Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies

The study of character is a legitimate and beneficial topic for organizational analysis. Through the lens of character and character-based leadership, and incorporating the 3-H (“head,” “heart,” and “hands”) approach to knowledge generation and dissemination, my reflections are provided to engage the Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies readership on how character can be used to provide our students as well as ourselves with a more meaningful business education experience.

Luthans, Youssef, Sweetman, and Harms proposed a holistic approach to psychological capital that involves examining psychological capital and its effects across multiple life domains, including work, relationships, and health. This article focuses on the effects of psychological capital on objective health outcomes. Using data from a sample of 1,889 U.S. Army soldiers, we demonstrate that soldiers with higher levels of psychological capital prior to deployment were less likely to receive diagnoses for mental health problems and substance abuse postdeployment. In addition, the effects of psychological capital on mental health diagnoses were mediated by soldiers’ overall health perceptions.

To advance research on how leaders influence followers and organizational performance, we proposed and tested a multilevel mediation model whereby authentic leaders influence follower fairness perceptions and create a fair climate, which in turn relates to subordinate well-being, turnover intention, and organizational commitment. Survey data from 187 employees, clustered under 37 leaders, were tested using a multilevel structural equation modeling approach. Results show that authentic leaders relate to follower outcomes in part through directly relating to subordinates’ perceptions of justice and justice climate. Implications include development of authentic leadership as an actionable strategy for bolstering followers’ well-being and performance.

This article reports the results from two studies (N = 233 and 161) on the role of self-leadership and psychological empowerment in linking empowering leadership to subordinates’ job satisfaction, work effort, and creativity. In addition, the studies investigated self-leadership as a mediator between empowering leadership and psychological empowerment. Results from structural equation modeling indicated that empowering leadership positively affects psychological empowerment both directly and indirectly, through self-leadership. Psychological empowerment influences both job satisfaction and work effort but not creativity, whereas self-leadership influences work effort and creativity but not job satisfaction. The article discusses the implications of these findings.

Shared leadership is considered a promising concept that meets the increased complexity of working life. Researchers and practitioners therefore need to know which factors might advance the development of shared leadership. Contributing to the yet limited amount of empirical research on shared leadership antecedents, this study investigates the impact of variables from different types of antecedents suggested in literature (i.e., intrinsic and extrinsic facilitators and vertical leadership). It relies on data from 328 team members nested in 67 work teams and their respective team leaders. Multilevel analyses confirmed that each team member’s perceptions of psychological empowerment as an intrinsic factor, and perceptions of being fairly rewarded as extrinsic factor, were associated with shared leadership. At the team level, the team leader’s behavior had differential effects on shared leadership within the team: Team members seem to adopt leadership behavior demonstrated by their team leader only as long as they perceive this team leader to be prototypical of the team. Results provide conclusions for practitioners and indicate starting points for future empirical research.

The current study aims to investigate the effects of cognitive and affective conflict on two important attributes of perceived strategic decision effectiveness: perceived strategic decision quality and commitment. Specifically, we identify cognitive conflict as a nonlinear phenomenon and test whether the presence of an organizational crisis alters the relationship between conflict types (cognitive and affective) and perceived decision quality and commitment. Our analysis of data from 264 executives comprising a total of 64 strategic decision-making (SDM) teams indicates that the effect of cognitive conflict on perceived strategic decision outcomes is, in fact, nonlinear. Furthermore, the findings of the study also revealed that organizational crisis is a significant moderator of the relationship between both level of cognitive and affective conflict and perceived strategic decision quality. These results help clarify the mixed findings about the effects of cognitive conflict within SDM teams and provide some insight on how SDM teams can maximize conflict in the decision-making process, without incurring its costs. More important, our findings indicate that high crisis contexts tend to lessen the influence of both cognitive and affective conflict on perceived strategic decision quality, suggesting that intrateam conflict dynamics among top management teams to some extent could be superseded by the urgent need for prompt decision making and collaboration. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

This research reports on the effects of scenario planning on participant perceptions of organizational creative climate. Participants from scenario planning projects in four different organizations were asked to contribute to the study as well as participants from four similar organizations that did not receive scenario planning. The scenario work took place over the course of 3 months and data were collected as pre- and posttests. Comparisons were made that suggest some significant changes over the course of the intervention period for the intervention group, but not for the comparison group. Results and limitations are discussed in detail and recommendations for future research are provided.