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To date, empirical research on shared leadership (SL) has been dominated by quantitative studies of antecedents and outcomes, frequently in simulated environments. Consequently, there have been few authentic accounts of how SL is practiced within organisational teams. Underpinned by shared leadership theory and leadership behaviour theory, this paper aims to provide a fine-grained view of the SL behaviours exhibited by team members over time, in five organisational teams in Ireland.

This longitudinal qualitative study uses critical incident technique, semi-structured interviews and participant diaries to explore SL behaviours emerging in five teams over time.

SL became widespread over time in each team, with almost all (96%) team members exhibiting SL behaviours. Ten different leadership behaviours were exhibited, indicating that SL permits a wide variety of leadership behaviours to be expressed. Some leadership functions were rarely or never fulfilled by team members (team composition, performance monitoring and resource allocation), suggesting that these leadership behaviours are not amenable to sharing.

This paper provides an insight into how SL could be used to increase the leadership capacity in team-based organisations.

This paper adds depth to the understanding of SL, revealing the specific behaviours underlying this approach, expanding our understanding of the micro-dynamics at play in SL processes.

Purpose—Joan Acker proposed her gendered theory of organization as a framework to analyze organizations and to understand how gender underlies organizational structure in such a way as to subordinate women. Much of the previous work that has utilized this framework has examined highly (male-) gendered organizations. This archival case study aims to use Acker’s framework to examine a purportedly female-gendered organization—the 1970s feminist organization, Stewardesses for Women’s Rights (SFWR).

Design/methodology/approach—Using these archived materials, this chapter uses a critical hermeneutic approach across Acker’s framework of gendered organization to make sense of the rise and fall of SFWR. The chapter discusses lessons learned from this short-lived organization.

Findings—The chapter finds that societal pressure and organizing women’s understanding of what is “real” and valued in an organization pushed them to create an organization that was as highly (male-) gendered as the organizations from which they were escaping. Many in the organization never saw SFWR as a “real” organization because of the underlying organizational logic that was directing what the organization should be. Even if the organization did, on the surface, look different than other explicitly male-gendered organizations, the same underlying organizational logic manifested itself in similar organizational structure.

Originality/value—This archival case study uses Acker’s framework to examine a purportedly female-gendered organization—the 1970s feminist organization SFWR and reveals lessons learned.

Joan Acker proposed her gendered theory of organization as a framework to analyze organizations and to understand how gender underlies organizational structure in such a way as to subordinate women. Much of the previous work that has utilized this framework has examined highly (male‐) gendered organizations. This archival case study aims to use Acker's framework to examine a purportedly female‐gendered organization – the 1970s feminist organization, Stewardesses for Women's Rights (SFWR).

Using these archived materials, this paper uses a critical hermeneutic approach across Acker's framework of gendered organization to make sense of the rise and fall of SFWR. The paper discusses lessons learned from this short‐lived organization.

The paper finds that societal pressure and organizing women's understanding of what is “real” and valued in an organization pushed them to create an organization that was as highly (male) gendered as the organizations from which they were escaping. Many in the organization never saw SFWR as a “real” organization because of the underlying organizational logic that was directing what the organization should be. Even if the organization did, on the surface, look different than other explicitly male‐gendered organizations, the same underlying organizational logic manifested itself in similar organizational structure.

This archival case study uses Acker's framework to examine a purportedly female‐gendered organization – the 1970s feminist organization SFWR and reveals lessons learned.

Miriam Adelman, who holds the M. Phil. in sociology from New York University and Doctorate in Human Sciences from Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, has been Professor of Sociology at the Universidade Federale do Paraná (UFPR), since 1992. She is responsible for initiating the first gender studies and research activities at that institution, as co-founder of its “Núcleo de Estudos de Gênero,” begun in 1994 and continuing today as the major institutional space for promoting women's and gender studies at the UFPR. In addition to current research and teaching in undergraduate and postgraduate Social Science and Sociology programs at the UFPR, she is also an active member of the Brazilian gender studies community and participates on the Editorial Board of the Revista de Estudos Feministas, one of Brazil's two major feminist academic journals. She has published numerous articles in scientific journals in Brazil and abroad, as well as book chapters on topics ranging from feminist theory, post-colonialism and contemporary sociology to women in sport and gender in film. She has one edited volume (Gênero Plural: um Debate Multi-disciplinar, 2002, Editora UFPR, with Celsi Bronstrup Silvestrin) and is currently organizing another, on gender representations in film.

Argues the case for lightening up in business, claiming that people who are internally focused and tense have little chance of turning their care and attention to customers. Provides many examples of how companies have used humour within their organizations, and turned it to their competitive value. Humour can make things more memorable, and puts things ‐ even problems and errors ‐ into a perspective where customers, and clients, will forgive. The payoff? If staff are excited about coming to work, it will show. “And people like to do business with people who like to do business.”

Changes in societal preferences can have a significant impact on the business strategy of companies. This paper aims to illustrate the utility of strategic alliances in channelizing societal preferences.

LEGO and its many strategic alliances are carefully examined to illustrate the need for considering strategic alliances from a societal preference perspective. LEGO’s strategic alliances are juxtaposed with two major societal trends of the past few decades, environmental movement and multiple efforts toward greater inclusivity.

