Leaders Turn Research Articles

Travel to allies or adversaries? A compositional analysis of U.S. diplomatic visits

AbstractObjectiveWhen and why do U.S. leaders visit their allies or adversaries? Much of the literature on diplomatic visits treats each visit as an independent observation. In this article, we analyze high‐level diplomatic visits as compositional data based on the assumption that they are scarce political resources.MethodsWe conduct a compositional analysis of U.S. high‐level officials' diplomatic visits between 1950 and 2010.ResultsWe find that U.S. diplomatic visits to its allies are defense‐oriented, so leaders spend more time touring them during their security crises to signal reassurance. Additionally, we find that visits to adversaries are motivated by leaders' domestic political concerns, particularly their high public unpopularity. Visiting a hostile country is a challenging and salient foreign policy task, providing a high‐profile opportunity to improve their domestic image and standing. This effect is particularly significant in a divided government, where leaders turn to foreign policy to maximize domestic political impacts amid domestic gridlock.ConclusionThe findings suggest that U.S. leaders travel to allies and adversaries for distinct strategic purposes. Furthermore, our study suggests that future research on diplomatic visits should use a compositional variable approach to better model the dynamics and competitive nature of travel diplomacy.

Turning Post-COVID-19 Institutions into Enduring Organizations: How Managers Build Agility & Growth

This symposium presents pathways by which effective managers and leaders turn post-Covid-19 institutions into enduring organizations through agility and growth mind-set. A recent Gallup study notes that the quality of managers and team leaders is the single biggest factor for an organization’s long-term success (Clifton & Harter, 2019). We cannot have a culture of agility until we equip our managers with the right development, clear expectations, ongoing coaching and accountability. If we give every team member in an organization a great manager – a great coach – one who cares about their development and growth, we have successfully engineered an organization with unlimited potential. We have helped build a more enduring organization. We need to bring the manager back into management! We do not need to view leadership and management as dichotomous functions, for great leaders can also be effective managers. Peter Drucker once said that successful organizations need both good managers and leaders, like the two hands needed to play violin. The current context has increased the need for a new management and leadership perspective that embraces a more fluid, less encumbered and more participative kind of management practice. Perhaps it is too early to arrive at post-pandemic management and leadership theory and practice. Nevertheless, during this moment of crisis, we must build on the lessons we have learned so far, help managers and leaders to embrace universal, holistic leadership principles: be authentic, have integrity, serve selflessly and create communities of care, together. When managers and leaders understand the context and embody these guiding principles as they engage with the emerging new normal, they will be ready to lead authentically and navigate the present volatile and precarious world with increased awareness and confidence. This symposium is our humble offering in this direction. Holistic Leadership: A New Paradigm for Today’s Leaders and Managers Presenter: Satinder Dhiman; Woodbury U. Awakened Leaders and Conscious Followers: Leading Mindful Change Presenter: Joan F. Marques; Woodbury U. Servant Leadership and Sustainable Employee Well Being in a Post-pandemic Workplace Presenter: Gary Roberts; Regent U. Strategies to Cope with COVID-19 Volatility based on the Work of Peter B. Vaill Presenter: Eric B. Dent; Florida Gulf Coast U. Effective Management Practices for Fostering Agility during Turbulent Times Presenter: Manoj Chandra Handa; New South Wales Department of Education, Sydney, Australia Thriving in a Culture of Care Presenter: Ginger Grant; Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning Expert Views on How to Lead in Complex Times for a Sustainable Future of Work Presenter: Claude Hélène Mayer; Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Presenter: Katharina Wilke; People Excellence Manager Automative Industry

Exploring Authentic Leadership through Leadership Journey of Gandhi

Leadership research will benefit from bringing in the subjective realities of becoming a leader by considering the leadership journey. Generating an understanding of how leaders turn episodes in time into meaningful subjective narratives helps shed light on the meaning-making process. We seek in this inquiry to understand self-awareness with a narrative meaning-making process. In this study, we adopt a narrative research approach for analyzing the autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi, who is widely acknowledged as an authentic leader. The study explores individual experiences of becoming a leader and factors leading to the manifestation of authentic leadership behaviour as well as followers’ outcomes. The study will also contribute towards the understanding of triggering events experienced by the leader at different points in life which have led to self-awareness.

