Rubiná Mahsud, Jessica Ludescher Imanaka and Gregory E. Prussia
This paper critiques existing approaches to business sustainability and recommends a new course of action. This paper focuses the critique on sustainable business practices (SBP…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper critiques existing approaches to business sustainability and recommends a new course of action. This paper focuses the critique on sustainable business practices (SBP) and gaining sustainable competitive advantage (SCA), as they have increasingly been the focus of strategy and management scholars.
Design/methodology/approach
The relative progress in the strategy and management domains is reviewed with regard to incorporation of concepts such as sustainability, corporate social responsibility and stakeholder theory. The defense industry is explored as a paradigmatic case of inauthentic sustainability.
Findings
Findings reveal that existing constructs lack authentic sustainability, largely on account of the tendency of these discourses to privilege select stakeholders in the developed world. Strategic management research needs to evolve further to accommodate a broader, systemic and global focus that will yield authenticity in business sustainability. Mutual benefit for all stakeholders necessitates a paradigm shift in our thinking from competition to collaboration and creation.
Practical implications
When SBP and SCA get applied to certain industries, such as defense, they prop up a form of inauthentic sustainability. All global stakeholders must be included in sustainability frameworks, and some businesses, by their very definition, should not be sustained.
Social implications
Mutual benefit for all stakeholders necessitates a paradigm shift in people’s thinking from competition to collaboration and creation. This paper suggests that Blue Ocean Strategy (BOS) can provide the requisite direction for future strategy scholarship so as to overcome existing limitations with SPB and SCA.
Originality/value
This paper suggests that BOS can provide the requisite direction for future strategy scholarship so as to overcome existing limitations with SPB and SCA.
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Keywords
Gary Yukl, Rubina Mahsud, Gregory Prussia and Shahidul Hassan
The purpose of this paper is to determine how task-oriented, relations-oriented and change-oriented leader behaviors are related to managerial effectiveness and subordinate job…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to determine how task-oriented, relations-oriented and change-oriented leader behaviors are related to managerial effectiveness and subordinate job satisfaction, to identify incorrect findings in a recent meta-analysis of these relationships and to verify that leader problem solving is an important task-oriented behavior.
Design/methodology/approach
In total, 235 employees were surveyed to measure 11 specific behaviors used by their leader, and again two weeks later to measure the two outcome variables. Multiple regression analysis was used to assess how the leader behaviors are related to each outcome.
Findings
Task-oriented, relations-oriented and change-oriented behaviors were all related significantly to managerial effectiveness, but only relations-oriented behavior was related significantly to subordinate job satisfaction. Problem solving was the task-oriented behavior with the strongest relationship to managerial effectiveness. Recognizing was the least important relations-oriented behavior for job satisfaction.
Research limitations/implications
Limitations included a convenience sample, common source data and possible effects of unmeasured situational variables. Ways to avoid these limitations in future research are suggested.
Practical implications
The findings can be used to improve leadership training and development for most managers.
Originality/value
The results support the idea that examining specific leader behaviors in addition to broad meta-categories can improve leadership theory, research and training.
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Shahidul Hassan, Gregory Prussia, Rubina Mahsud and Gary Yukl
The purpose of this paper is to assess the individual and joint influence of three distinct external leadership behaviors (i.e. networking, representing, and external monitoring…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to assess the individual and joint influence of three distinct external leadership behaviors (i.e. networking, representing, and external monitoring) on workgroup performance and managerial effectiveness.
Design/methodology/approach
Data were gathered by surveying subordinates of 233 managers in various types of organizations.
Findings
The results of multiple regression analyses indicated that external monitoring and representing were positively related to subordinate perceptions of workgroup performance and managerial effectiveness. The effects of networking depended on a leader’s use of the other two external behaviors.
Originality/value
Understanding why a leader is effective in a particular context requires examining joint effects and different patterns of external behavior (Yukl, 2012). Past research on external leader behavior only examined one of the specific behaviors or examined a broadly defined behavior that included more than one of the three specific behaviors. The study provides new insight into the independent and joint effects of the three external leadership behaviors on managerial effectiveness and workgroup performance.
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Shahidul Hassan, Rubiná Mahsud, Gary Yukl and Gregory E. Prussia
The purpose of this paper is to examine how ethical leadership and empowering leadership are related to leader‐member exchange relations (LMX), affective commitment, and leader…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine how ethical leadership and empowering leadership are related to leader‐member exchange relations (LMX), affective commitment, and leader effectiveness.
Design/methodology/approach
Data were collected using questionnaires filled out by 259 subordinates of public and private sector managers. Relationships among variables were analyzed using structural equation modeling.
Findings
The results indicated that ethical leadership and empowering leadership have positive associations with LMX, subordinate affective commitment, and perception of leader effectiveness.
Originality/value
This study is the first to examine the independent and joint relationships of empowering leadership and ethical leadership with leadership effectiveness and the mediating role of LMX.
