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The effects of innovation on leadership abilities have not been widely investigated. Although diffusion of innovation theory has existed for some time, there is a need for more research detailing the relationship between innovation and transformational leadership. In a survey of organizational members (N = 294), innovation was significantly related to all subscales of transformational leadership. The relationship between innovation and transactional leadership was generally not significant, and the relationship with laissez-faire leadership was inverse and significant. Implications emerging from the relationship between transformational leadership and innovation are discussed, including the distinction between the champion and “techie” styles of innovation and their basis in leadership activity.

This article focuses on the empirical effects of cognitive differentiation and persuasive skills on transformational, transaction, and laissez-faire leadership. Subjects (N = 294) completed measures of independent and dependent variables. Findings confirmed prior findings, however findings some reflected differences. Cognitive differentiation was positively related to transformation leadership (r = .16, p = .038), unrelated to transactional leadership (r = -.02, ns), and negatively related to laissez-faire leadership (r = -.22, p = .002). Findings were nearly identical for the persuasive skills variable showing a positive relationship with transformational leadership (r = .19, p = .021), no relationship with transactional leadership (r = -.007, ns), and negatively related to laissez-faire leadership (r = -.27, p = .001). In a regression analysis cognitive differentiation and persuasive skills accounted for 5.4% of the unique variance of transformation leadership (F = 4.02, df = 2,139, p = .02). Implications to leadership educators were discussed.

As we move rapidly into the 21^st century leaders face the challenge of being effective in a global knowledge environment. Now, more than ever, leaders must play the key role in helping organizations cope with the challenges they face from expanding knowledge and knowledge systems. Leaders must guide changes in a climate of increased competition to fill customer demands. This paper addresses the nature of the rapidly changing knowledge organization through an exploration of the traditional leadership paradigms, an examination of current trends in knowledge management and the learning organization, and by finally considering the role of leaders and leadership education in the emerging knowledge organization.

The International Leadership Association’s Guiding Questions: Guidelines for Leadership Education Programs (Ritch & Mengel, 2009) provides a framework to attend to leadership program development, redesign, evaluation, organized program review, questions concerning academic legitimacy and developing common program benchmarks. This article provides a critique of the Guiding Questions: Guidelines for Leadership Education Programs and, in particular, the five major categories: Conceptual Framework, Context, Content, Teaching and Learning, and Outcomes/Assessment. The article also draws upon scholarly research within the field to provide both breadth and depth to the different Guiding Questions categories. Finally, the goal of this article is to encourage a collaborative dialogue which will ultimately increase the effectiveness of the Guiding Questions.

This paper reviews the literature of formal mentoring programs in organizational settings. Additionally, the components of mentoring, how it works, and how it can be implemented in an organization is addressed. Further this paper also proposes that formal mentoring is possible in organizations. Formal mentoring will be shown to be less effective than informal mentoring. Furthermore, it will be shown that formal organizational mentoring can be effective to meet the needs for all employees to have the opportunity to be mentored, to learn from the wisdom, experience and mistakes of others, and to increase the protégé’s career opportunities.

In the fast pace of the 21^st century there is a demand for effective leaders capable of handling the internal and external changes occurring in our organizations. This paper seeks to inform the reader because change is natural; it is constant; it is inevitable. But, what constitutes effective leadership is the question? The main purpose of this paper is to offer 10 recommendations toward effective leadership that are outcomes of an eclectic leadership approach – Facilitative Social Change Leadership Theory (FSCL). The FSCL approach is a melding of Social Change Theory, Social Change Leadership Theory, and Transformational Leadership Theory as well as the work of Tichy and DeVanna.

The purpose of this research report is to empirically explore the relationship between transformational leadership, organizational position, and knowledge management.

Adult subjects (n=1,046) were asked to complete a survey battery consisting of questions about their leadership abilities, organizational position, and knowledge management behaviors.

Knowledge management behaviors were significantly predicted by transformational leadership accounting for 19.5 percent of the variance. Organizational position was a significant predictor of knowledge management and, with transformational leadership, accounted for 21.1 percent of the variance of knowledge management.

Future research needs to more clearly focus on the specific aspects of transformational leadership, position, and knowledge management in a variety of contexts, but the results of this study clearly support the basis for a relationship between these variables. Furthermore, future research should continue to clarify the causative details surrounding leadership and knowledge management such that more specific cause and effect relationships might be exposed.

Transformational leaders are better suited to handle even the most technical aspects of the modern workplace than are transactional or laissez‐faire leaders. Additionally, as individual leaders move up in an organization they are better suited to engage in knowledge management, at least partially, because they are more transformational in leadership style.

This paper reveals that the relationship between knowledge management and effective organizational management is not just theoretically sound, but, in fact, empirically proven. This report has applicability to any leader, or aspiring leader, in an organizational setting seeking to improve their abilities.

The chapter proposes to investigate online reputation of hospitality brands and its measurements. Brand reputation is generally defined as an overall appraisal of a company by its stakeholders, which is the result of the company's past actions and predictions about the company's future (Ferguson, Deephouse, & Ferguson, 2000). Being viewed as the opinion shared among a group of stakeholders (Dowling, 2008), it plays an important role in the tourism industry. With the progress of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), reviews and user-generated contents of destinations and of hospitality companies together with the related emerging brand reputation can influence consumers' behaviors and choices. Brand reputation analysis could be more useful in the hospitality brand management when integrated with brand image and brand identity analysis, mainly because in tourism businesses and destinations, brands are typically affected by an inherent fragility determined by the service nature of products (Casarin, 1996). According to Biel (1991), the meanings that consumers assign to a brand are synthesized into brand associations formed by the components perceived to underlie the brand's image. As well as brand reputation, strong, positive and unique associations reinforce a brand and increase its equity that requires significant internal brand identity efforts, which should create a corresponding brand image through integration in overall marketing programmes (Keller, 2003). It makes sense to develop an analytical research approach that compares online brand reputation (OBR) with brand association matching as a measure of the alignment between brand identity and brand image in hospitality companies. This comparative analysis emerging from brand reputation, brand image and brand identity analysis can reveal divergent situations (i.e., high brand reputation and low brand association matching) and orient brand managers in reviewing online brand communication. Brand reputation and brand image analysis will be contextualized in an online community as a social setting that is considered to be a new type of market (Muniz & O'Guinn, 2001). We focus on hospitality online communities populated by consumers and other actors such as influencers and bloggers: their brand perception could be separately compared with brand identity that we will extract from company communications including presentational information and brand-related press releases found on websites, nonfinancial narrative from annual reports, and interviews with managers published in mainstream media sources. In our analysis we will focalize on a cluster of luxury hospitality companies integrating a netnographic and text-mining techniques. We will use both the techniques in order to (1) extract and study brand associations in terms of brand reputation, brand image, and brand identity; (2) develop indicators of brand reputation and brand association matching; and (3) discuss their utility in the management of the hospitality company brands.