Management & Organizational Development

Northeastern University and the University of Wyoming are investigating whether the participation of sophomores (with particular attention to women) in formal undergraduate engineering programs that provide work experiences while enrolled (e.g., cooperative education and internships) is related to enhanced self-efficacy. While self-esteem is a global concept and self-efficacy refers to confidence about a particular content area or set of tasks, general self-esteem tends to be related to an individual's feelings of self-efficacy. Research suggests that decreased self-esteem and self-efficacy of women in engineering majors are significant obstacles to persistence. Indeed, consistent findings reported through the Assessing Women in Engineering Project have reported that the persistence of women in engineering is highly related to efficacy. Thus, this study was designed to add to the body of literature on the retention of women in undergraduate engineering.

This article endeavors to develop an emerging paradigm of leadership for our organizations known as "leaderful practice." Leaderful practice constitutes a direct challenge to the conventional view of leadership as "being out in front. " It is submitted that in the 21st Century organization, everyone will need to share the experience of serving as a leader, not sequentially, but concurrently and collectively. In other words, leaders need to co-exist at the same time and all together. In addition, each member of an organization will be encouraged to make a unique contribution to its growth, both independently and interdependently with others. In this sense, organizational members will aspire to become fervently collaborative, which in turn is derived from their compassion toward other human beings. Their well-developed sense of self permits them to develop a deep consideration of others. Thus, the article makes the case that the only possible way to lead ourselves out of trouble in management is to become mutual and to share leadership.

An experiential exercise is presented to align emotions education and practice with stateof-the-art emotions research. Starting with a contextualization of how emotions have been used in management education and practice, a disconnect is revealed between these domains and current research. In particular, academic applications have often embraced the emotions approach espoused by advocates of emotional intelligence and emotional labor, resulting in emotions being seen as something to be cognitized and controlled.

In this paper a new role for managers is advocated to create conditions for genuine collaborative engagement in Twenty-First Century organizations. The new role is as a facilitator of emancipatory dialogue, a discourse among parties that can lead to mutual learning, deep understanding and insight, and collaborative consciousness and action. The facilitator role is described and illustrated in the article as a means to encourage free expression and inquiry, but the article also warns about the imposition of coercive norms within the work group that might be externally imposed or even self-imposed. As managers promote an emancipatory form of dialogic engagement, conversations ensue that bring out people’s individual and collective wisdom, creativity, and dignity.

This article takes up an important question that has puzzled learning theorists in the critical tradition, namely, are the dialogic practices of emancipatory discourse sufficient to change oppressive conditions in the power structure of the modern organization? In other words, can critical dialogic processes change the social order to close the gap between a privileged class of managers and workers, or do we require class struggle and structural reform? By elaborating on such methods as dialogue, public reflection and action science, this article attempts to make the case that marginalized groups in society might find their voice in projects that are intentionally contextualized and publicly reflective. These methods have found applications in some illustrated critical pedagogies, although not without strain induced from conventional institutions. The article concludes with an enumeration of some conditions under which emancipatory discourse and liberationist struggle may coincide.

Readers might be wondering whether and how work-based learning connects to leadership. In this article, after defining how I view work-based learning, I will demonstrate that it impacts, indeed changes, leadership, but it does so by helping to produce a different form of leadership -a shared leadership or "leaderful" practice. Once explaining the leaderful approach, I will illustrate how work-based learning affects its four critical tenets.

This article has the aim of considering whether managerial control, no matter its form, has outlived, its usefulness in postbureaucratic society, and if so, whether it can be replaced by a more emancipatory discourse among local practitioners as they confront the immanent requirements of social interaction within their own practices. The article initially reviews the limitations of bureaucratic control and considers postbureaucratic or “soft” alternatives as sources of empowerment. Seen as ideals, postbureaucratic options are not thought to overturn the imposition of control in organizing, but the relocation of the positioning of work to the practice setting offers management a new role as the facilitator of the critical discourse required to sustain and enhance local activity.

This article begins with the presumption that action learning has not made as deep an impact in promoting participatory social change as its supporters may have hoped for, but nor has its cousin action modalities, such as action research and action science. These action strategies have evolved separately along distinct traditions and, rather than focus on their commonalities, their proponents have tended to cite their differences from one another. As a result, they have seldom stood together to advocate for their shared epistemology based on practice as the fundamental unit of analysis. Accordingly, after briefly summarizing the history and differences among these action modalities, this article will focus on their potential confederation. It cites ten unifying elements that may construct an agenda characterized by the value of learners collectively reflecting on planned engagements that can not only expand but can create knowledge while at the same time serving to improve practice.

Consistent with views that see leadership emerging from social practices rather than from the external mind, this paper contributes to an emerging movement in leadership studies known as ‘leadership-as-practice’ (L-A-P). This movement looks for leadership in its music and activity rather than in the traits and heroics of individual actors. The article distinguishes L-A-P from the individualistic approach by explaining its intersection with its dualistic counterpart, theory; with the agency–structure problem; and with relationality and meaning in organizations. It calls for
a modification in classic approaches to research methodology and to leadership development. L-A-P is advised to consider its natural affinity with democratic participation through leaderful practices that systematically privilege the co-creation of social organization.