Sub-Saharan leaders in Morocco’s migration industry: activism, integration, and smuggling

ABSTRACT The migration industry includes governments and private companies wanting to control and limit human mobility, but also nonstate actors who help facilitate it. This article addresses the multiplicity of roles that Sub-Saharan migrant activists and community leaders play in Morocco’s migration industry. The article draws on ethnographic research conducted in 2018 among 39 sub-Saharan activists and community leaders and 4 Moroccan activists throughout the Kingdom. I argue that while activists and community leaders are front line defenders of migrants’ rights, they are also caught up in the migration industry that emerged after the National Strategy for Immigration and Asylum (SNIA) was implemented in 2014. They attempt to enter the humanitarian aid or migration control sectors of the industry, but are often prevented from extracting monetary value from it due to racial discrimination. Migrant leaders turn to using their social capital to facilitate border crossings for other migrants in exchange for financial compensation. These activists and community leaders are instrumental in the mobility apparatus in Morocco as without them other sub-Saharan migrants would not have the information, networks, or support to access aid to stay in the country or continue their journey to Europe.

The Unsociability of Commercial Seafaring: Language Practice and Ideology in Maritime Technocracy

ABSTRACTThis article explores the language practices and language ideologies of maritime technocracy and inquires into the imagined and real gaps involved in sustaining channels of sociable talk aboard cargo ships. Lacking knowledge of the routines, practices, and beliefs impacting seafarers’ productivity, shipping industry leaders turn to Christian ministries to identify infrastructural or logistical gaps in the operation of communications media networks and deficiencies in the language policies and interactional practices that animate them. These converging profit‐driven and ethical projects collectively support a technocratic language ideology. It locates risks to the supply chain in presumptions of miscommunications caused by the lack of English‐language use and unsociability caused by the lack of convivial talk among seafarers for channeling information about these risks. Actualized by strategies that affirm the value of face‐to‐face talk and online chatting rather than solitary reading, maritime technocracy standardizes the logistical coordination of media infrastructures and labor and language policies. This article draws on ethnographic research aboard cargo ships and at Christian centers to elucidate the logic of maritime technocracies in Newark and Montreal, two seaports with different governance structures highlighting the internal differences of a shipping industry facing crises due to automation, outsourcing, and neoliberal reform. [commercial seafaring, shipping industry, sociability, maritime technology, language ideology]

The role of the chair in informal international organisations: Australia’s Group of Twenty presidency

ABSTRACTScholars of international relations have devoted significant effort to understanding international organisations. However, two areas have been understudied: the role of the chair in international multilateral negotiations and the role of informal international organisations. Yet informal international organisations are increasingly important in international affairs as world leaders turn to smaller and more flexible forums to address global challenges. This article addresses these two blind spots in the literature by considering the role of Australia as chair in one of the most important yet most understudied informal international organisations: the Group of Twenty (G20). Drawing on primary interview data and the participant observations of the first author, who was a member of the G20 chair in 2013–14 during Australia’s presidency, the authors examine two theoretical puzzles: (1) why states delegate control of the negotiation process to a chair and (2) how the chair can, and does, influence the negotiation process. It is argued that member states delegate control to the chair to overcome specific institutional failures and, in doing so, provide the chair with the power to influence the negotiation process. The authors also argue that the G20 case indicates that existing theory overlooks key factors which restrict the capacity of the chair to influence the negotiation outcome.

