Leadership for sustainability: fostering organizational learning to achieve radical innovations

PurposeWhile concerns about the social and environmental impact that result from business activity continue to grow, a stream of research consolidates to understand the mechanisms that can favor more sustainable companies. The present study tries to expand the knowledge of the antecedents of radical innovation by analyzing the effects of alternative and understudied constructs. Grounded on stewardship and organizational learning theories, this paper analyzes how leaders that are concerned with sustainability and the social impact of their companies may boost this type of innovation by facilitating an organizational context that promotes experimentation, dialog, participative decision-making, risk-taking and interaction with the external environment.Design/methodology/approachThrough structural equation modeling, the study provides empirical evidence of the positive effect of stewardship leader behavior on radical innovation, using organizational learning capability as an explanatory variable.FindingsResults suggest that organizational learning capability fully mediates the relationship between stewardship leader behavior and radical innovation.Research limitations/implicationsThis research focuses on a sample frame of Spanish companies with recognized excellence in human resources management.Practical implicationsIn the context of a growing interest in sustainable development, and concern for the consequences of economic and business activities, this study highlights the role played by stewardship leader behavior to foster radical innovation and organizational learning capability which, in turn, represent essential tools to compete in a globalized and turbulent context.Originality/valueTo the authors’ knowledge, this is the first empirical study that analyzes the mediating effect of organizational learning capability in the relationship between stewardship leader behavior and radical innovation. This paper contributes to the understanding of how stewardship leader behavior affects radical innovation and the key role played by organizational learning capability.

Harmful Leader Behaviors: Toward an Increased Understanding of How Different Forms of Unethical Leader Behavior Can Harm Subordinates

Research on unethical leadership has predominantly focused on interpersonal and high-intensity forms of harmful leader behavior such as abusive supervision. Other forms of harmful leader behavior such as excessively pressuring subordinates or acting in self-centered ways have received less attention, despite being harmful and potentially occurring more frequently. We propose a model of four types of harmful leader behavior (HLB) varying in intensity (high vs low) and orientation (people/relationships or tasks/goals): Intimidation, Lack of Care, Self-Centeredness, and Excessive Pressure for Results. We map out how these relate to other constructs in the unethical leader behavior field in order to integrate the existing work on how leaders can cause harm to followers. Next, in five studies (N = 35, N = 218, N = 352, N = 160, N = 1921 in 196 teams), we develop and test a new survey instrument measuring the four proposed types of perceived HLB. We provide initial validity evidence for this new measure, establish its psychometric properties, and examine its nomological network by linking the four types of HLB to related leadership constructs and soft and hard outcome correlates at the individual and team level. We find that HLB is negatively related to constructive forms of leadership (e.g., ethical and transformational) and positively to unethical ones (e.g., abusive supervision). HLB is also related in the expected direction to job satisfaction, engagement, psychological safety, knowledge sharing, knowledge hiding, deviance, and objectively recorded team-level stress-related absenteeism.

Humble Leader Behavior and Its Effects on Performance at the Team and Individual Level: A Multi-Perspective Study

Drawing upon social information processing theory, this study builds a multilevel model to explore the effects of humble leader behavior on performance in teams. Time-lagged and multi-source data were gathered from 298 employees across 70 work teams. Results indicated that at the individual level, humble leader behavior was positively related to individual performance via organization-based self-esteem, while at the team level, humble leader behavior was positively related to team performance via team potency. Moreover, team cognitive diversity moderated the indirect effects of humble leader behavior on individual and team performances, such that the positive indirect effects were stronger for teams with high cognitive diversity than for those with low cognitive diversity. Implications and limitations are also discussed.

Flexible Adaptation of Leader Behavior

Based on the model of ambidextrous leadership, we investigated the impact of flexible adaptation of leader behavior, that is, opening and closing leader behaviors, on innovative performance in a laboratory experiment. Leader behaviors were manipulated with confederates attending to one participant showing either no leadership, a sequential, or a flexible application of opening and closing leader behaviors. We hypothesized that flexible adaptation leads to better innovation performance. N = 93 participants took part and received one leadership manipulation. We did not find significant effects. These findings suggest that the effects of ambidextrous leadership might not be as strong as previously expected. Nonetheless, this study provides a manipulation of flexible leadership in a controlled setting, which is important to provide causal evidence.

The Power of Followers That do not Follow: Investigating the Effects of Follower Resistance, Leader Implicit Followership Theories and Leader Negative Affect on the Emergence of Destructive Leader Behavior

This study focuses on follower resistance as a potential antecedent of destructive leader behavior and examines leader-related moderators and mediators to help explain the relationship between follower resistance and destructive leader behavior. Drawing from implicit followership theories, we propose that the relationship between follower resistance and destructive leader behavior is moderated by leaders’ Theory X schema. Furthermore, we build on affective events theory to hypothesize that follower resistance increases destructive leader behavior via leaders’ negative affect. We tested our hypotheses in a within-subjects online field experiment. Our study findings demonstrate that follower resistance increases destructive leader behavior and that this relationship is mediated through leaders’ negative affect and moderated by leaders’ Theory X schema. We discuss theoretical implications regarding the impact of (resistant) follower behavior on destructive leadership and offer methodological advances in terms of research design and analytical approaches to deal with endogeneity issues and derive causal inferences. Lastly, we derive practical implications for utilizing follower resistance.

Military Leader Behavior Formation for Sustainable Country Security

The continuous improvement of military leadership identity to maintain excellent performance with respect to the promotion of mission success is a highly desired by the Lithuanian Armed Forces. This study seeks to identify the criteria for effective leadership behavior that is appreciated by Lithuanian servicemen. The validated Leader Behavior Description Questionnaire (LBDQ XII) was used to collect data representing followers’ preferences with respect to commander–leader behavior by assessing twelve leadership behavior criteria. Additionally, commander–leaders were chosen as experts to judge the importance of the criteria by pair-wise assessment. Consequently, the Fuzzy Decision Making (FDM) with Fuzzy Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) method based on the new concept of the relationship between the influenced and influencing criteria were employed to analyze the ranking using leadership behavior and to establish the causal relationships among the criteria when the collected data were expressed in trapezoidal fuzzy numbers. This study contributes to military leadership by using a novel approach for identifying and prioritizing the behavior criteria for leaders. The results indicate six “cause” constructs: ability to persuade, taking the lead, result orientation, accurate forecasting, building interpersonal relationships, and cooperation with managers. These findings could assist militaries in designing effective improvement strategies for continuous leadership training.