Conveners
Symposium: What it takes to be a leader: Insights into key questions of the leadership process
- Sabine Bergner (Universität Graz)
Description
This symposium emphasizes organizational leadership as a key to company success. Its contributions are organized along the process of becoming and being a leader. Study 1 tackles the question why people take on leading roles and shows in a longitudinal study that personal interest, prior experience and perceived success motivate to lead. Study 2 focuses on those who are in leading positions and exposes mechanisms explaining how leaders impact employee engagement. It shows that selected leadership styles affect engagement due to the fact that they reduce employee stress. Complementary, study 3 uses a systematic literature review to prove that not only leaders affect employees but that employees also shape leader behavior. The contribution #4 takes into account that leaders have to consider the context they work in. It focuses on schools and proves that organizational size and type shape leader strategies. The final study reveals that leaders’ communication strategy – assessed using big data derived from CEO twitter accounts – affects organizational performance such as profits or assets. The symposium provides international and transdisciplinary insights into the leadership process.
One important issue within the field of leadership research is the question of who is actually motivated to take on leadership roles. Possessing a high motivation to lead (MtL) is seen as a strong predictor of leader emergence and effectiveness. But what are the antecedents of this motivation to lead and how can it be promoted? Within a longitudinal study incorporating 471 participants it...
Building up resources in the workplace through health-promoting leadership (HPL) is shown to have positive effects on employees. “Getting things done” on the other hand is the idea of the concept of “agility”. This study wants to clarify the aspects of agile working and the relationship between an agile organizational culture and HPL. Agile working means building organizational resources and...
In this paper, through a systematic literature review, I argue that the scientific study of instrumental leadership has been the object of a misunderstanding of its fourth dimension, i.e., outcome monitoring. The general conceptualization of this dimension, which interprets outcome monitoring as an activity consisting of performance supervision and feedback provision, is highly reductive....
School leadership is considered to be context-sensitive. This seems plausible as the context in which school leaders are operating changes constantly. Therefore, school principals have to bring effective leadership strategies into a new balance. In our paper, we want to clarify empirically which contexts during the COVID-19 pandemic are relevant for effective school leadership actions and...
CEO communication is an important element of any business strategy. This study examines the power of CEO communication on the social media platform Twitter and investigates its link to firm performance and reputation. Therefore, the communication style of 144 CEOs was analyzed using their tweets of a 3 month period. Additionally, the reputation and financial performance of the organizations...
