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This application brief provides pedagogical strategies for teaching and learning about women and leadership as a potentially sensitive subject, with emphasis on creating an intellectually safe learning environment. Findings from a study of students’ expectations and experiences with a Women and Leadership course showed that the strategies affected students’ learning experiences. Some strategies also challenged the instructor as a woman leader.

Qualitative, case study methods were used to examine students’ expectations of and experiences with studying women and leadership. Participants were 48 undergraduate students enrolled in an elective course titled Women and Leadership offered in the Leadership Studies minor curriculum at a liberal arts institution. Students perceived women and leadership as a sensitive subject fraught with potential struggles for learners, but were willing to engage in the subject in pursuit of both meaningful learning and their own utilitarian-oriented leadership development. Their experiences show the potential for transformative learning if the course content, structure, and learning environment are purposefully crafted to enable students to deal with anticipated or experienced struggles and engage in rather than resist the learning experience. The findings have implications for leadership curriculum design, course design, and pedagogy. Although this study focused on undergraduate learners in a traditional college classroom, the implications may also be relevant to a range of leadership educators and learners in various educational contexts both within and outside of academe.

Leadership research has traditionally focused on formal leadership; however, leaders may emerge in informal settings in self-managed teams, and little is known about who emergent leaders are and what their characteristics are. This study investigates emergent leaders' behaviors, roles, skills, and leadership style, drawing on a multi-method approach.

We first identify emergent leaders using social network analysis and aggregation approaches. Second, we investigate emergent leaders' characteristics using interviews with forty agile team members in five organizations.

Results indicate different roles of emergent leaders (i.e. coach, liaisons), leadership styles (i.e. supportive), skills (i.e. culturally intelligent, strategist), and influencing factors (i.e. personality, technical knowledge, social circle).

We contribute by identifying emergent leaders through multiple identification methods (i.e. network analysis, aggregation), and then through identifying their various characteristics, we contribute to leadership literature as well as idiosyncrasy-credit theory. We also add to agile-leadership theory, showing that multiple informal leaders may emerge within agile teams. Finally, our findings have practical implications for self-managed teams, informal group settings, organizational change professionals, and organizations with horizontal structures.

Agile project teams are self-managing and self-organizing teams, and these two characteristics are pivotal attributes of emergent leadership. Emergent leadership is thus common in agile teams – however, how these (informal) emergent leaders can be identified in teams remains far from understood. The purpose of this research is to uncover techniques that enable top management to identify emergent agile leaders.

We approached six agile teams from four organizations. We employ social network analysis (SNA) and aggregation approaches to identify emergent agile leaders.

We approached six agile teams from four organizations. We employ SNA and aggregation approaches to identify emergent agile leaders.

Seven emergent leaders are identified using the SNA and aggregation approaches. The same leaders are also identified using the KeyPlayer algorithms. One emergent leader is identified from each of the five teams, for a total of five emergent leaders from the five teams. However, two emergent leaders are identified for the remaining sixth team.

Emergent leadership is a relatively new phenomenon where leaders emerge from within teams without having a formal leadership assigned role. A challenge remains as to how such leaders can be identified without any formal leadership status. We contribute by showing how network analysis and aggregation approaches are suitable for the identification of emergent leadership talent within teams. In addition, we help advance leadership research by describing the network behaviors of emergent leaders and offering a way forward to identify more than one emergent leader in a team. We also show some limitations of the approaches used and offer some useful insights.

Emergent leadership is a relatively new phenomenon, suggesting that leaders emerge from within teams without having a formal leadership assigned role. While emergent leadership has much relevance in today's organizations transitioning from vertical to horizontal leadership, there is a paucity of research about the process of emergent leadership that enables team members to become influential within teams.

Using purposive sampling, we interview 40 individuals in nine agile teams working in five Information Technology firms.

We identify various traits, experiences, behaviors, skills, and abilities of emergent leaders. Broadly, we conclude that an emergent leader serves as a “detail-oriented structure” or a “big picture coordinator.” Based on the findings, we propose a leadership emergence process that details how team members gain status and emerge as leaders, as well as the factors that can cause them to lose that status and return to becoming a regular team member. Furthermore, we introduce a model that demonstrates how technical expertise and personality traits interact, influencing team dynamics and facilitating the emergence of leaders within a team.

We contribute to the literature on emergent leadership by conceptualizing lateral influence and a leadership emergence process. We also extend the agile leadership literature and address some calls for empirical studies to understand the leadership dynamics in agile teams. We also show some limitations of the existing approaches and offer some useful insights.