Challenges in Leadership: Part 3 of 3

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“In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.” —Thomas Jefferson

We hope you’ve enjoyed our series on the challenges of leadership. Today’s post is all about leadership and ethics — and with Corporate Compliance and Ethics Week coming up next Monday, be sure to tune in for more related research and insights.

In their article “The Role of Moral Values in Instigating Morally Responsible Decisions” (Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, March 2013), Richard P. Bagozzi, Leslie E. Sekerka, Vanessa Hill, and Francesco Sguera warn of “the distance between espoused values and values in action” in leaders that can block “the virtuous self”:

If we want leaders to model this competency and build ethical organizations, we must provide them with the tools to understand their values at a root level and how to act accordingly. Putting expectations into action for virtuous human systems means helping people understand how their values may serve as guides to behavioral choices. Without focused awareness and commitment to right action, these values can dissipate. [Read more]

In “Someone to Look Up To: Executive-Follower Ethical Reasoning and Perceptions of Ethical Leadership” (Journal of Management, March 2013), Jennifer Jordan, Michael E. Brown, Linda K. Treviño, and Sydney Finkelstein look into what makes ethical leaders tick:

Despite a business environment that highlights the importance of executives’ ethical leadership, the individual antecedents of ethical leadership remain largely unknown. In this study, the authors propose that follower perceptions of ethical leadership depend on the executive leader’s cognitive moral development (CMD) and, more importantly, on the relationship between executive leader and follower CMD. [Read more]

And in his article “Leading questions: Leadership, ethics, and administrative evil” (Leadership, May 2012), George E. Reed warns of modern organizations’ “diffusion of information” and “fragmentation of responsibility,” noting:

The result is the very real possibility that well-intentioned people who conscientiously perform their jobs will unintentionally participate in systems and processes that produce great harm. Some may not even be aware that they are doing anything wrong; they certainly intend no great harm, and furthermore, those around them would likely agree at the time that they are simply acting in consonance with accepted professional roles and practices. They may also play a crucial part in a larger process that perpetrates harm. [Read more]

Challenges in Leadership: Part 2 of 3

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“Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.” —John C. Maxwell (author, speaker, and pastor)

In 1978, James MacGregor Burns defined transformational leaders as those “who engaged with their followers in such a way that each was raised to a higher level of morality and motivation.” How are employee engagement and leadership related? Does innovation and creativity increase when employees feel they can personally identify with their leader? How can leaders meet the challenge of enhancing their employees’ well-being as well as their performance on the job?

In their article “Examining the Role of Personal Identification With the Leader in Leadership Effectiveness: A Partial Nomological Network” (Group & Organization Management, February 2013, Weichun Zhu, Gang Wang, Xiaoming Zheng, Taoxiong Liu, and Qing Miao found that:

…transformational leadership was positively related to personal identification with the leader, which was significantly associated with followers’ innovativeness, affective organizational commitment, and turnover intention. [Read more]

In “Employee Engagement and Leadership: Exploring the Convergence of Two Frameworks and Implications for Leadership Development in HRD” (Human Resource Development Review, June 2012), Brad Shuck and Ann Mogan Herd write:

…leadership starts with the self. Leaders who are looking to build engaging climates should be encouraged to develop in the four domains of emotional intelligence, especially the domain of self-awareness. As the foundational domain for which the other three are developed, self-awareness is the conceptual cornerstone of emotional intelligence and in many ways of leadership that promotes the development of engagement. [Read more]

And Fred Luthans, Carolyn M. Youssef, David S. Sweetman, and Peter D. Harms, in their paper “Meeting the Leadership Challenge of Employee Well-Being Through Relationship PsyCap and Health PsyCap” (Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies February 2013), write:

Increasing recognition is being given to the role that employee overall well-being plays in desired outcomes of today’s organizations. To help organizational leaders searching for understanding and answers, we propose that the positive core construct of psychological capital (or simply PsyCap), consisting of the positive psychological resources of hope, efficacy, resiliency, and optimism can be extended into the well-being domain. [Read more]

Challenges in Leadership: Part 1 of 3

Is a narcissistic boss good or bad for the company? (Narcissus, via Wikipedia)

Editor’s note: This week, we are pleased to present a three-part series highlighting current research on key challenges facing leaders in the workplace.

