Leadership Transition

This chapter addresses the transition of leadership authority. This event occurs after an empowered leader’s assignment comes to an end. Leadership transition starts with a reflection and decision on the compatibility of the role’s conditions with the empowered leader’s actual behavior. In addition, internal and external contingencies are taken into account to decide on the continuation, change, or termination of the empowered leader’s assignment. Finally, to improve future leader selection and empowerment, a decision is made to abandon, change, or continue the criteria for leader selection in similar situations. The chapter is framed through transition theory and uses the morphogenetic cycle to explain the decision-making processes. The chapter ends with a model on leadership transition in balanced leadership.

Voters’ Motivation for Selecting the Party Leader: The Case of the Italian Democratic Party

Political parties suffer from a lasting, consolidated and, probably, irreversible crisis. However, they have begun a laborious process of adaptation which, among other things, has led to the spread of some new organizational practices. In general terms, looking at the party on the ground, we have seen a significant spread of inclusive procedures in party decision-making, which, in other words, has meant a strengthening of intra-party democracy. In particular, the inclusion of party members and, sometimes, sympathizers concerns not only the formulation of a policy position, but also the selection of party candidates and leadership. This article focuses on the inclusive process of leadership selection of the Italian Democratic Party (DP) occurred in 2013, 2017 and 2019. Since its inception, the Democratic Party has introduced the figure of the supporter, i.e. a voter not formally enrolled in the party but authorized to participate in a number of internal decision-making processes, including the selection of the party leader. Using the survey data from the research group Candidate and Leader Selection (CLS), the article explores the relationship between selectors and the primaries, looking particularly to the motivations behind the choice of vote. The analysis is based on over 8,000 interviews conducted through the exit poll technique and collected from 2013 to 2019. The article shows that voters self-positioning on the left-right axis and their strategic orientation are, in all three cases of primaries, the most relevant variables for explaining the selectors’ motivations.

DESIGN OF CONTROLLABLE LEADER–FOLLOWER NETWORKS VIA MEMETIC ALGORITHMS

In many engineered and natural networked systems, there has been great interest in leader selection and/or edge assignment during the optimal design of controllable networks. In this paper, we present our pioneering work in leader–follower network design via memetic algorithms, which focuses on minimizing the number of leaders or the amount of control energy while ensuring network controllability. We consider three problems in this paper: (1) selecting the minimum number of leaders in a pre-defined network with guaranteed network controllability; (2) selecting the leaders in a pre-defined network with the minimum control energy; and (3) assigning edges (interactions) between nodes to form a controllable leader–follower network with the minimum control energy. The proposed framework can be applied in designing signed, unsigned, directed, or undirected networks. It should be noted that this work is the first to apply memetic algorithms in the design of controllable networks. We chose memetic algorithms because they have been shown to be more efficient and more effective than the standard genetic algorithms in solving some optimization problems. Our simulation results provide an additional demonstration of their efficiency and effectiveness.

The Challenges in Product Design and Development in Project Management towards IR4.0

This paper provides a review about the challenges in product design and development (PDD) in the context of the Industrial Revolution 4.0 (IR 4.0), with a particular focused on the problems that may be encountered by the project management (PM) team in the PDD phase. In recent decades, there has been a large number research, design, and development studies related to IR 4.0, such as synthesizing the applications of Big Data, Internet of things (IoT), Cloud Computing, Cybersecurity, and Artificial Intelligence. The effect of this revolution in technology is changing rapidly with new models and methods of manufacturing that have been proposed for the new future. The pandemic Covid-19 also accelerates the interest in using all kinds of online technology. However, to adapt and achieve the benefits of this revolution, industry players have to encounter several issues related to the PM, especially during the PDD phase. The management challenges discussed in this study were divided into four categories: the project team member selection, team leader selection, identifying potential customers, and design for the environment. In addition, some of the solutions and recommendation has been described using several examples.

Leader Selection and Dynamics Analysis under Leader-Based Collective Bargaining for Buyers’ Alliance

This paper focuses on the leader selection from the leader-based collective bargaining system, where buyers form an alliance and designate one of them as the leader to bargain with the supplier for a lower wholesale price of their common component. We construct the dynamic bargaining system consisting of two heterogeneous buyers and one supplier to analyze the influence of the enterprise nature and bargaining power on the leader selection. It was proved that the buyer with stronger bargaining power should be the leader. However, we find that, when the buyers are heterogeneous, the result may be different. In order to explore which factor plays a more important role in the leader selection, we design two rounds of bargaining for comparison. The interesting results imply that whether the bargaining power will reverse the leader selection in the first round depends on its growth rate. The nonlinear dynamics theory is also introduced to analyze the complex behaviors in the dynamic bargaining system. We analyze the influence of adjustment speed on the dynamic bargaining system and obtain the conditions required to maintain system stability. Considering the significance of system stability, the delayed feedback control mechanism is adopted to drive chaos back to stability.