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As other researchers have done previously, we conceptualize innovation not as a linear process but as a cyclical one (e.g., Van de Ven, Polley, Garud, & Venkataraman, 1999), which consist periods of innovation initiation, implementation, adaptation, and stabilization (West, 1990). Within this cycle it is possible to distinguish two major components: the beginning of the cycle, which is dominated by the generation of ideas that is generally also designated as creativity; whereas the dominant activity at the end of the cycle which is the implementation of ideas (hereafter referred to as the implementation of innovation). Creativity is then likely to be most evident in the early stages of the innovation process, when those in teams are required to develop or offer ideas in response to a perceived need for innovation. Creative thinking is also likely when teams proactively initiate proposals for change and consider their initial implementation. As the innovation is adapted to organizational circumstances, there is less need for creativity. At the outset of the process, creativity dominates, to be superseded later by innovation implementation processes. Of course, it can be argued that creativity is important throughout the innovation process, but in general, the requirements for creative ideas will be greater at the earlier stages of the innovation process than the later stages.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the challenges that health care organizations face in nurturing and sustaining cultures that ensure the delivery of continually improving, high quality and compassionate care for patients and other service users.

Based on an extensive review of the literature, the authors examine the current and very challenging context of health care and highlight the core cultural elements needed to enable health care organizations to respond effectively to the challenges identified.

The role of leadership is found to be critical for nurturing high-quality care cultures. In particular, the authors focus on the construct of collective leadership and examine how this type of leadership style ensures that all staff take responsibility for ensuring high-quality care for patients.

Climates for quality and safety can be accomplished by the development of strategies that ensure leaders, leadership skills and leadership cultures are appropriate to meet the challenges health care organizations face in delivering continually improving, high quality, safe and compassionate patient care.

This paper provides a comprehensive integration of research findings on how to foster quality and safety climates in healthcare organizations, synthesizing insights from academic literature, practitioner reports and policy documents to propose clear, timely and much needed practical guidelines for healthcare organizations both nationally and internationally.

There is a need for individual‐level research into innovation, which departs from the traditions of mainstream creativity research. A working definition is given which enables innovation to be distinguished from creativity, and a qualitative study, examining individual experiences of innovation, is described. Unstructured interviews were carried out with 27 people in managerial or professional jobs, eliciting descriptive accounts of individual experiences of innovation at work. Transcripts of these interviews were content‐analysed, and the findings are discussed here under three headings: facilitators and inhibitors of innovation, reactions to innovations, and strategies for the management of innovation. Implications are drawn for future research in this area.

The ubiquity and value of teams in healthcare are well acknowledged. However, in practice, healthcare teams vary dramatically in their structures and effectiveness in ways that can damage team processes and patient outcomes. The aim of this paper is to highlight these characteristics and to extrapolate several important aspects of teamwork that have a powerful impact on team effectiveness across healthcare contexts.

The paper draws upon the literature from health services management and organisational behaviour to provide an overview of the current science of healthcare teams.

Underpinned by the input‐process‐output framework of team effectiveness, team composition, team task, and organisational support are viewed as critical inputs that influence key team processes including team objectives, leadership and reflexivity, which in turn impact staff and patient outcomes. Team training interventions and care pathways can facilitate more effective interdisciplinary teamwork.

The paper argues that the prevalence of the term “team” in healthcare makes the synthesis and advancement of the scientific understanding of healthcare teams a challenge. Future research therefore needs to better define the fundamental characteristics of teams in studies in order to ensure that findings based on real teams, rather than pseudo‐like groups, are accumulated.

Reiter-Palmon, Herman, and Yammarino (this volume) put forward a series of useful propositions about the nature of team creativity, its connection with individual creativity and cognitive processes, and its antecedents. This commentary highlights some issues raised by these propositions, and explores the emergence of team creativity in greater depth. In particular, it discusses existing principles of multi-level theory and measurement, and considers how they might be applied to team creativity. We conclude that there is no single unified way to treat the concept of team creativity, but just as the antecedents of creativity may change in different situations, so may the way in which the construct is defined.