Humble Leaders Turn Authoritarian: The Moderating Effects of Power Threat and Status Threat

Since power threat and status threat are very common to leader roles in organizations, we explore how humble leaders will react to these threats. Based on the contingency model of dearth awareness ...

Offline: Why science should matter more to global health

A brief experiment in global health comes to an end this week. On Sept 26, the iERG (the thankfully short acronym given to the independent Expert Review Group on Information and Accountability for Women's and Children's Health) hands its fourth and final report to WHO's Director-General, Margaret Chan. The iERG is a creation of the Commission on Information and Accountability for Women's and Children's Health (CoIA). CoIA was, in turn, the product of Ban Ki-moon's signature global health initiative, Every Woman Every Child. CoIA was chaired by the Prime Minister of Canada (Stephen Harper) and the President of Tanzania (Jakaya Kikwete). Such high-level political leadership ensured that CoIA's recommendations were taken seriously, especially since Canada was promising billions of dollars for maternal, newborn, and child health programmes (its highly successful Muskoka Initiative). The purpose of the iERG (declaration: its two co-chairs are Joy Phumaphi and myself) was to strengthen accountability for women's and children's health, which meant making sure the promises of all stakeholders were actually delivered. The philosophy behind the iERG was animated by Paul Hunt, a former UN Special Rapporteur on the right to the highest attainable standard of health. He envisaged accountability as a three-part process—monitoring, review, and remedy or action. The integration of human rights into health proved to be a powerful idea, one that has helped to accelerate progress for women and children worldwide. But there was one further lesson from this embryonic architecture of accountability—the neglected value of science as a political instrument to catalyse advances in health. Governments and multilateral organisations are essential partners in determining the direction of global health. Civil society is increasingly recognised as a forceful additional actor in shaping global health policy. The burgeoning engagement of non-governmental organisations at the World Health Assembly has exemplified not only the emergent diversity of global health, but also its gradual democratisation. And the private sector is now recognised as an indispensable voice too, and not only for its money. But science and scientists also have a role, and my experience in working with the iERG has been that science deserves far greater attention as a tool for global health decision making. Surprisingly, many global health leaders turn away from science and feel uncomfortable among scientists. Partly, this aversion is because leaders of health-related agencies often have little-or-no scientific background themselves. Alienation from the language and practice of science may, understandably, lead to anxiety, scepticism, and rejection of science itself. Good global health leadership demands a suite of political skills whose acquisition may be entirely antipathetic to science. But global health needs to learn to love science—and scientists. Here's why. Science performs at least five vital functions for global health, and especially for global health accountability. First, science can deliver the most reliable data to inform decision makers (think of the contribution made by the Global Burden of Disease study). Second, science can support the impartial evaluation of global health programmes. Third, science can offer divergent visions of the world's future through its predictive models, varying conditions and outcomes which offer choices to political leaders. Fourth, science creates new ideas that can help to accelerate action. Examples might include Dean Jamison's Commission on Investing in Health or Ana Langer's Commission on Women and Health. Finally, scientists can be advocates for policies based on the best available evidence. But there is a danger. Although one might lament the fact that science is a persistently marginalised cultural force, a technocracy can never substitute for democracy. The control or influence of society by a technical elite will only produce a new tyranny. Experts are unaccountable to society. Technical solutions may not be humane solutions. The technocratic becomes the inverse of the democratic. But even a justified fear of science is no excuse for ignoring the contribution science can make either to the alleviation of human suffering or to the delivery of social justice. Scientists are surely sometimes guilty of private diffidence and public arrogance. But those who could use science to advance the health of their societies and who choose not to do so are guilty of far greater atrocities.

