in self-leading teams specifically for team effectiveness, agile me...

Cultural change and lodestones in the British police

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to consider a challenge to an occupational jurisdiction in the British police. Historically, street cops have defended the importance of operational credibility as a way of sustaining the value of experience, and inhibiting attempts to introduce external leaders. This has generated a particular form of policing and leadership that is deemed by the British Government as inadequate to face the problems of the next decade.Design/methodology/approachThe project used the High Potential Development Scheme of the British police to assess the value of operational credibility and the possibilities of radical cultural change. Data are drawn from participants on the program, from those who failed to get onto the program, and from officers who have risen through the ranks without access to a fast-track scheme.FindingsMost organizational changes fail in their own terms, often because of cultural resistance. However, if we change our metaphors of culture from natural to human constructions it may be possible to focus on the key point of the culture: the lodestone that glues it together. Operational credibility may be such a cultural lodestone and undermining it offers the opportunity for rapid and radical change.Research limitations/implicationsThe scheme itself has had limited numbers and the research was limited to a small proportion of the different categories outlined above.Practical implicationsIf we change our metaphors for culture and cultural change – from natural to constructed metaphors – (icebergs and webs to buildings), it may be possible to consider a much more radical approach to organizational change.Originality/valueMost assessments of cultural change focus on those charged with enacting the change and explain failure through recourse to natural metaphors of change. This paper challenges the convention that cultural change can only ever be achieved, if at all, through years of effort.

Deep Help in Complex Project Work: Guiding and Path-Clearing Across Difficult Terrain

How do teams working on complex projects get the help they need? Our qualitative investigation of the help provided to project teams at a prominent design firm revealed two distinct helping processes, both characterized by deep, sustained engagement that far exceeds the brief interactions described in the helping literature. Such deep help consisted of (1) guiding a team through a difficult juncture by working with its members in several prolonged, tightly clustered sessions, or (2) path-clearing by helping a team address a persistent deficit via briefer, intermittent sessions throughout a project’s life. We present a model theorizing these processes, which has two noteworthy features. First, it emphasizes the socially constructed nature of helping behavior. That is, the parties must establish and maintain a helping frame for their interaction, especially when help-givers are high-status external leaders. Second, the model specifies that the rhythms of deep help—the duration and temporal patterns of giver–receiver interactions—are resource-allocation decisions that also contribute to the social meaning of help. These findings illuminate the theoretical and practical overlap between helping and external leadership in knowledge-intensive project work, and the role of temporality in the helping process.

The Pathways and Challenges of University Engagement: Comparative Case Studies in Austria

The Pathways and Challenges of University Engagement: Comparative Case Studies in Austria

The Dragon's Goodwill: Examining China's External Finance and African Leaders' Preferentialism

This paper has been retracted. Please contact jicep@wspc.com

Managing Conflict: A Guide for the Pharmacy Manager

Managing conflict among a variety of people and groups is a necessary part of creating a high performance pharmacy department. As new pharmacy managers enter the workforce, much of their success depends on how they manage conflict. The goal of this article is to provide a guide for the pharmacy director on conflict in the workplace. By evaluating each type of conflict, we can learn how to respond when it occurs. Resolving conflict requires a unique and individualized approach, and the strategy used may often be based on the situational context and the personality of the employee or manager. The more that pharmacy leaders can engage in conflict resolution with employees and external leaders, the more proactive they can be in achieving positive results. If pharmacy directors understand the source of conflicts and use management strategies to resolve them, they will ensure that conflicts result in a more effective patient-centered pharmacy service.

When Do Firms Invest in Developing Rookies?

