Search results

Following an overview of the leadership arena, examines completely the lesser explored concept of discretionary leadership with the view that the phenomenon of downsized, delayered organizations will demand even greater discretionary choices and behaviour from the executives and thereby testing the togetherness concept of co‐operation, sharing and working together. A benchmarking survey of the Australian Public Service (benchmarked against a private sector and health management sector database) emphasizes the point of creeping fragmentation in organizations and highlights that the capabilities of cohesion, quality dialogue and cabinet responsibility will be demanded even more from the leadership of today’s organization. Gives attention to understanding, practising and developing today’s private and public sector leaders in the capabilities of discretionary leadership.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship of gender, work factors, and non‐work factors with aspirations to positions in senior management. A process model of senior management aspirations was developed and tested.

Data were collected via an online survey that resulted in a sample of 368 working professionals. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis was used to analyze results.

Women were less likely than men to desire promotion into a senior management position. Moreover, women's lower desired aspirations for promotion to senior management were due in part to the smaller degree of congruence that women perceive between personal characteristics and senior management positions and in part to the less favorable prospects for career advancement that women perceive relative to men.

The cross‐sectional, correlational research design does not permit strong inferences regarding the causal direction of observed relationships. In addition, the specific nature of the sample (working professionals enrolled in graduate study at one university in the USA) may limit the generalizability of the results.

Because women's career aspirations are affected by their perceived congruence with senior management positions and by their perceived opportunity to reach senior management, organizations should assure that senior management roles are not predominantly associated with masculine characteristics and should evaluate their promotion systems to eliminate artificial barriers to women's advancement into senior management.

This research distinguishes between desired and enacted aspirations as well as provides insights into some factors that explain why women hold weaker desired aspirations for senior management positions than men.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of senior managers in managing intra-and inter-organizational relationships with key customers and the factors that influence such involvement in a novel context in the Arab Middle East region.

An exploratory qualitative research design was used in which 68 face-to-face semi-structured interviews were conducted in Jordan with endogenous and Western firms.

Top/senior managers play a significant role in Arab business relationships and in creating value for the firms. Their involvement in key accounts is imperative at all levels – strategic, operational, and relational – mainly due to cultural and institutional factors that are unique to the Arab context.

The study is limited to operations in one emerging country situated in a novel setting in one particular region of the world, which is the Middle East.

Arab senior managers’ participation is imperative and should continue with their relatively intense involvement with key accounts. For foreign investors operating in that part of the world, it is highly recommended that senior management have a more a hands-on approach when dealing with the Arab key customer and to focus more on the relational aspect of key account management than on the organizational aspect.

This paper adds to the very limited number of studies on senior management involvement in key account management, making a theoretical and practical contribution and adding insight on how to manage the relationship with the Arab key customer.

Using an alternative lens to challenge assumptions of solidarity behaviour and the queen bee label, the paper aims to analyse empirical data to explore negative relations between women in management and surface processes of female misogyny.

Feminist standpoint epistemology; qualitative semi‐structured interviews; subjective narrative data from senior women and women academics of management in two UK organisations.

Assumptions of solidarity behaviour are largely absent in the research and the queen bee label impacts pejoratively on women in management, perpetuating a “blame the woman” perspective. Senior women do recognise barriers facing women in management but they do not want to lead on the “women in management mantle.” This does not make them queen bees; the women recognise becoming “male” in order to “fit” senior management and acknowledge the impact of their gendered context. From this context, processes of female misogyny between women in management fragment notions of solidarity; highlight contradictory places women take in relation to other women and challenge women as “natural allies.”

Future research should engage women at all levels in management in consciousness‐raising to the impact women have on other women. Organizational interventions are required to explicitly surface how the gender order exacerbates differences between them to maintain the gendered status quo.

Empirical paper using an alternative lens to problematize solidarity behaviour and queen bee, surfaces female misogyny between women in management and highlights how the gendered social order encourages and exacerbate differences between women.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the Pelz Effect to explain the effects of incongruence between senior managers' orientations and underlying assumptions of total quality management (TQM) on middle managers' own orientations and on TQM itself.

Using a multi‐case study approach of three organisations from different sectors, the authors conducted 68 semi‐structured interviews with managers at both senior and middle levels.

The findings largely support the Pelz Effect in that senior management exerts a major influence in establishing the tone and atmosphere of the TQM organisation by their orientations and attitudes towards the underlying principles of it. It has been found that senior managers' reliance on detection, reactive strategies and hard aspects of TQM – as opposed to prevention, proactive strategies and soft people‐based issues – resulted in: first, middle managers' compliance with short‐term tactical orientations rather than long‐term commitment; second, middle managers' increased control over the workforce rather than the work‐related processes; third, middle managers' tendency to agree about TQM objectives in a way to prioritise and fulfil their own self‐interests rather than TQM intended objectives and organisational interests; and finally the inability of middle managers to run TQM effectively.

The findings suggest that the nature of middle management's orientation towards TQM and the degree of their supportive behaviour towards first line managers is affected by the senior management's orientation towards TQM and their supportive behaviour towards middle managers.

The results reveal that the current practice of TQM can be characterised by inspection and quality control approach, a top‐down process based upon a culture of procedure‐dominated with a heavy bureaucratic base, and the dominance of senior management's unilateral control. Finally, the theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the antecedents of top-down knowledge hiding in buying and supplying firms.

