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Building on a social‐technical approach to project management, the authors aim to examine the effect of action‐centered leadership attributes on team member's learning, knowledge collaboration and job satisfaction during IT‐related projects.

Structural equation modeling was utilized to assess the work environment of team members as well as the leadership practices of their respective project team leaders. Data were collected with a survey questionnaire from 327 team members in a variety of organizations in 15 industry sectors including financial services, software, manufacturing, retail, government and universities.

The identified action‐centered project leadership practices (effective task management, team efficacy cultivation, and individual autonomy support) create a project team environment that fosters individual learning and knowledge collaboration along with individual performance and job satisfaction, and ultimately project success.

The action‐centered leadership practices construct, developed in this study, can be a good surrogate measure of what is required to be an effective leader in an IT project team environment. The main limitations of the research are those inherent in the survey method (self‐reported; subjective data).

In a project team environment, it is essential that all team members collaborate effectively to increase the likelihood of project success. The implication for managers from these findings is that concentrating more on the identified action‐centered leadership practices can positively influence the team environment.

Although previous studies have described attributes that influence team performance, a clearer understanding of what team leadership practices enable a project manager to be effective warrants further investigation. A second order construct merges these team leadership practice attributes and validates its use.

In this volume of Advances in Appreciative Inquiry, leading scholars from the fields of art, management, design, information technology, organization development, and education come together to chart new directions in Appreciative Inquiry theory and research as well as new intervention practices and opportunities for design in organizations. While diverse in topic and discipline, each of the following original chapters treats the reader to a view of Appreciative Inquiry's revolutionary way of approaching familiar questions of information and organization design and vice versa.

The time is ripe for a pedagogy of appreciation. This chapter is a cross pollination of the positive philosophies and visions of educators such as Dewey, Freire, Kolb, and Handy with the vibrant and emerging organizational change ideas and processes of Appreciative Inquiry. This pedagogical stance is values driven and embraces the relevance of personal experience. There is a distinct bias towards success and positive change through supportive relationships and dialogue in the creation of knowledge. This chapter details step-by-step classroom applications that follow the 4-D model (Discover, Dream, Design, Destiny) and extend the experiential learning cycle. For the student, these applications have led to more energized and sustained interactions, an increase in positive attitudes towards other students and the professor, more relevant and personally meaningful concepts, and a fuller and more hopeful view of the future. For the professor, a deeper engagement with the students and their stories leads to a stronger connection with the values, concepts and models of the course. The chapter concludes by identifying some challenges in applying and extending an appreciative approach to educational systems as a whole.

Research indicates that many innovations and social change initiatives fail to achieve their goals. One of the reasons they fail is because leaders lack an effective methodology that effectively engages support, addresses resistance, and integrates and aligns the innovation and change with the existing culture and social structure of the organization. Actor-network theory (ANT) provides a methodology for helping leaders understand and execute their role in leading innovations and social change as well as the role of networks in changing culture and social structure to support innovation and change. This chapter examines ANT as a leadership strategy for creating macro actors (powerful networks) to foster innovation and social change and describes a case study at a major research university of how ANT was used, in conjunction with the scientific method and appreciative inquiry, to enhance sustainable development.

The common view of design sees in it a way of reacting to our problems. To the question, “What are the boundaries of design?” Charles Eames asked in return, “What are the boundaries of problems?” Another view – taken in many of the works presented here – sees design as a response to opportunities. And never have opportunities been more abundant. “We are as gods,” declared Stewart Brand, “and might as well get good at it.” Or, as Bruce Mau has more recently framed it, “Now that we can do anything, what will we do?”

Appreciative Inquiry is about the search for the best in people, their organizations, and the strengths-enriched world around them. In its broadest focus, “AI” involves systematic discovery of everything that gives “life” to a living system when it is most alive, effective and flourishing, and most capable in economic, ecological, and human terms. AI involves, in a very central way, the art and practice of asking questions that strengthen a system's capacity to apprehend, anticipate, and heighten positive potential. It centrally involves the mobilization of whole system appreciation through the crafting of the “unconditional positive question” often-involving hundreds or sometimes thousands of people.

Given the dramatic changes taking place in society, the economy, and technology, 21st-century organizations need to engage in new, more spontaneous, and more innovative ways of managing. I investigate why an increasing number of companies are including artists and artistic processes in their approaches to strategic and day-to-day management and leadership.

Images and ideals of organization design have changed dramatically in the past decade in response to the need for a redirection in the purpose and strategy as well as leadership styles following the global economy, new brave networked world, emerging new forms of organizing, and social innovations. This chapter is an invitation to explore a new genre of organization design and organizing as if life matters. It is a call to embrace organizations designed to affirm, nurture, and sustain life. The chapter discusses two key questions: “What Gives Life to Human Organizing” and “What Are We Designing.” The first part aims to uncover what gives life to human organizing through an exploration of nine principles of appreciative organizing. The second part aims to expand what we mean when we talk about organization design through an examination of six fundamental structures that seem to be at play in organized action.

This chapter creates a logic that links the transformation of organizational consciousness with the creation of a more life affirming global consciousness. In it the author examines the relationship between the practice of Appreciative Inquiry, the concept of organizational consciousness and the need for global transformation. She suggests that Appreciative Inquiry, with its life giving focus, is uniquely suited to simultaneously bring about change in organizations and society through the elevation and evolution of organizational consciousness. Recognizing the need for transformation on a global scale, she challenges the field of organization development to move beyond the metaphor of organization culture toward the metaphor of organizational consciousness. Cultures are defined and bounded by national and corporate borders. Consciousness is all pervasive. It knows not boundaries of organizations, countries nor continents. Appreciative Inquiry practices, that involve the whole system in valuing the best of what is, envisioning generative possibilities and creating life-sustaining organizations, hold great potential for the evolution of organizational consciousness.

Conducting effective program evaluations such that all stakeholders benefit can be challenging. Appreciative inquiry provides a framework for seeking out the “goodness” of a program. By identifying what is being done “right,” programs can be strengthened by keeping what is currently valued, discarding what is not valued, and creating what does not currently exist but is envisioned and desired by all stakeholders. This chapter explores the benefits of using an appreciative approach to program evaluation. It describes the process used to appraise the Technology for Education and Training graduate programs.