“The challenge of leadership is to be strong, but not rude; be kind, but not weak; be bold, but not bully; be thoughtful, but not lazy; be humble, but not timid; be proud, but not arrogant; have humor, but without folly.” —Jim Rohn (American entrepreneur, author and motivational speaker)

Leaders are only human–and some of the most successful bosses out there can be arrogant, egotistical, and manipulative. Just how does this self-serving behavior positively or negatively affect employees, managers, and organizations?

In their award-winning article “Executive Personality, Capability Cues, and Risk Taking: How Narcissistic CEOs React to Their Successes and Stumbles”  (Administrative Science Quarterly, June 2011), Arijit Chatterjee and Donald C. Hambrick find that narcissistic bosses may be more effective risk-takers:

At the core of an executive’s subjective assessment of risk is his or her sense of confidence. Compared with gamblers, who cannot influence whether their bets will work out, business executives may believe that their personal talents, as well as the capabilities of their organizations, can greatly affect whether their risky initiatives will bear fruit. [Read more]

Update: Wolf-Christian Gerstner, Andreas König, Albrecht Enders, and Donald C. Hambrick have a brand-new article in ASQ, “CEO Narcissism, Audience Engagement, and Organizational Adoption of Technological Discontinuities,” which highlights “the role of narcissism in the context of radical organizational change, the influence of audience engagement on executive behavior, and the effect of executive personality on managerial attention.” Click here to read the article in ASQ’s OnlineFirst section.

On the other hand, Wayne A. Hochwarter and Katina W. Thompson in their article  “Mirror, mirror on my boss’s wall: Engaged enactment’s moderating role on the relationship between perceived narcissistic supervision and work outcomes” (Human Relations, March 2012) document the threats that selfish bosses pose to employee well-being:

Defined as an ego-defensive response to interruptions in goal attainment (Rosenzweig, 1944), frustration has been identified as an outcome of threatening social cues including perceived politics (Rosen et al., 2009), injustice (Lillis et al., 2007), and coworker counterproductive work behaviors (Fox and Spector, 1999). Supervisor ego-nurturing behavior, when persistent and focused, provokes frustration because it introduces bias that affects subsequent interactions and reward decisions (Emmons, 1984). [Read more]

And an article published this month in the Journal of Management’s OnlineFirst section by Frank D. Belschak, Deanne N. Den Hartog, and Karianne Kalshoven, “Leading Machiavellians: How to Translate Machiavellians’ Selfishness Into Pro-Organizational Behavior,” finds manipulative leaders may offer desirable results for organizations:

Machiavellians are said to be manipulative people who reduce the social capital of the organization. Yet some authors note that Machiavellians are also highly adaptive individuals who are able to contribute, cooperate, and use pro-social strategies when it is advantageous to them. Here we study whether transformational leader behavior can stimulate Machiavellian followers to engage in organizationally desirable behaviors such as challenging organizational citizenship behavior. [Read more]

Do you know a leader who is particularly self-interested or overly demanding? Does this serve to increase their leadership effectiveness, or does it do more harm than good?

What Makes High-Performance Organizations Tick?

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What are high performance work systems, and why do they matter to human resource researchers and practitioners today? A new article in the Journal of Management takes a closer look:

High Performance Work Systems are designed to enhance organizational performance by improving employee capability, commitment, and productivity. Yet there is very little consensus about the structure of these systems and the practices therein. The lack of structure may be inhibiting the growth of knowledge in this field and the degree to which organizations adopt these systems.

Read “A High Performance Work Practices Taxonomy: Integrating the Literature and Directing Future Research” by Richard A. Posthuma of the University of Texas at El Paso, Michael C. Campion of the University of South Carolina, and Malika Masimova and Michael A. Campion, both of Purdue University, published in the Journal of Management.