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Keywords
Officially, of course, the world is now post-imperial. The Q’ing and Ottoman empires fell on the eve of World War I, and the last Leviathans of Europe's imperial past, the…
Abstract
Officially, of course, the world is now post-imperial. The Q’ing and Ottoman empires fell on the eve of World War I, and the last Leviathans of Europe's imperial past, the Austro-Hungarian and Tsarist empires, lumbered into the grave soon after. Tocsins of liberation were sounded on all sides, in the name of democracy (Wilson) and socialism (Lenin). Later attempts to remake and proclaim empires – above all, Hitler's annunciation of a “Third Reich” – now seem surreal, aberrant, and dystopian. The Soviet Union, the heir to the Tsarist empire, found it prudent to call itself a “federation of socialist republics.” Mao's China followed suit. Now, only a truly perverse, contrarian regime would fail to deploy the rhetoric of democracy.
It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the French Revolution in Russian intellectual life. One could even make the claim that the French Revolution has had a more…
Abstract
It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the French Revolution in Russian intellectual life. One could even make the claim that the French Revolution has had a more significant impact on modern Russian history than it has had upon modern French history! Indeed, since the end of the nineteenth century, the French Revolution has become passe in France in the sense that no Frenchman has looked at it as a blueprint for current political development. While there have been cases in which some of the old revolutionary images were invoked to bolster support for certain political activities (such as support for the war against Germany), it has never been wholeheartedly re‐embraced and there has been a sense of detachment about the revolution, a sense that modern conditions were somehow different.
At present, education often takes place in an organized setting. From the end of the 18th century onwards, the educational system has unmistakably become differentiated — into the…
Abstract
At present, education often takes place in an organized setting. From the end of the 18th century onwards, the educational system has unmistakably become differentiated — into the nonorganized family and the organized school or university. This evolution is connected with the growing complexity of modern society and with evolutions in other social subsystems, such as politics and the economy. The family context normally creates numerous moments of casual education, but it can hardly provide adequate support for lengthy and complex processes of learning. Formal organizations are able to specify and preserve the criteria necessary to steer these complex processes in the right direction. Accordingly, the introduction of compulsory schooling — in Western Europe during the long 19th century, reaching from Prussia (1764) to Belgium (1914) — has strengthened the role of organized education. How has this fact, viz. that education now takes place in an organized setting, influenced the nature of educational interaction?
In the year 1900 Koch expressed the view that human and bovine tuberculosis were distinct diseases, that the bacillus of bovine tuberculosis could not produce this disease in the…
Abstract
In the year 1900 Koch expressed the view that human and bovine tuberculosis were distinct diseases, that the bacillus of bovine tuberculosis could not produce this disease in the human subject, and that the bacillus of human tuberculosis could not set it up in the bovine species. As is now well known. these conclusions have not received the slightest confirmation from other workers in the same field, and it may be said that the consensus of scientific opinion is now to the effect that the bacilli of human and bovine tuberculosis are identical—at any rate, so far as the effects attributed to them are concerned. The Royal Commission appointed in 1901, and consisting of the late Sir MICHAEL FOSTER, Drs. SIMS WOODHEAD, SIDNEY MARTIN, MACFADYEAN, and BOYCE, have issued a further interim report on their investigations. The first interim report was published in 1904, the conclusions stated in it being to the effect that the human and animal diseases were identical, and that no characteristics by which the one could be distinguished from the other had been discovered. The report now issued shows that these conclusions are confirmed by the results of a very large number of fresh experiments. The main conclusions set forth in the present report are as understated :—
Mai T. Pham Evans, Daniel J. Tisak and Douglas F. Williamson
The purpose of this descriptive research article is to investigate current benchmarking practices (2001 to 2010) so as to determine new approaches which may transcend the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this descriptive research article is to investigate current benchmarking practices (2001 to 2010) so as to determine new approaches which may transcend the traditional benchmarking model developed by Watson.
Design/methodology/approach
Previous generations of benchmarking have been developed and utilized in the last century. Watson's generational benchmarking model predicted that global benchmarking would encompass future benchmarking. Watson's Strategic Benchmarking: Reloaded with Six Sigma links Six Sigma strategies with strategic planning and benchmarking.
Findings
Most articles and dissertations reviewed indicate usage of existing benchmarking practices. The research also uncovered complementary approaches, including the Boyd Cycle, which underscores flexibility and speed, Six Sigma tools to implement significant business change decisions, the insights of Hoshin Kanri's philosophy of management, which fosters communication such that everyone in an organization is working toward a common goal, and “rapidmarking” of business improvements.
Practical implications
These approaches, while complementary, do not represent a “new generation” of benchmarking.
Originality/value
The value of this article comes from making the connection between the very beginnings of benchmarking techniques and the latest techniques in use today.