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As organizations strive for more flexibility, decentralized decision‐making has been at the core of many modern HR approaches. Yet, on a company‐wide scale, it remains unclear whether decentralized decision‐making structures improve organizational performance. Our study aims to illuminate prior ambiguous evidence by examining an employee‐level mechanism underlying the organizational‐level relationship between decentralization and performance, and scrutinizing the critical role of formal leaders for empowering employees in decentralized structures. Integrating the perspective of organizational structure as opportunities and constraints with social information processing theory, we argue that transferring decision‐making authority to lower organizational levels positively affects employees' emergent leadership, but only to the extent that direct supervisors engage in empowering leadership and guide employees' behaviors in decentralized structures. Our predictions are supported by a multilevel, multisource field study of 5807 individuals across 144 companies. We further find that emergent leadership yields a positive effect on organizational performance. By developing a multilevel model that explicates both an employee‐level mechanism and a contingency of the decentralization–organizational performance link, our study enriches understanding of the key role that formal leaders play for achieving the strategic goals of decentralized decision‐making in organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Unternehmung: Swiss Journal of Business Research & Practice is the property of Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Gruppe. Interaktion. Organisation: Zeitschrift für Angewandte Organisationspsychologie (GIO) is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Recent advances in leadership research suggest that collective-focused leadership climate and differentiated individual-focused leadership might simultaneously, yet oppositely, affect collective outcomes. The present study extends this literature by addressing open questions regarding theory, methods, statistics, and level of analysis. Therefore, a new and more parsimonious theoretical model is developed on the organizational-level of analysis. Drawing on the commitment literature, we argue for opposite relations of the two leadership constructs on the affective organizational commitment climate. We subsequently theorize that contingent-reward leadership climate moderates these opposing relationships, making our study the first in this field to investigate moderators. Last, we reason that organizational effectiveness is enhanced when affective commitment is “put into action” and raises the organizational citizenship behavior climate. Our three-path moderated-mediation hypotheses are tested, and supported, by structural equation modeling analyses in a multisource data set containing 16,911 respondents from 157 companies. Extensive alternative model testing shows that our theory and findings are robust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study puts a core assumption of the recently-emerged concept of transformational leadership (TFL) climate under direct empirical scrutiny; namely, that it is not only the average level (i.e., the mean perceptions among employees), but also the level of homogeneity (i.e., the variance in perceptions) which is important for understanding the effect of TFL climate on organizational outcomes. By developing and testing an interaction hypothesis in a dual-source dataset containing 107 small- and medium-sized organizations, we extend previous knowledge in two important ways. First, we extend the limited empirical evidence on TFL climate by relating it for the first time to organizational performance. Second, we test the previously assumed, but never investigated, assumption of homogeneity for the TFL climate construct at the organizational level. Our results show that it is important to investigate such underlying core assumptions, as the average level of TFL climate was found to relate more strongly to organizational performance with increasing levels of homogeneity in TFL climate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Autumn 2004 issue of Business Strategy Review we published one of the final articles by Sumantra Ghoshal. With characteristic intellectual brio, Ghoshal and his co-author Heike Bruch argue that effective execution lies at the heart of achieving superior business performance and that purposeful action-taking by managers — both individually and collectively — lies at the heart of effective execution. The trouble is that five years of research by Ghoshal and Bruch showed that only a relatively small proportion of managers actually engage in such purposeful action-taking. What are the causes of this pervasive lack of purposeful action-taking by managers? What is different about those who do take purposeful action? What can managers do to enhance their personal actiontaking ability? And what can corporate leaders do to create an organisational context in which others can take purposeful action? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although research has long focused on the consequences of leaders' charismatic behavior, the antecedents of such leadership are increasingly gaining scholarly attention. Nevertheless, the antecedent-oriented literature on charismatic leadership has been fragmented to date and lacks theoretical integration. Also, important gaps remain within this developing line of inquiry. Therefore, this article systematically reviews extant research on charismatic leadership behavior emergence and advances a more comprehensive perspective by integrating previous work into an overall conceptual framework. Building on these considerations, the authors outline potentially fruitful directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following recent interest in contextual factors and how they might influence the effects of transformational leadership, we consider the social distance between leaders and followers as a cross-level moderator of the relationships between senior level managers' transformational leadership and individual-level outcomes. Our sample comprised 268 individuals in 50 leader-follower groups. Results revealed that high social distance reduced or neutralized transformational leadership's association with followers' emulation of leader behavior. In contrast, high levels of social distance between leaders and followers enhanced the effects of transformational leadership on individuals' perceptions of their units' positive emotional climate and individuals' sense of collective efficacy. Results not only highlight the importance of social distance as a contextual variable affecting leader-follower relations but also suggest that the same contextual variable may have differential effects, enhancing some relationships and neutralizing others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use the case of German aviation Group Deutsche Lufthansa and its strategic change program, ‘D-Check Maintaining Leadership’, to illustrate how a large company was able to execute group-wide change in order to effectively secure its future despite a highly turbulent environment. In this context, we found that top executives must systematically make two decisions. First, they need to decide what the right change is for their company and second, they need to decide how to implement the change correctly. In the process of making these decisions, various critical factors also need to be taken into individual consideration in a methodical, deliberate way. Details of Lufthansa's program are provided and the benefits of and insights into pre-implementation decision-making processes are assessed for framing and subsequently implementing strategic change. The impact of leadership and management decisions for successful strategic change is discussed in the analysis. We round up our discussion with major lessons learned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Effective execution lies at the heart of achieving superior business performance, and purposeful action-taking by managers lies at the heart of effective execution. This article shows that only a relatively small proportion of managers actually engage in such purposeful action taking. A set of answers have been developed to the research questions, namely: What are the causes of this lack of action-taking by managers? What is different about those who take purposeful action? What can managers do to enhance their personal action-taking ability? And what can corporate leaders do to create an organizational context in which others can take purposeful action? A broad overview is given on some of the key findings of an investigation of the phenomenon of managerial action-taking.