Shelley D. Dionne

Transformational leadership and team performance

Despite transformational leadership enjoying success and attention as an exceptional leadership theory, few scholars have investigated a specific link between transformational leadership theory and team performance. As such, we discuss how transformational leadership theory can provide a framework in which to investigate a leaders impact on team performance. We posit that idealized influence/inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individualized consideration could produce intermediate outcomes such as shared vision, team commitment, an empowered team environment and functional team conflict. In turn, these intermediate outcomes may positively affect team communication, cohesion and conflict management. Implications for team development, team training and team structure are presented. Limitations and future directions are also discussed.

I Am, I Think I Can, and I Do: The Role of Personal Identity, Self-Efficacy, and Cross-Application of Experiences in Creativity at Work

ABSTRACT This study examined creativity at work by considering a new construct, creative personal identity, in conjunction with creative self-efficacy and a problem-solving strategy. Results of a field study suggested that creative personal identity explained variance in creativity at work above and beyond creative self-efficacy, but that the two did not interact. Results also indicated support for the interaction of the self-concept and a problem-solving strategy. The positive relationship between creative personal identity and creativity at work was stronger when individuals applied nonwork experiences in efforts to solve work-related problems.

Neutralizing substitutes for leadership theory: Leadership effects and common-source bias.

The purpose of this research was to examine alternative models of substitutes for leadership theory given the general lack of empirical support for the moderating effects postulated by the theory. On this basis, the research posited that the effects of substitutes also could be conceptualized as mediated relations. The research examined moderated and mediated relations for several sets of leader behaviors and substitutes that have been examined in the literature. The research design sampled 49 organizations, with 940 subordinates rating 156 leaders. Results, although generally not supportive of the moderator or mediator hypotheses, essentially demonstrated that leadership matters. The findings also suggest that prior significant effects in substitutes literature may be merely a statistical artifact, resulting from common-source bias.

A Longitudinal Study of the Leadership Development Process: Individual Differences Predicting Leader Effectiveness

This study tracked the leadership development of236 male cadets from matriculation through graduation ata military college. Cognitive ability, physical fitness,prior influence experiences, and self-esteem measured in Year 1 were relevant to predictingthose who assumed formal leadership positions in Year 4.Physical fitness and prior influence experiencesmeasured when cadets entered the college predicted leader effectiveness rated in their fourthyear. Stress tolerance and moral reasoning levels didnot predict leader emergence or effectiveness, thoughthe set of individual difference measures significantly predicted emergence and effectiveness. Physicalfitness levels and moral reasoning increased over timefor all cadets, though surprisingly, levels ofself-esteem and stress tolerance did not increase over time. Overall the study demonstrated thatleadership effectiveness and emergence could bepredicted from early measures of individualdifferences.

Leadership styles and Deming's behavior factors

Although total quality management scholars, including W. Edwards Deming, consider leadership to be important, there has been little work which considers linkages between specific leadership styles and TQM behaviors/policies. This paper examines the relationship between a full range of leadership styles (Bass & Avolio, 1994) including laissez-faire, management-by-exceptionpassive, management-by-exception-active, transactional and transformational leadership, and five specific TQM behavior factors derived from Demings (1986) Fourteen Points, i.e., change agency, teamwork, trust-building, short-term goal eradication and continuous improvement.

Leadership and team dynamics for dangerous military contexts.

We propose an interdisciplinary, multilevel model of leadership and team dynamics for dangerous military contexts. Viewing this context as a higher level of analysis, our model includes constructs and multiple levels of analysis involved in team formation and assembly, which result in leadership and team dynamics, which in turn yield team performance and maintenance. Pragmatic leadership at the individual level, individualized leadership at the dyadic level, and shared leadership at the team level provide an integrated core for the approach. Multilevel precursors, consequences, and moderators of this leadership and team dynamics approach also are discussed. Twelve key multilevel propositions and five multilevel exploratory ones are derived from the model and asserted for testing in future work on dangerous military contexts.

Individual attributes and leadership style: predicting the use of punishment and its effects

This study examined attributes of leaders that influenced their use of contingent and noncontingent punishment and the results of using punishment on leader effectiveness. Results indicated that leaders with higher levels of physical fitness and moral reasoning were more likely to use contingent punishment, while those with lower self-esteem were more likely to use noncontingent punishment. Noncontingent punishment negatively impacted leader effectiveness, while contingent punishment positively impacted leader effectiveness.

DIVERSITY AND DEMOGRAPHY IN ORGANIZATIONS: A LEVELS OF ANALYSIS REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

This article presents a comprehensive and qualitative review of how levels of analysis issues have been addressed in the diversity and demography literature. More than 180 conceptual and empirical publications (i.e. book chapters and journal articles) in this field are reviewed and coded regarding the specific incorporation of levels of analysis in theory and hypothesis formulation, representation of levels of analysis in measurement of constructs and variables, appropriateness of data-analytic techniques given the explicit or implied levels of analysis, and alignment between levels of analysis in theory and data in regard to drawing inferences and conclusions. Although the body of diversity and demography literature continues to grow, levels of analysis issues are rarely considered. Only a few reviewed studies address levels of analysis issues in theory development, and no reviewed studies employ appropriate multi-level data analytic techniques. Implications for future research are discussed, and recommendations for incorporating levels of analysis into diversity and demography research are provided.

Studying collective human decision making and creativity with evolutionary computation

We report a summary of our interdisciplinary research project “Evolutionary Perspective on Collective Decision Making” that was conducted through close collaboration between computational, organizational, and social scientists at Binghamton University. We redefined collective human decision making and creativity as evolution of ecologies of ideas, where populations of ideas evolve via continual applications of evolutionary operators such as reproduction, recombination, mutation, selection, and migration of ideas, each conducted by participating humans. Based on this evolutionary perspective, we generated hypotheses about collective human decision making, using agent-based computer simulations. The hypotheses were then tested through several experiments with real human subjects. Throughout this project, we utilized evolutionary computation (EC) in non-traditional ways—(1) as a theoretical framework for reinterpreting the dynamics of idea generation and selection, (2) as a computational simulation model of collective human decision-making processes, and (3) as a research tool for collecting high-resolution experimental data on actual collaborative design and decision making from human subjects. We believe our work demonstrates untapped potential of EC for interdisciplinary research involving human and social dynamics.

Retrospective Relatedness Reconstruction Applications to Adaptive Social Networks and Social Sentiment

Examination of temporally changing adaptive social networks has been difficult given the need for extensive and usually real-time data collection. Building from interdisciplinary advances, the authors propose a web search engine–based method (called retrospective relatedness reconstruction or 3R) for collecting approximated historical data of temporally changing adaptive social networks. As quantifying relatedness among people in social networks leads to difficulty in assigning proper weights to relationship ties, 3R offers a means for assessing relatedness between people over time. Additionally, 3R can be applied beyond people relatedness to include word associations. To illustrate these two novel contributions, the authors reconstructed the temporal evolution of a social network from 2005 to 2009 of 92 individuals (key leaders) related to the U.S. financial crisis and also examined the temporal evolution of social sentiment (i.e., fear, shame, blame, confidence) related to the same 92 individuals. We found several illustrative cases where temporal changes in centrality and/or sentiment captured actual events related to these individuals during this time period.