Leadership: What’s all the fuss about (and what does all the hype really deliver)?

Abstract

Attaining a leadership role in anything – be it in the local sports club through to being the leader of a country, is generally viewed as an achievement and even as aspirational. Taking on or being offered a leadership role is generally associated with recognition of ability and with enhanced social status (and, if in a paid role, often with increased financial rewards). Within the world of work, upward progression into a supervisory and then into managerial positions is equated with assuming greater and greater leadership roles. Leadership positions may indeed be an aspiration of many but, as far as day-to-day work goes, many of us are happy to ask nothing more than having a have good manager. Good leadership is also something many of us aspire to experience – but sadly, also something we often have very little personal experience of in our own working lives. This gap or disconnect between theory and the reality of working life seems very odd given the vast resources given over to the field. For instance, most management schools not only teach leadership at the individual course level but also develop whole programs around it. Most also offer inspiring tales of their graduates who have gone on to key leadership roles. While leadership is very much a ‘bread and butter’ issue for the education sector a critical question seems to be ‘where is the synthesis between the efforts of the academic world and what is being put into practice?’ The eight papers we present in this first issue of Journal of Management and Organization (JMO) for 2018 take a variety of perspectives to offer insight into some answers to this question. We begin with Mieke Audenaert and Adelien Decramers’ investigation of the circumstances under which empowering leadership fosters creative performance from employees. Their study focused on a three-way interaction of empowering leadership, problem-solving demands and creative personality. While the results appear deceptively simple (with less creative employees in jobs requiring high problem-solving demands particularly benefiting from an empowering leadership style), the paper provides for practitioner insight in the way it identifies the nuanced interplay between the contextual factors of the organization and how these interact with the personal factors of both leader and follower. Our second paper provides another perspective to the examination of creativity to examine how leadership creates organizational value. In their paper Eldad Kollenscher, Micha Popper and Boaz Ronen deconstruct the main approaches to leadership to reveal how the traditional dichotomy of a macro–micropolarization of major leadership theories has overlooked important meso perspective processes. The authors suggest that attention to issues such as structuring will allow leaders to produce greater and more sustained organizational outcomes. The integrative theoretical framework they provide offers a unified model of corporate leadership crying out for some avid reader to pick up and test! The practical implications of testing theory in real-world settings is a task taken up with some passion in the next few papers published in this issue. Our third contribution is ‘When leadership elicits voice’ by authors Chang-Wook Jeung and Hea Jun Yoon and this paper examines the influence of humble and empowering leader behaviors on the prosocial voice of subordinates. Drawing on the views of over 300 employees of a Korean business conglomerate, the results find that both humble and empowering leadership positively influence the prosocial voice of subordinates. The role of psychological empowerment also emerges as an important moderating variable – a result that ties on well with Audenaert and Decramers’ paper on empowering leadership fostering employee creativity.