Law, Fiscal Federalism, and Austerity

In response to the Eurozone crisis, European Union leaders have undertaken a number of dramatic reforms, including the imposition of a new regime for fiscal governance of Eurozone Member States. The 2012 Fiscal Compact Treaty, one of the lynchpins of this package of reforms, requires states to incorporate judicially enforceable balanced-budget rules into national law. This article explores this effort to judicialize austerity in the European Union, focusing on two interrelated sets of questions. First, why did EU leaders turn to the courts and ask them to become the stewards of fiscal discipline, and second, should we expect the effort to judicialize fiscal discipline through the Fiscal Compact to work? I argue that after the failure of the Maastricht Eurozone governance regime, Member State governments concluded that the enforcement of fiscal rules must be shielded from political interference and entrenched at the national level, where national courts could assure that EU rules were respected by reluctant governments. Nevertheless, I conclude that these efforts will fail because they are based on a misunderstanding of when and how fiscal rules are actually enforced. The vague character of the balanced budget rules adopted in the Fiscal Compact Treaty along with other background conditions in the structure of the Eurozone mean that the rules are unlikely to be enforced.

Turnaround leadership core tensions during the company turnaround process

How leaders turn around declining performance is a significant issue for companies, their employees, their customers, their shareholders and, more generally, society. Leadership influence during times of change is well recognised in the literature; however, leadership during a turnaround is more complex and less understood. In-depth examinations of the role and activities of turnaround leaders have received insufficient attention in the literature to date. Specifically, studies have not investigated, in-depth, the tensions that leaders face during a turnaround process. To begin addressing this gap in the literature, we utilise case studies of four companies to examine the core tensions leaders experience, when they occur during the turnaround process and how they are managed. We frame our focus on leadership tensions in three prominent domains in the literature, leadership change, leadership assertiveness and strategic orientation. Our findings identify and detail the management of six core tensions that leaders experience across a five-stage turnaround process model. We conclude that effective turnaround leadership is less about particular skill sets or ‘types’ of leaders for different stages of the recovery process, and more about their ability to purposefully navigate and balance apparently conflicting activities within these tensions. We discuss the implications of these findings for theory and practice.

Not by Order, Nor by Dialague: The <i>Metanoetic</i> Presence of the Kingdom of God in a Fluid New World and Church

Fluid modernity favours new forms of individualism, complexity and non-linear change. Therefore, the emphasis on order, predictability and open dialogue in religious circles, as preferred ways of responding to change and problems, must be augmented by a metanoetic understanding of the kingdom of God. As a subversive, upside-down new reality, God’s kingdom is relationally driven, open-ended and in constant flux. Through “metanoia,” as the urgent boundary-crossing call of Jesus, individuals become part of this subversive new world where selfless love for God and others dominates. As an ongoing process of personal metamorphosis, “metanoia” simultaneously facilitates new forms of “complexity leadership”, where religious leaders turn into sages who create fluid new structures to facilitate familial relationships and a new culture of respect in which believers are allowed to thrive in their Spirit-induced flow states.