The following important lessons are elaborated for helping business organizations pursuing strategic alliances: long-term orientation should not become an excuse for complacency, need for alignment of organizations within the strategic alliance, strategic alliances should be viewed as a bidirectional channel for influence and attending to internal transformations is crucial for success.

This paper deviates from the traditional treatment of strategic alliances as a business arrangement that only drives financial performance but instead provides insights into how strategic alliances can be connected to changing societal preferences. It also challenges the received wisdom in the academic literature on strategic alliance, which is dominated by some very restrictive theoretical perspectives.

Establishing and/or developing a portfolio of private label brands (PLBs) is a strategic imperative for most retail chains. The purpose of this paper is to construct, and validate, a holistic conceptual model to investigate the effect of perceived product quality, relative price and risk on perceived product value and, ultimately, willingness to buy these brands. In addition to this, the study seeks to investigate the potential role of store image as an antecedent within the model.

A survey of middle to upper income shoppers was administered in order to determine the magnitude of the above-mentioned effects. The study focused on the market segment of private label breakfast cereal consumers within South Africa.

All relationships in the model were found to be significant at the 5 per cent level, except for store image on perceived risk. The strongest relationship, by some margin, was that between perceived value and willingness to buy PLBs.

The myth that a powerful store image can necessarily mitigate high levels of consumer risk was dispelled. In general, the results may be used to glean further insight into the consumer’s approach to buying PLBs and shape brand managers’ actions in building these brands.

This study draws on the collective works of Beneke et al. (2013), Snoj et al. (2004) and Sweeney et al. (1999) in exploring this issue. However, the research advances the discussion by considering a low-involvement product category and the inclusion of an additional antecedent – store image.

Despite its widespread acceptance and application in the psychology literature, exhaustion, the core dimension of job burnout, has only recently been examined in the domain of public accounting. These studies highlighted the problem of exhaustion within the profession and examined its causes relative to the environment of public accounting. Another factor, not previously addressed in the context of public accounting, is the role personality plays on public accountants’ exhaustion. The current study addressed this void by examining how the personality traits of hardiness, workaholism, neuroticism, and Type-A behavior in public accountants affect exhaustion. The results indicated that public accountants who were high in hardiness experienced significantly less exhaustion. The role stressors of overload and conflict were also significant contributors to public accountants’ exhaustion.

Despite extensive adoption of Simons’ Levers of Control (LoC) framework, there is still considerable diversity in its operationalization which impedes the coherent development of the literature and compromises its value to researchers. The purpose of this paper is to draw researchers back to the conceptual core of the framework as a basis for stable, consistent definitions of the domain of observables.

We derive the conceptual core of the framework from Simons’ writings. We highlight instability in existing operational definitions of the LoC, weaknesses in the extent to which these definitions reference this conceptual core, and inconsistencies in the restriction of LoC to formal information-based routines.

We draw on the inconsistencies identified to build the case for commensuration or a “common standard” for the framework’s use on two levels: the constructs within the framework (through reference to the conceptual core of the framework) and the framework itself (through explicit inclusion of informal controls).

We illustrate the benefits of commensuration through the potential to guide the scope of the domain of observables in empirical LoC studies, and to study LoC as complementary or competing with other management control theories.

Our approach to resolving tensions arising from inconsistencies in the empirical definitions of LoC differs from others in that we focus on the strategic variables underlying the framework to define the conceptual core. We believe this approach offers greater potential for commensuration at the level of the constructs within the framework and the framework itself.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how project managers, influence the assignment of project team members by directly assigning or specifying who they want or by indirectly using lateral influence strategies to secure the appropriate resources. This study is part of a wider study investigating the balance between vertical and horizontal leadership in projects in which nomination (or assignment) was identified as a key event contributing to balancing the leadership. It focuses specifically on the nomination or assignment event at the start of a project.

Based on the philosophy of critical realism, case studies were used to collect data through 70 semi-structured interviews in Australia, Scandinavia and South Africa. Interviews were conducted with senior managers, project managers and project team members. Two project team members who worked with the same project manager were interviewed to gather diverse views. The data were analyzed individually by researchers from each location using a coding method proposed by Miles et al. (2014). The researchers then jointly analyzed the findings to arrive at five common themes from that explained how team members were assigned in practice.

Despite the recognized need for project managers to form their own teams, this study found that project team members were often assigned by others. This was because project managers lacked authority to secure their resources. Therefore, they used lateral influence strategies to help with assigning project team members. The study identified five lateral influencing strategies adopted by project managers to assign team members: creating an image of competence; creating coalitions; taking a gamble; waiting for the right moment; and reasoning with facts. Two of these lateral influencing strategies were not identified in the previous literature on influencing strategies used in organizations.

The findings should not be viewed as representative of the respective continents where the cases were studied. However, this study contributes to the literature on project management, illuminating how project teams are assigned and by whom and, specifically, the role that influence plays during this event of the balanced leadership theory. It also identifies the types of lateral influence strategies used by project managers when assigning team members to their projects. It provides a pathway to explore the use of lateral influencing strategies by project managers beyond the assignment process.

This study will help project managers to become aware of influencing strategies that they can use in practice while assigning team members to their projects. It will also highlight the importance of assigning the right resources to projects with a view to achieving balanced leadership.

This research is of value to organizations using projects to successfully deliver their strategies by assigning suitable resources to their projects.