To readers of the popular press, the words ‘positive psychology’ may conjure up images of happiness gurus and people having their feet massaged, their heads resting peacefully on pink, fluffy clouds. But in this article, our aim is to demonstrate how the new science of positive psychology speaks powerfully to ‐ and has much to contribute to ‐ the development of leadership and the practices and processes of organisations, whether in the public or private sectors. Much of our work is concerned with the applications of this new field, and particularly with building strengths‐based organisations. A key pillar of this work is around enabling strengths‐based leadership, and provides our focus for this article.

Government appointed and sponsored committees of every description—select, ad hoc, advisory, inquiry—such a prominent feature of the public scene since the last War, are understandable, even acceptable, reflect the urgency of the times in which we live. In the gathering gloom of more recent twilight years, they have flourished inordinately, especially in the socio‐political field, where most of their researches have been conducted. Usually embellished with the name of the figure‐head chairman, almost always expensively financed, they have one thing in common—an enormous output of words, telling us much of what we already know. So much of it seems dull, meaningless jargon, reflecting attitudes rather than sound, general principles.

Examines both consultant and client perceptions of the consulting relationship, focusing on internal process consultants and a sample of their clients. Employs a procedure based on repertory grid technique to elicit dimensions of client‐consultant relationships from 22 consultants and 16 of their clients within a major UK company. Develops a questionnaire in order to determine the importance and frequency of these dimensions, and also to investigate any perceived differences between the views of clients and consultants. Dimensions fell within four broad categories: clients’ skills and behaviours; consultants’ skills and behaviours; contract details or the logistics of the project; and dimensions focusing specifically on the client‐consultant relationship. Clients focused particularly on the contract details, placing less emphasis on the importance of either their own skills and behaviours or the relationship they formed with the consultant. Consultants, on the other hand, viewed relationship building as most important. Makes recommendations for establishing and enhancing client‐consultant relationships.

To explore the roles of perceived leader caregiving, and followers’ leader-specific attachment orientations, in followers’ experiences of negative interactions and emotions.

In a qualitative field study, individuals identified as secure and insecure (avoidant or anxious) on a pre-measure of leader-specific attachment, were interviewed regarding perceptions of leader caregiving and experiences of negative affective events in their current leadership dyad.

Followers perceived and interpreted negative interpersonal events and emotions in ways that reflected underlying attachment concerns, and embedded perceptions, of leader caregiving quality.

The study was small-scale but provides rich relational information on which future researchers can build to further explore the development and impact of leader-follower attachment dynamics.

Attachment-focused leadership development training may be useful in enhancing leader-follower relationship quality.

This study is the first to demonstrate qualitatively the associations between followers’ leader-specific attachment orientations, their perceptions of leader caregiving, and their experiences of negative affective events in the leader-follower dyad.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of the quality of senior management leadership on social support and job design, whose main effects on strains, and moderating effects on work stressors‐to‐strains relationships were assessed.

A survey involving distribution of questionnaires was carried out on a random sample of health care employees in acute hospital practice in the UK. The sample comprised 65,142 respondents. The work stressors tested were quantitative overload and hostile environment, whereas strains were measured through job satisfaction and turnover intentions. Structural equation modelling and moderated regression analyses were used in the analysis.

Quality of senior management leadership explained 75 per cent and 94 per cent of the variance of social support and job design respectively, whereas work stressors explained 51 per cent of the variance of strains. Social support and job design predicted job satisfaction and turnover intentions, as well as moderated significantly the relationships between quantitative workload/hostility and job satisfaction/turnover intentions.

The findings are useful to management and to health employees working in acute/specialist hospitals. Further research could be done in other counties to take into account cultural differences and variations in health systems. The limitations included self‐reported data and percept‐percept bias due to same source data collection.

The quality of senior management leaders in hospitals has an impact on the social environment, the support given to health employees, their job design, as well as work stressors and strains perceived.

The study argues in favour of effective senior management leadership of hospitals, as well as ensuring adequate support structures and job design. The findings may be useful to health policy makers and human resources managers.