This study uses a multiple case study methodology by considering four UAE-based firms and further employing 20 semi-structured interviews with managers of buying and supplying firms having a local and foreign nationality.

Based on the qualitative interviews, senior managers were found to be intentionally hiding knowledge from their managers based on five individual, three interpersonal and two firm-level reasons.

This study has some limitations. First, the results of this study are not generalizable to a broader population. Second, this study explores behavioural patterns with respect to United Arab Emirates culture only.

Firms can use the findings of this study to understand what really motivates senior managers to intentionally hide knowledge from their subordinates. Also, this study provides some constructive guidelines to firms/senior management, which can discourage the culture of knowledge hiding in firms.

This study contributes to knowledge management literature by revealing multi-level and multi-faceted antecedents of top-down knowledge hiding in buying and supplying firms in the supply chain context.

Every merger and acquisition deal presents a different goal and a different mix of critical issues to manage. Making, consummating, and integrating a deal puts pressure on chief executives to play multiple leadership roles and switch quickly from one role to another throughout the merger process. The roles employed vary dramatically with the type of deal and how ambitious the strategy. As the rationales for transactions have changed, new challenges have evolved, especially for those leading the deals: leaders must establish and communicate the strategic vision for the merger ‐‐ they need to explain the top four or five sources of value in the deal and what the core values and culture of the new organization should be; leaders must cheer on the stakeholders to generate enthusiasm for the merger or acquisition, and to confront fear and uncertainty in its various forms; leaders must close the deal; leaders captain change by managing the integration of the two entities; and leaders crusade for the new entity. These five roles are essential to all transactions, but leaders need to employ each at different times. The strategic rationale behind the deal, and the inherent risks and opportunities that it presents, determines which roles a leader needs to play and when.

This paper aims to provide a quantitative picture of the extent to which Irish universities are male-dominated at senior management, professoriate and governance levels; to locate this pattern in an international context; and, drawing on qualitative data from a purposive sample of Irish university senior managers, to explore the limits and possibilities of change.

The quantitative data at senior management level draw on a largely web-based study, supplemented by interview data from a purposive sample of 40 people (85 per cent response rate) in senior management positions in all seven universities funded by the state – including those at Dean to Presidential level, men and women, and academics and non-academics. The interview schedule used in the qualitative study was devised by the eight-country Women in Higher Education Management Network (WHEM).

Irish universities are very male-dominated at senior management, professoriate and governance levels. The qualitative data suggest that the limits to change are an organisational culture that is homosocial and conformist, where women and their attitudes and priorities are seen as “the problem”. Yet there was a striking level of endorsement of various discourses suggesting that having women in senior management makes a difference.

The failure of the Higher Educational Authority to collect data on the gender of those in senior management in Irish universities has necessitated the use of the web. This is an effective pragmatic response, but obviously not as satisfactory as official data.

It has been widely recognised that diversity in management teams is positively associated with innovation. In this context the absence of such diversity in the senior management teams in Irish universities raises concerns in the context of the challenges facing Irish society in general and the university sector in particular. The references to the organisational culture as conformist and homosocial raise fundamental questions about the universities ' ability to use the skills of their staff to move the institution forward.

The paper is the first specific study of senior management in Irish universities. It echoes and specifies the nature of the organisational culture – but also highlights the existence of legitimating discourses endorsed by senior managers.

This paper aims to present and discuss factors that affect the current complexity of new product development processes in the appliance sector, exploring their influence on the repositioning of senior Research & Development (R&D) executives in terms of both knowledge and leadership management.

The paper is built on an illustrative real case which is analyzed based on the conceptual foundations of the role of senior R&D executives, vis-a-vis industry specialists’ reflections on new requirements for such managers due to the current complexity of new product development processes.

The paper proposes an integrative framework that links emerging trends in product development complexity with a new enhanced approach required for senior R&D management. In addition, this paper raises new skills to equip the current and future generations of R&D managers, taking into account the need to reposition the knowledge management skills of senior R&D executives.

This paper sheds light on the skills desirable for senior R&D executives to be prepared for the new complexity involved in new product development processes, such as soft skills related to people management practices; technical skills related to portfolio management, project management and systems engineering; and conceptual skills related to the own, teach, learn and delegate strategy.

This paper blends academic and practical experience to shed light on emerging issues within R&D organizations and to point out the value of real impact research to open new research avenues.

Aims to critique solidarity behaviour as a means of advancing women in management; questions the queen bee concept and raises negative relations between women.

Conceptual paper which critiques extant research and approaches to advancing women in management identifying alternative perspectives.

Assumptions of solidarity behaviour set expectations of senior women which cannot be fulfilled. Continued use of the unproblematized queen bee label, without acknowledgement of the embedded gendered context for women in senior management, perpetuates a “blame the woman” perspective as a “one‐woman responsibility”. Emerging from the gendered nature of organization, female misogyny may be a means of exploring negative relations between women to challenge existing gendered organizations which sustain the status quo.

Mediates recommendations of senior women as mentors and role models, whilst blaming them for being more male than men, by calling for action to challenge and change the gendered social order which impacts on women in management. Empirical research is required.

Considers the impact of negative relations between women to highlight how the gendered social order encourages and exacerbates differences between women; challenges assumptions of solidarity behaviour and problematizes the queen bee label.