Developing Teams in a Virtual Environment: A Generative Approach

At the beginning of 2020, the operations of the Finance Hub of the Americas (FHoA) at pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) were suddenly forced to shift entirely from face-to-face to remote work. To handle this challenge, an FHoA team started a team development process aimed at strengthening teamwork in virtual environments. The intervention was grounded in the principles of generative leadership and dialogic organization development. Through a scholar-practitioner collaboration that focused on identifying the drivers of the successful transition to remote work, we build a three-step process of team development using the metaphor of organic growth: (1) sowing, (2) nurturing, and (3) flourishing. Using GSK's example, we illustrate how this process became a simple but powerful strategy to help teams thrive in a virtual environment. The core of the process uses generative questions to configure a structured but adaptable process that can be easily implemented in different contexts and situations.

Leaders in Limbo: The Role of Collaborative Inquiry Influencing School Leaders’ Levels of Efficacy

Using collaborative inquiry as a methodology for investigation, this study examined the implementation of a model of generative leadership (Adams et al., 2019) to explore the question: In what ways can implementation of a generative leadership model of professional learning for school leaders influence their sense of efficacy? An adapted model of generative leadership was adopted by seven school leaders in Alberta, Canada over a period of three years. Data was collected at the end of each year through journal reflections (Bashan & Holsblat, 2017) to ascertain school leaders’ levels of efficacy. Findings revealed four themes that identified how a generative leadership model influenced participants’ effectiveness in their roles. These findings offer insight into how models of school leader professional learning might be re-imagined in order to positively influence their sense of efficacy.

The impact of generative school leadership on student performance: The case of Saudi Arabia

The primary aim of this study is to facilitate interactions among the generative school leadership of high school principals in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to take responsibility for student performance. Existing research suggests that generative leadership is based on the principles of inclusiveness, employee creativity, knowledge transfer and delegation. The sample is based from nine principals from large high schools. To investigate this issue, this qualitative study assesses and analyses interviews and comments from participants. The findings show the high degree of centralisation and traditionalism of the Saudi Arabian educational sector, affecting creativity and inclusiveness, have a strong impact on student performance. The author recommends implementing teacher practitioner training to implement open-ended tasks teaching practices.

Leadership Ideas Shaped by Digital Insights in Higher Education

The paper deals with the problem of exploiting the potential of digitalization at scale by organizations in the age of information technologies and advanced analytics of data. Being at the forefront of social progress, universities inspire managers, training staff and students to reset their working, thinking and leading initiatives and embrace digital transformation of the educational environment. The study aims to research the modern thought on transformational leadership befitting universities’ distinguished title of growth engines. The methodological framework comprises modern sociological, psychological, management and complex systems science theories of leadership. The paper analyzes organizational leadership models, explains their weak and strong points, formulates the terms of realizing the leadership phenomenon in the context of digitalization, studies the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation’s experience in introducing the elements of the ‘digital university’ model. The findings support the idea that generative leadership is attainable through inter-layer and inter-cluster interaction of all educational environment members. The paper suggests a mechanism of transforming hierarchical models into generative leadership models. The theoretic and practical significance is the validation of interconditionality of digitalization and a leadership ecosystem as a variety of communications, complexity of interrelations and integrity of functioning of educational leaders.