“Reading the List”: Casualty Lists and Civil War Poetry

“Reading the List”: Casualty Lists and Civil War Poetry Vanessa Steinroetter (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The Casualties. The New York Times. 12 May 1864. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. The Siege of Fort Donelson, Killed and Wounded. The New York Times. 3 March 1862. [End Page 48] On August 29, 1862, as the Second Battle of Bull Run raged in Virginia, an unassuming article titled “Unrecorded Heroes” appeared in the New Orleans Daily Delta, a Confederate newspaper published in New Orleans during the Union Army’s occupation under General Benjamin Butler. The article described the daily acts of courage and strength that went unnoticed by most historians of the war, giving examples of the “unrecorded heroes,” such as the starving population of the South or the nameless soldiers whose dead bodies would never be found or returned. It claimed that “[a]ll these are the true heroes of this war; not alone they who have memorials presented, and if they die, pompous monuments erected, but the thousands of brave fellows who know, if they fall, they will have mention only among the ‘list of killed and wounded.’” Referring to the lists of wounded, missing, or fallen soldiers that appeared in large daily or weekly newspapers such as the Delta or the New York Times (see Figures 1 and 2) throughout the war, the anonymous author’s words suggest the inadequacy of the casualty list as a memorial to the dead due to the erasure of individuality through mere quantification of the dead, wounded, and missing. Given the casualty list’s failure to provide any satisfactory account of the lives or deaths of soldiers, the author concludes the article [End Page 49] by asking: “Who, untrammeled by precedents, shall write us such a history?”1 As careful study of a large archive of periodicals, poetry collections, and other print sources from the Civil War has revealed, this very question was one that animated a significant number of other wartime writers from both the North and South as well. In fact, as I argue in this essay, the author of “Unrecorded Heroes” addresses concerns that were at the heart of a remarkable number of poems written and published during or shortly after the war. A wide variety of poets including Herman Melville but also lesser known popular poets used the topic of the casualty list to reflect on the perceived contrast between war as represented textually and war as experienced emotionally by individuals. As a growing preoccupation with the quantitative assessment of the war’s human cost drove Americans to count the dead and missing, the casualty list came to assume a central importance in their lives, but also, as the texts discussed here illustrate, in the literary representation of the civilian experience of the war. In the course of the Civil War, the unexpectedly high—and ever rising—number of casualties increasingly made government and military leaders turn to statistics and other means of quantifying their losses as well as those troops that remained. Commanders in both the Union and Confederate armies were required to keep and submit lists of the wounded, killed, captured, and missing to military leaders. In addition, many officers and enlisted men on either side of the conflict created similar lists for their regiments or companies and sent them to their families and local newspaper at home, which might then be circulated and reprinted in other newspapers or on bulletin boards as official casualty lists. Often compiled hastily and based on partial or faulty information, many of these lists were unreliable, and yet, as Drew Gilpin Faust explains, the “specificity, rather than the accuracy, of these totals attracted Americans seeking consolation in the seemingly comprehensive and comprehensible character of numbers.” Counting the dead and missing at least meant keeping some form of record.2 However, as many Americans keenly felt during and after the war, it was an [End Page 50] imperfect record that threatened to substitute numbers for human faces and lives. Impressed by the incongruity between human lives and numbers, and feeling a need for alternatives to the history of the war presented by these...

Sympathy for the ‘devil’? Voting for populists in the 2006 and 2010 Dutch general elections

What motivations do voters have to vote for populist parties? How do their motivations differ from those of voters for mainstream parties? Analyzing new empirical material – the Dutch elections of 2006 and 2010 – we demonstrate that policy preferences, protest attitudes and evaluations of party leaders are important reasons to vote for populist parties. Yet only protest attitudes distinguish voters for populist parties from voters for mainstream parties; evaluations of party leaders turn out to be equally important for both. We theorize how protest attitudes and party leader evaluations overlap and employ an exploratory simulation technique to test this. We find that populist parties differ strongly from each other with regard to the specific patchwork of motivations of their voters.

AIDS NGOS and corruption in Nigeria

Using two ethnographic case studies, the intersecting dynamics of inequality, morality, and corruption are examined as they play out in Nigerian AIDS NGOs. To the Nigerian public, local AIDS organizations are widely seen as conduits for corruption. But local opinions of particular NGOs and their leaders turn less on whether donor resources were misused and more on the ways that people who accumulate the benefits of corruption use them socially. Nevertheless, discontent swirls about corruption in general, a fact that suggests a gradual change in people's understandings of the processes that produce inequality in Nigeria.

Text-mining the voice of the people

Statistical techniques help public leaders turn text in unstructured citizen feedback into responsive e-democracy.

BIG GUNS TARGET GLOBAL WARMING

WORLD LEADERS turn their attention to climate change this week in two meetings that could give an important push to talks that are supposed to culminate in a new global climate deal this December. On Sept. 22, more than 100 world leaders are expected at United Nations headquarters in New York City for the first of the two meetings, the Summit on Climate Change. The second is a meeting of financial officials from the world’s largest economies, dubbed the Group of 20 (G-20). It will take place on Sept. 24 and 25 in Pittsburgh. The two gatherings will provide President Barack Obama with his first opportunities to help shape international policies on human-induced global warming. He will speak at the UN summit and is hosting the G-20 gathering. At the summit, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is calling heads of governments together for a day of intensive discussions. Ban says he wants them to “mobilize the ...