Firms must often decide how to augment their human capital (HC) in a manner that can generate competitive advantages. Two predominant options are either (1) to build which entails hiring novice employees and developing them inside the firm or (2) to acquire which means to hire experienced employees from other firms and then integrating them. Recent trends suggest that firms are pursuing both options in order to have a mix of both HC strategies. In this paper, I analyze firms that pursue both building and acquiring strategies, and then investigate when their attributes can inform effective governance of one strategy vis-a-vis the other. This paper theorizes that a firm that has the managerial slack to provide mentorship to its employees and the financial slack to make a long-horizon investment is more likely to use building relative to acquiring strategies. Using a panel dataset from the legal industry, which has reported the augmentation practices of law firms from the last decade, I test and find support for my hypotheses. Law firms’ managerial and financial slack is positively associated with building strategies. Alternatively, when law firms have less of these slacks, which would the case if external leaders are hired or a large number of employees suddenly depart, these firms are more likely to acquire.

Leading multiple teams: Average and relative external leadership influences on team empowerment and effectiveness.

External leaders continue to be an important source of influence even when teams are empowered, but it is not always clear how they do so. Extending research on structurally empowered teams, we recognize that teams' external leaders are often responsible for multiple teams. We adopt a multilevel approach to model external leader influences at both the team level and the external leader level of analysis. In doing so, we distinguish the influence of general external leader behaviors (i.e., average external leadership) from those that are directed differently toward the teams that they lead (i.e., relative external leadership). Analysis of data collected from 451 individuals, in 101 teams, reporting to 25 external leaders, revealed that both relative and average external leadership related positively to team empowerment. In turn, team empowerment related positively to team performance and member job satisfaction. However, while the indirect effects were all positive, we found that relative external leadership was not directly related to team performance, and average external leadership evidenced a significant negative direct influence. Additionally, relative external leadership exhibited a significant direct positive influence on member job satisfaction as anticipated, whereas average external leadership did not. These findings attest to the value in distinguishing external leaders' behaviors that are exhibited consistently versus differentially across empowered teams. Implications and future directions for the study and management of external leaders overseeing multiple teams are discussed.

The Miles and Snow Strategic Framework: Corporate Environmental Strategies in China

The earth’s environment is deteriorating. Business is part of the problem and can be part of the solution. What factors lead to firm environmental proactive behaviours? Literature on the environmental management, strategy and managerial cognition show that governments, other internal and external stakeholders, ethical leaders, culture, and economic incentives are some key drivers to the process of “going green.” However, we still do not know enough about the environmental proactivity in what is fast becoming the world’s biggest economy, China? Research has focused largely on the West. China is particularly important not only for its economic power and size, but because it has very serious environmental problems. We need to apply what is known to China. Second, how do the various pieces, the factors seen as significant, fit together? This study, built from in-depth interviews with 33 businesses in China, shows that a pattern exists. The four clusters identified can be labeled compliance, competitiveness, e...

Leader Emergence in Teams: The Role of Leadership Self-Efficacy and Motivation to Lead

This study explores the emergence of leader in a newly organized team. Two antecedents for the leader emergence are empirically examined: motivation to lead and leadership self- efficacy. It is suggested that a person with higher motivation to lead is more likely to be identified to be a leader by team members. It is also suggested that a person with higher leadership self-efficacy is more likely to be indentified to be a leader by team members. Both leadership self efficacy and motivation to lead were found to be positively related to leader emergence in a nascent team social network. The relationship between leadership self-efficacy and leader emergence will be mediated by the motivation to lead. In addition, the relationships of the leadership self-efficacy and motivation to lead with leader emergence are supposed to be moderated by the external leaders’ leadership style. When external leaders empower the team members, a person with has higher level of leadership self efficacy and motivation to lead is supposed to emerge as leader of the group than those under lower level of empowering leadership.

"Leading Multiple Teams: The Influence of Leadership, Standardization, and Empowerment on Teams"

Team empowerment often implies that external leaders are unimportant, but research shows that they are. Extending research on empowered teams, we adopt a multi-level approach to examine the unique ...

