Leadership

This paper addresses the changing leadership task associated with a new agenda about the leadership of place. The shifting development context for cities and regions — including the emergence of the creative city and the knowledge-based region — places a renewed emphasis on the importance of interdisciplinary processes that stimulate the creation and the exploitation of knowledge. Consequently there is a requirement for an approach to the leadership of processes of collaborative learning and `associational'working. There is, however, a general lack of alignment of the literature on leadership, place-shaping and the stimulation of the knowledge-based economy. This article refers to the existing leadership literature and draws upon research related to economic development policy to initiate a discussion about the new leadership of place. It presents a rationale and outlines an initial argument for a more comprehensive approach to the leadership of place that takes account of the paradigm shift occurring in urban and regional studies.

The notion that leadership involves performance is not new, but there has been little detailed exploration of the implications of theories of performance for contemporary leadership practice. This article differentiates between leadership `is' performance and leadership `as 'performance as one means of investigating contemporary leadership. We suggest that this distinction allows for more sustainable accounts of the relationships between leaders, followers and the institutional settings within which they are generated and, consequently, the spaces in which there is potential for change to occur. The article argues that such insights may be made by combining ideas derived from writers on performance studies and performativity with new-institutionalist theory, the latter emphasising the crucial role of context in shaping the behaviour of leaders, so that their agency is always situated in specific settings.

The principles of selection of national candidates and contenders for political leadership are becoming increasingly standardised in Western contemporary democracies, which have been affected by two widespread processes: first, the growth of mass political communication via the electronic media; and second, the increasing deficit of perceived legitimacy of traditional representative institutions. After analysing such processes, this article draws attention to their standardising effects on the images of contemporary leaders. These are analysed in terms of three main elements: image traits, image types, and `vision'. Presenting and developing the notion of `valence image'as the most important dimension of a political leader's image, the article posits that two sets of `valence' image traits (`effectiveness' and `trustworthiness'), four image ideal-types (the `Outsider', the `Strong Leader', the `Everyday Man', the `Post-ideological'), as well as the presence of a consensual `vision' of the country have become the essential and standard prerequisites for access to contemporary political leadership.

This article critically evaluates the GLOBE project as an example of existing cross-cultural studies into leadership, recognising the project's value in communicating leadership differences across countries and summarising its methodological limitations. It is suggested that a dynamic and interactive approach is needed to overcome the shortfalls of the GLOBE project. Ailon-Souday and Kunda's (2003) work points the way towards such an approach, and it is the contribution of this article to apply this approach to the relationship between cultural context and leadership in the German and UK chemical industry. Analyses of a mixed methods data set support the theoretical arguments for the dynamic nature of different contexts such as national, organisational, hierarchical and departmental and the importance of this interaction for individual participants'understanding of leadership. Implications are drawn for the development of global managers in light of these new perspectives on the interaction of cultural context and leadership.

In this article we discuss individual implicit theories of how positive and negative organizing unfold. The discussion is grounded in data collected from 89 individuals working in different organizational contexts. An inductive logic was followed, based on critical incidents of positive and negative processes and outcomes presented by participants, according to how they viewed their professional situation. Through a dialectical process of analysis, we extracted six dimensions that were present in different combinations among narratives provided by the participants: recognition/indifference, communication/silence, interaction/separation, confidence/ distrust, loyalty/betrayal, and organizational transparency/organizational secrecy. We then analysed how these dimensions fit together and discovered that they could be organized around four major patterns combining the clarity/secrecy of organizational rules and the considerate/detached behavior of leaders. We assert that positive leaders are essential in the creation of patterns of organizing, regardless of the features of the external context.

This article aims at analyzing the content and structure of managers' conceptions of negative leadership. Using semi-structured interviews, 42 managers were asked about their conceptions of negative leadership, its antecedents and consequences. Results show that the concept of negative leadership is associated with eight behavioural categories: insincere, despotic, exploitative, restrictive, failed, laissez-faire, and active- and passive-avoiding leadership. Negative leadership was causally attributed to the environment of the leader, especially the followers, the immediate working field, as well as organizational processes, structures, and resources were seen as potential sources for negative leadership. The main factors regarded as its consequences included negative follower feelings and attitudes, destructive follower behaviour, and devastating organizational results. An analysis of the relationship between the leadership categories revealed two underlying dimensions of human- versus task-orientation and passive versus active behaviour. Limitations of the present approach, implications for future research and organizational practice are discussed.