To help further the dialogue on this important topic, SAGE is pleased to open access to key articles on high performance work systems through April 11:

“Enriched job design, high involvement management and organizational performance: The mediating roles of job satisfaction and well-being,” published in Human Relations by Stephen Wood of the University of Leicester, UK; Marc Van Veldhoven and Marcel Croon, both of Tilburg University, The Netherlands; and Lilian M de Menezes of Cass Business School, City University London, UK

“Employee responses to ‘high performance work system’ practices: an empirical test of the disciplined worker thesis,” published in Work, Employment & Society by Bill Harley and Leisa Sargent, both of the University of Melbourne, and Belinda Allen of Monash University

“High-Performance Work Systems and Job Control: Consequences for Anxiety, Role Overload, and Turnover Intentions,” published in the Journal of Management by Jaclyn M. Jensen of George Washington University, Pankaj C. Patel of Ball State University, and Jake G. Messersmith of the University of Nebraska-Kearney

“Entrepreneurial orientation and performance in young firms: The role of human resource management,” published in the International Small Business Journal by Jake G. Messersmith of the University of Nebraska at Kearney and William J. Wales of James Madison University

“Founding-Family Ownership and Firm Performance The Role of High-Performance Work Systems,” published in Family Business Review by Chiung-Wen Tsao of Tajen University and Shyh-Jer Chen, Chiou-Shiu Lin, and William Hyde of  National Sun Yat-Sen University

“Employment Modes, High-Performance Work Practices, and Organizational Performance in the Hospitality Industry,” published in Cornell Hospitality Quarterly by Tsai Cheng-Hua of National Cheng Kung University, Chen Shyh-Jer of National Sun Yat-Sen University, and Fang Shih-Chien of National Cheng Kung University

3 Ways to Increase Your Published Article’s Visibility Online

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Editor’s note: This article was originally published on SAGE Connection.

As the academic and business worlds increasingly move online, researchers, practitioners and students are plugging in to the social world of the Internet to find the scholarly material that they need in their work. Statistics show that 80 percent of professors have at least one social media account, and according to Pew Research, the number of online adults using Twitter is growing exponentially each year.

Many academics are extolling the virtues of blogging, too: as Martin Weller of the Open University in Britain noted in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “a blog post gets immediate reaction and can then be worked into a conference presentation, shared through SlideShare, or turned into a paper that is submitted to a journal.”

Our conclusion from these findings: If you want your published work to get maximum visibility, you need to get social. Still not convinced? Just look back at our recent post spotlighting Melissa Terras’s experiment for the LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog. Curious about social media’s potential impacts, she Tweeted and blogged about her own work, monitored the results and found that “the papers that were tweeted and blogged had at least more than 11 times the number of downloads than their sibling paper which was left to its own devices in the institutional repository.”

If you’re ready to give social media a chance, but not sure where to begin, you’ve come to the right place. Read on for three simple steps that will get you blogging and Tweeting today.

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• Go to blogger.com or wordpress.com and sign up for a free account. Pick a name for your blog that is descriptive, relevant to your community, and easy to remember.
• Start writing. Focus on your area of research and work that you have published, and link out to related articles or books in your field. Write about conferences at which you will be speaking and any hot topics that attendees are talking about.
• Keep your finger on the pulse. If you happen upon interesting articles or press coverage about your research area, blog about them. Share your insights, and ask your colleagues and co-researchers to guest-blog and stimulate debate.
• The more you write, the higher your page will appear in search engine results. This is especially important as researchers are increasingly using Google Scholar to find content.

For inspiration, check out this article from SAGE’s Social Science Space featuring Q&As with top academic bloggers. Still not sure how to get your blog up and running? SAGE can provide a blogging template and guidelines—contact us for more information.

2. Tweet

• If you are new to Twitter, go to www.twitter.com and choose a name and password. You will need to register with an email account, which will also notify you when users mention your account on the site.
• The name you choose should reflect how another user would search for you on Twitter. Be sure to write a short bio with keywords and add a URL and picture so people believe the account is real.
  

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• Tweets should be personal, not written in the style of a typical press release. Think more in terms of a quick snippet of information which will be suited to the 140 character limit. Remember, you are communicating directly with individuals who can respond to you immediately, and your responses to tweets should be personal as well.
• Engage! Monitor what others are saying on Twitter by searching and/or following, and re-tweet information that you think is interesting or useful to your network.

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3. Connect!

