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The purpose of this paper is to identify the challenges posed to business leaders from major global demographic changes expected in the workforce composition, such as higher participation of women and more active involvement of elder and more experienced people in the future workforce.

The authors ran a survey among 733 middle managers, focusing on their ideal leadership behavior. The Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior project methodology was applied for data collection and analyses.

Several significant differences were established in leadership ideals according to gender, age and managerial experience. The differences based on gender had higher practical significance than the ones based on age and experience of the respondents.

The paper adds up to the pertinent in the implicit leadership approach dialogue over the existence of stable, global and unchanging aspects of leadership.

Leader behaviors traditionally deemed as positive, such as the participative and charismatic/value-based leadership, are shown to be critical for the future business leader. Leadership development in organizations should focus on these two aspects.

Leaders who can meet the expectations of diverse groups of people will be able to achieve inclusion of least privileged groups at the business level, leading to higher inclusion at the social, aggregate level.

The paper is the first to explore how documented demographic trends could affect the way that leadership will evolve in the near future.

HRM in Greece is in a state of rapid development, as well as fundamental change. With the end of 1992, and the Single European Market approaching, larger firms are upgrading their personnel practices, and personnel managers currently enjoy an increasingly high status. More sophistication is being added to recruitment and selection methods; training is being offered to a considerable number of employees; employee relations are improving and moving towards a stage of consensus and co‐operation. Meanwhile, smaller companies, realizing the importance of HRM, are turning to consultancy firms for advice. Efforts are also being made in the public sector to introduce measures for improving productivity and employee morale. The overall picture appears very favourable for an increase in the significance of HRM in Greece and for the strengthening of its practice.

In order to test some major hypotheses on leadership styles of women managers, empirical research was conducted among subordinates with male and female supervisors in Greek firms. Analysis of results showed that neither leadership styles nor subordinates′ satisfaction differed between employees with male and female managers. The conclusions to be drawn from this analysis are that gender should not influence hiring, promotion and delegation decisions, and that women managers should be encouraged to express certain innate qualities which could contribute to the improved co‐operation and team spirit within organisations.

Presents findings of empirical research in Greek public, quasi‐public, and private organizations. Results show that commitment of managers decreases as we progress along a continuum from private towards publicly‐owned organizations; managers report the existence of a gap between the perceived and the desired organizational culture of their firm, and this “culture gap” tends to increase as we move from the private towards the public sector; organizational commitment appears to be influenced negatively by the culture gap, therefore this gap offers a plausible explanation for the lower commitment in public sector firms.

This article seeks to discuss the role that line managers take up concerning human resource management issues among Greek firms and to propose ways for enhancing the synergistic relationship between human resource (HR) and line managers.

It presents the trends of line management involvement in Greek firms, from 1993‐2003, based on the CRANET survey. The survey results are enhanced by qualitative data from focus groups.

Findings show that during the past ten years there has been an increasing tendency for collaboration, with the main responsibility increasingly falling on the HR department. Moreover, the main obstacles to this collaboration are presented.

The main research limitation is the limited data that the CRANET questionnaire provides on the issue of HR – line management partnership. However, the focus groups enrich the survey data with qualitative results. Implications for practice derive from the qualitative results.

The value of this paper is mainly to line managers that are involved in human resource management activities, since the difficulties that occur from this partnership are discussed.

Some of the most common characteristics in the vast amount of literature dealing with management development (MD) appear to be the lack of clear definition as to the context of the field and the enormous variations which appear in practice both among organisations and training institutions. Some reasons for these variations can be found in the complexity of ideas and concepts in management theory which are in turn reflected in MD practice.

Observes that historically, family and work were not separated in pre‐industrial societies in which life was a united whole, but that family and work are gradually becoming separated in industrial societies, as work becomes dependent, production becomes centralized, and the relationship of the individual with work impersonal. In Greece there is still some evidence of close relations between family and work due to the large number of very small family firms and the high proportion of the population working in small family farming lots. However, a large percentage of the population work in full‐time traditional jobs. Flexible working patterns such as part‐time, flexi‐time, annual working hours, parental leaves, job sharing, variable working time, telework, condensed working week, as well as contract, pay and task flexibility are not so extensively used in Greece and it is only since 1990 that they are gaining ground. Flexibility at work is a major tool in enhancing economic performance, fighting unemployment and promoting competitiveness. Apart from that, flexibility is needed because it can prove very useful in harmonizing family life with work obligations, provided it takes into consideration family needs, parental obligations and the right of employees to a better quality of life. Presents the current situation on work flexibility in Greece and examines these aspects of flexibility which can prove useful not only in enhancing economic performance but in providing better conditions for the reconciliation between family and work.

The globalization of economic activity and the rapid technological developments require a more qualified workforce with multiple skills. As a result, rapid obsolescence of competences makes the capacity to update continuously and develop the required skills the key to competitiveness and growth. Moreover, under the pressure of competitive forces, developments in the HRM practices become increasingly important. The first part of this article draws from the findings of the Cranfield survey, in which Greece participated three times (in 1993, 1996 and 1999), in order to present an overall picture of HRM in Greece. The second part analyzes the results of a larger European Union project to study skills benchmarking in Europe, in which Greece participated along with eight European countries. The results from the Greek study do not show considerable deviations from the whole European sample. Some of the main conclusions of the study are: training can no longer be treated as a method to cure skills deficiencies, but rather as a continuous, life‐long learning process with considerable impact to the growth of the firms; acquiring human skills presents the greatest challenge for training; and adaptability and self‐learning are necessary elements that need to be incorporated in the educational system from its early stages.

The purpose of this paper is to deal with the attitudes towards women as managers, and the leadership style that women managers adopt. By replicating a study that was conducted in 1990, it is intended to explore how things have changed during the last 15 years, in terms of attitudes towards women in management, as well as in terms of the leadership style that each gender tends to apply at work.

A longitudinal survey, first run in 1990 and repeated in 2006, with a similar to the original sample of 229 Greek middle managers. Three very popular research scales are used to study the phenomenon: the women as managers scale, the satisfaction with the supervisor and the Likert four types of leadership styles.

The 2006 initial findings indicate greater presence of women in managerial positions, and relatively stable attitudes towards women as managers. Satisfaction with supervisor does not appear to be significantly correlated with the managers' gender, while, at the same time, no significant difference appears to exist between the leadership styles that male and female managers adopt.

This research is unique in drawing on cross‐time, large pool of data, to support the existence of persisting effects in the attitudes towards women as managers, as well as the effect of gender on the satisfaction with supervisor.

Based on evidence from the Cranet survey this paper examines the progress in the practice of HRM in Greek organizations, comparing results from 1992 to those of the 1999 survey round, focusing on various core functions such as training and development, performance management and employee communications. It also compares these developments to the overall European scene. Results show more improvement in training and performance management and less in employee communications. From examination of survey results, it is obvious that Greece follows the EU trends towards an improved, more strategic role of HRM. However, statistical analysis of data from the comparative survey across European countries indicates a slower pace in improvements and some differences, which Greek companies will have to overcome. In this effort, training and development appears to be the most critical factor.