Calculated Risks: Why Civic Leaders (Re)Turn to Politics

Existing conceptualizations of civil society often emphasize its distinction from political institutions and individuals. This article argues for a systematic review of the relationships between civic and political leaders in Latin America, since many civic leaders turn (or return) to political activities in order to carry out local work better. There exist a variety of nuanced relationships between the civil and the political realms. Examples from civil–political relationships in the Dominican Republic in 1999 illustrate this variety of alliances between civic leaders and political parties and demonstrate that they are not necessarily harmful to the democratic order.

Moral Leadership in a Postmodern World

This paper examines the gap between moral purpose and moral performance as a problem created in part by the alienation of spirituality from civic life. We are a nation ofprivatized morality that places corporate and civic leaders in a labyrinth of uncertainty when they try to establish a moral foundation for actions and decisions affecting the public interest. This uncertainty is compounded by an Enlightenment tradition of modern secular pluralism privileging rational discourse as the vehicle of public moral sentiment. In this longstanding intellectual tradition, reason is the highest good (Plato, Aristotle), the defining,feature of human subjectivity (Descartes), the foundation of human freedom (Kant, Hegel, Locke), and the path to moral truth (Kant). Although much of the intellectual, social, economic, and political energy of the last century has challenged the totalizing assumptions embedded in this tradition (Marx, Foucault, et alia), qualities of neutrality, objectivity, and universality remain as privileged values influencing cultural practices of morality and leadership. Leaders turn to reason, with its assumed qualities of tolerance and respect, in the attempt to cultivate organizational cultures of moral clarity, accountability, and trust without violating the intellectual and spiritual freedom of the individuals and groups who constitute the organizational culture. The problem with this approach is that moral solidarity - and, for that matter, genuine tolerance and respect -- are not a product of the intellect; they are a creation of the human spirit. In the secular tradition, spirituality is a private pursuit with no legitimate role in the public domain. This paper introduces a framework, the Moral Compass, as a possible approach for creating moral solidarity. The Moral Compass creates a conceptual framework and terminology the enables people to engage in meaningful, authentic moral dialogue and discernment while remaining anchored in the their unique moral traditions.

The Four I's of Police Leadership: A Case Study Heuristic

In this paper we attempt to shed light on police leadership by telling the story of leadership at a particular Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) detachment. The case study is based upon interviews with 28 police officers and participant observations at the case site. The framework provided by transformational leadership theory proved meaningful in describing police leadership within a convenient heuristic comprised of four I's: individualised consideration, idealised influence, inspirational motivation, and intellectual stimulation. We concluded that transformational leaders have particular relational strengths that serve to elevate levels of commitment, work satisfaction, and motivation. The paper also points out that transformational leaders turn constraints into opportunities in the pursuit of their shared vision. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Management Development

Clearly, both the nurse executive and nurse manager roles are becoming more complex. I feel an enthusiasm by the professionals in those positions to pursue development activities that will help them do their jobs better and with less discomfort. Nurse executives obviously know the power of combining knowledge with experience. How do the different leadership and management development needs identified by these NE fit with your organization's needs? What is the content in your leadership and management development programs? Are your programs meeting the real needs of your executive and management-level staff? One way to find out is to do a simple survey. Today, nurse executives are responsible and accountable for challenges we never considered possible, even a few years ago. But along with the new challenges came the flexibility and positive attitudes of NEs to respond to changes and acquire new skills such as cost accounting, computers, or marketing. It's this type of proactive thinking that helps nurse leaders turn problems into opportunities and their situations into success stories.