Social media is, in a word, social. To get optimum results, you need to share and engage with others in your network. Take a look at SAGE’s social media channels, where we can help cross-promote your content. Connect with us, post on our walls, and send us direct messages about your promotional efforts so we can re-post, re-Tweet, and help spread the word! Please visit www.sagepub.com/social to view all our social media channels and connect with us today.

Family Business, Part 3 of 3

As we conclude our series on family business, we turn to a recent Journal of Management article entitled “The Adolescence of Family Firm Research: Taking Stock and Planning for the Future“:

Through its rapid growth during the past decade, family business research has reached its adolescence as a field of study, and family business scholars now regularly contribute interesting and thought-provoking work to top-tier management, entrepreneurship, and finance journals. In this review article, the authors seek to document the growing maturity of family business research and to promote its integration into broader streams of inquiry in the organizational sciences. To do so, the authors describe recent family business research that addresses two fundamental questions: “How do firms differ in terms of their financial performance?” and “How do institutional conditions moderate performance differences between firms?” Based on their review, the authors describe the past and potential future contributions of family business research and conclude that it holds great promise to “give back” and provide meaningful contributions to the general field of management.

Eric Gedajlovic of Simon Fraser University, Michael Carney of Concordia University, James J. Chrisman of Mississippi State University and the University of Alberta School of Business, and Franz W. Kellermanns of the University of Tennessee and WHU (Otto Beisheim School of Management) published the article in the July 2012 issue of the Journal of Management.

The 2012 FFI Global Conference kicks off today in Brussels. Even if you are not attending, you can still watch the conference live at FFI.org!

Stay up to date on the latest family business research: click here to receive customizable e-alerts from sagepub.com.

Family Business: Part 2 of 3

Welcome to part two of our series on family business. Today we congratulate two award winners who recently appeared on the Family Business Review podcast, which spotlights the latest research, developments and thought leaders in the field. Tune in or listen on iTunes as FBR Assistant Editor Karen Vinton of Montana State University talks with the authors about their findings–and gain some additional perspective from the Family Firm Institute (FFI) Practitioner blog below:

Dr. Cristina Bettinelli of the University of Bergamo in Italy discussed her article “Boards of Directors in Family Firms: An Exploratory Study of Structure and Group Process,” which was selected as the Best Article in FBR for 2011. It will be presented at the 2012 FFI Global Conference, which kicks off this Wednesday in Brussels. Click here for the podcast. From The Practitioner:

This research topic and Professor Bettinelli’s findings explore issues crucial to both family businesses and family business advisors. This article clearly demonstrates the important benefits that can be derived from having outside directors on a family business board, in particular the impact on board level processes that can enhance board effectiveness.This article represents a fine-grained extension of prior research into the composition and functioning of family business boards of directors with a particular focus on outside directors and group process. It tests hypotheses relating to board composition, expectations of effort required for deliberations, and the use of knowledge and skills of board members. It uses a multi-theoretical approach to shed new light on how best to configure BODs given the types of group process that are unique to a family business setting.

Dr. Jörn Block of the University of Trier in Germany discussed his article “How to Pay Nonfamily Managers in Large Family Firms: A Principal—Agent Model,” which was selected for honorable mention recognition as the journal’s best article of 2011. Click here for the podcast. From The Practitioner:

This article also explores a topic that is crucial to both family businesses and family business advisors:developing effective pay packages for non-family executives. Because the goals of family and non-family managers can differ, it is important to design pay packages that take into account those differences. The article draws on a well-rounded set of salient literature and is framed in terms of issues that are clearly relevant to the family business context. It represents a valuable extension of prior theorizing about agency and stewardship approaches to incentives, and short-term versus long-term decision criteria.

What are some additional family business-related topics that you’d like to see covered on Management INK? Let us know in the comments or send us an email.

Remember—even if you’re not in Brussels this week, you can still watch the 2012 FFI Global Conference live at FFI.org!

Family Business: Part 1 of 3

As the field of family business continues to grow, so does its influence on management research as a whole. As we recently reported, Family Business Review was singled out this year by Thomson Reuters as a “Rising Star” in the field of Economics & Business. As the 2012 FFI Global Conference prepares to kick off this Wednesday in Brussels, we’re proud to present a three-part series on this exciting field of study.