Reflexivity in External Religious Leaders’ Summit Communication Sequences (2005-2012) to G8 Political Leaders

Religious governance influence in international relations is underresearched. Using reflexivity as primary governance indicator, this case study examines the external communicational sequences of the only multifaith summits (2005-2012) whose purpose is communication to, and dialogue with, G8 and G20 political leaders about global responsibilities to empirically discern, independent of religious leaders’ self-identification, whether the quality of dialogue is indicative of governance behavior or unreflexive acts of international value struggle. Reflexivity is operationalized as historically embedded in social relations using methodological cosmopolitanism. Findings indicate that religious leaders use cultural capital to blur (not reify) social boundaries that inhibit international collaboration, and offer no evidence of unreflexive dialogue. Leaders use social capital to socially (re)construct boundaries for cosmopolitan responsibility to include the interests of the vulnerable that are impacted by, but excluded from, G8 and G20 decisions. This work contributes to the “empirical mapping” of religious governance in international relations with implications for their consideration as dialogue partners for global governance.

Early childhood service development and intersectoral collaboration in rural Australia

There is a paucity of research into the development of intersectoral collaborations designed to support early childhood development in rural communities. Drawing on findings from a qualitative study conducted in three small rural communities in Tasmania, this paper will examine community-based intersectoral collaborations involving government and non-government organisations from the health and allied health, education and community service sectors. The paper analyses the process of developing intersectoral collaborations from the perspective of early childhood health and wellbeing. The specific focus is on collaborations that build family and community capacity. Findings indicate that three groups of factors operate interdependently to influence collaborations: social capital, leadership and environmental factors. Each community has different leadership sources, structures and processes, shaped by levels of community social capital, and by environmental factors such as policy and resources. Effective models of early childhood development require strong local and external leadership. Rural communities that are able to identify and harness the skills, knowledge and resources of internal and external leaders are well positioned to take greater ownership of their own health and wellbeing. The paper provides guidelines for developing and enhancing the capacity of rural communities at different stages of collaborative readiness.

ON THE EXISTENCE OF LIMIT CYCLES IN OPINION FORMATION PROCESSES UNDER TIME PERIODIC INFLUENCE OF PERSUADERS

This paper concerns a model of opinion formation in a population of interacting individuals under the influence of external leaders or persuaders, which act in a time periodic fashion. The model is formulated within a general framework inspired to a discrete generalized kinetic approach, which has been developed in Ref. 6. It is expressed by a system of non-autonomous nonlinear ordinary differential equations. The dynamics of such a system is investigated and the existence of a globally asymptotically stable periodic solution is analytically proved in three example cases, each one corresponding to a different quantitative choice of the actions of the persuaders. Equivalently, in three particular cases a time periodic asymptotic trend of the opinions evolution is established. Several computational simulations are described and discussed, suggesting that for the model under investigation analogous qualitative results hold true more generally, also in cases involving quantitatively different persuaders actions.

Athlete leadership dispersion and satisfaction in interactive sport teams

Objective Athlete leadership on sport teams can be represented by an individual occupying a formal or informal leadership role within a team who influences a group of team members to achieve a common goal [Loughead, Hardy, & Eys, (2006). The nature of athlete leadership. Journal of Sport Behavior, 29, 142–158]. Previous research has suggested that individuals involved in sport view the presence of athlete leaders as a crucial component to the effective functioning of the team [Glenn & Horn, (1993) Psychological and personal predictors of leadership behavior in female soccer athletes. Journal Applied of Sport psychology, 5, 17–34]. The purpose of the present study was to examine, at both the beginning and end of a competitive season, the relationship between individual perceptions of athlete leader dispersion across three types of leadership functions (i.e., task, social, external) and satisfaction. Method Participants included 218 intercollegiate athletes from a variety of interactive team sports. At the beginning and end of their competitive seasons, athletes indicated who the task, social, and external leaders were on their respective teams and responded to four dimensions of the Athlete Satisfaction Questionnaire [Riemer & Chelladurai, (1998) Development of the Athlete Satisfaction Questionnaire (ASQ). Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 20, 127–156]. Results Those who perceived all three leadership functions to be represented to the same degree (i.e., higher number of leaders for all three functions, an average number of leaders for all three functions, or a lower number of leaders for all three functions) were more satisfied with their team's performance and degree to which the team was integrated than those individuals who perceived an imbalance in the number of athletes engaging in those functions. Conclusion The relative number of leaders within sport groups is related to individual perceptions of satisfaction.