Purpose – To make the case, firstly, that democratic leadership, referred to as “leaderful practice,” should be the fundamental form of leadership that characterizes participatory organizational change.  The parties affected by change are those engaged who seek to reflect upon their own tacit collective practices.  Their mode of communication is a dialogue or deliberation that involves the responsible parties to decision making without privileging particular stakeholders because of their status or authority.  Thus, it is purported, secondly, that the three practice elements of democratic leadership, dialogue, and deliberation should be included among the bedrock principles of participatory organizational change.

Design/methodology/approach – A critical conceptual examination is undertaken of the contribution of three alternative literature streams – leaderful practice, dialogue, deliberation – to participatory organizational change.

Findings –Dialogue, an authentic exchange between people, and its decision-making cousin, deliberation, can become the communication modes associated with participatory organizational change.  They are each characterized by equality of participation; thus they are inherently democratic processes that should substitute for top-down or monologic discourses which are inimical to participatory practice. 

Practical implications – If OD and comparable participatory change processes claim at their core to be democratic processes, their exponents would endorse a leadership and communication that would preferably match their value system.  There would be a shared communication by all those who are involved in the change activity, wherever they may sit within the organizational bureaucracy.  The communication would become a multiple-party reflective conversation that is captured in the mode called dialogue.

Originality/Value – By focusing on critical reflection, the dialogic perspective with its emancipatory interest challenges common sense assumptions that are likely to be historical and cultural as psychological.  Ultimately, dialogue supports democratic leadership at a core interpersonal level in which participants learn to engage through a reflective practice that allows them to observe and experiment with their own collective tacit processes in action.

This paper takes a whimsical look at the state of pedagogical delivery in management education over the last 40 years, and concludes that the long tradition of what the author refers to “spoon-feeding in management education” is unlikely to end anytime soon. His case is built on neo-institutional theory which posits that the pressures to conform to standardized classroom teaching are highly resistant based on deep-seated and long-standing consensual beliefs and traditions. The principal alternative of employing practice-based and critical approaches has been diluted in favor of the promotion of reductionist and mythological active learning strategies which, though useful, are unlikely to lead to the acquisition of prudential wisdom.

Can the teaching of leadership transform practice? What concepts and modalities are best suited to do so? This paper builds on Meyer and Land‟s (2003) theory of threshold concepts to examine how students learn and experience leadership as a complex and multi-faceted practice. Threshold concepts are conceptual gateways, opening up new and previously inaccessible ways of thinking about a field. In an ethnographic account using participant observation, analysis of student papers, and in-depth interviews, the authors identified two threshold concepts that had a transformational impact on students: (i) situational leadership and (ii) shared leadership. In addition, they found three modalities that supported the learning of threshold concepts: (i) variation, (ii) enactment, and (iii) reflection. The paper concludes by citing the broader implications for the research and teaching of leadership practice.

In this article, the author introduces the leadership approach known as “leaderful practice,” an alternative to the traditional trait-based approach of individual leadership. Leaderful practice is shown to sustain an ethical infrastructure based on democratic principles. It is democracy not in its representative sense, however, but in its endorsement of public engagement of all those affected by the activity and decision at hand. It is likewise more concerned with the subjective and discourse ethics of individuals, facing at times an obstinate organization, than with an organization or business ethics, seeking to manage the ethical behavior of organizational members.
The article makes the ethical case for leaderful practice based on two paramount ethical behaviors: dialogue and meaning making, and on three virtues: authenticity, humility, and dignity. It also entertains the prospect of leaderful ethics having an impact on sustainability. In particular, dialogue as the cornerstone of communicative action within leaderful practice not only pays heed to emancipatory processes but also attends to the practice under consideration to preserve a sustainable future.

This article takes the view that formal educational programs often miss opportunities to use the rich experiences of working managers to produce both learning and knowledge. Two alternative pedagogical approaches, action learning and action research, are proposed as contributing to management education by their respective capabilities of generating practical learning and producing actionable knowledge. These approaches are compared with one another and with conventional classroom methodology using a new framework based on
voice, level, form, and time.

Fearing that our over-reliance on an individual, heroic model of leadership will only continue to dampen the energy and creativity of people in our organizations and communities, this essay proposes a practice perspective of leadership based on a collaborative agency mobilized through engaged social interaction.
After briefly reviewing the emerging practice tradition in leadership studies, the article turns to the inseparable connection between leadership and agency and discusses how structure may pacify but, under dialogic conditions, release agency. Acknowledging the cultural constraints against collaborative agency, the
account affirms its potential realization through interpersonal interaction and sociality. Specific leadership activities associated with collaborative agency and their conditions are illustrated. The paper concludes by showing how the collaborative agentic model might produce a more sustainable future for our world while
suggesting avenues for future research of a collective rather than a personal approach to leadership.