Today, we highlight its importance to entrepreneurship research with this video recently produced by the Academy of Management Entrepreneurship Division, in which Dean Shepherd, the Randall L. Tobias Chair in Entrepreneurial Leadership at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business, discusses his experience of learning through business failure when his own father had to close the family business. Watch the video by clicking here.

Not able to make it to Brussels for this week’s 2012 FFI Conference? You can watch it live via FFI.org:

For the first time this year, we will broadcast the keynote and selected sessions in real-time. Online participants will be able to watch the events live, give feedback and discuss with others via the Twitter and Facebook Streams. You will also be able to tweet your questions for the keynotes using the hashtag #FFIBrussels.

All sessions will be recorded and available to watch anytime following the live broadcast. Visit and bookmark www.ffi.org/livefrombrussels to watch sessions.

Enjoy selected editorials, review articles, and special issues as well as brand-new podcasts and more from Family Business Review. You can also submit a paper for the FBR special issue on social issues in the family enterprise; click here for more information.

Climate Change: Is It Too Late?

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Editor’s note: Dr. Thomas Sterner, Professor of Environmental Economics at the University of Gothenburg and Visiting Chief Economist at the Environmental Defense Fund, also co-authored the op-ed “Rio Isn’t All Lost” on June 18 in The New York Times, focusing on the “seeds of an energy revolution” that may help us solve the climate crisis.

***

Even before the Rio+20 Earth Summit ended on Friday, critics had deemed it a failure, calling it “too little, too late.” But a New York Times op-ed coauthored by top environmental leaders offers a different perspective:

Rio+20 is a catalyst. It is the starting point for change, not the finish line. It is a call to action for all of us who now realize that we can’t just rely on government negotiators or verbose and hyper-compromised documents to save our planet.

Today, we present a selection of articles offering good reasons to answer that call, along with strategies for moving forward in the race against climate change.

Mark C. J. Stoddart of the Memorial University of Newfoundland, D. B. Tindall of the University of British Columbia, and Kelly L. Greenfield of the Memorial University of Newfoundland published “‘Governments Have the Power’? Interpretations of Climate Change Responsibility and Solutions Among Canadian Environmentalists” in the March 2012 issue of Organization & Environment.

Cynthia E. Clark and Elise Perrault Crawford, both of Bentley University, published “Influencing Climate Change Policy: The Effect of Shareholder Pressure and Firm Environmental Performance” in the March 2012 issue of Business & Society.

Thomas Sterner of the University of Gothenburg, Maria Damon of New York University, Gunnar Köhlin of the University of Gothenburg, and Martine Visser of the University of Cape Town published “Capacity Building to Deal With Climate Challenges Today and in the Future” in the March 2012 issue of The Journal of Environment & Development.

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Risky Business: Does ERM Increase Firm Value?

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As JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon came under fire for the bank’s $2 billion trading loss, the critical issue of risk management again came to the forefront of business dialogue.

Against the backdrop of the global financial crisis, a study in the Journal of Accounting, Auditing & Finance (JAAF) looks at enterprise risk management (ERM), a rising but little-researched paradigm in global financial institutions–as well as in the government–to evaluate its effectiveness.

Michael K. McShane, Anil Nair, and Elzotbek Rustambekov, all of Old Dominion University, published “Does Enterprise Risk Management Increase Firm Value?” in the October 2011 issue of JAAF. Click here to view more articles in this issue.

The authors explain in the abstract:

Enterprise risk management (ERM) has emerged as a construct that ostensibly overcomes limitations of silo-based traditional risk management (TRM), yet little is known about its effectiveness. The scant research on the relationship between ERM and firm performance has offered mixed findings and has been limited by the lack of a suitable proxy for the degree of ERM implementation. Using Standard and Poor’s newly available risk management rating, the authors find evidence of a positive relationship between increasing levels of TRM capability and firm value but no additional increase in value for firms achieving a higher ERM rating. Considering these results, the authors suggest directions for future research.

To learn more about the Journal of Accounting, Auditing & Finance, please follow this link.

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