Knowledge-Oriented Leadership, Team Cohesion, and Project Success: A Conditional Mechanism

We examined the impact of knowledge-oriented leadership on project success via team cohesion and the moderating role of valuing people and project complexity on this relationship. We collected data from 121 project employees in Pakistan in a two-wave field survey at an interval of 15 days. The results showed a positive association between knowledge-oriented leadership and project success, and team cohesion partially mediated this relationship. Valuing people positively moderated the relationship between knowledge-oriented leadership and team cohesion. Project complexity had a negative but insignificant moderating effect on project success. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Analyzing the Link between Distributed Leadership and Teachers’ Self-Efficacy Beliefs at Secondary School Level

School head teachers can no longer lead their schools on your own; they are obligated to cooperate with their leadership team members. They assign various leadership functions to teachers and allow them to contribute in decision-making process. In this context, this correlational study was mainly intended to analyze secondary school teachers’ perceptions regarding various functions of distributed leadership and to find out their relative weight in terms of predicting secondary school teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs. Furthermore, the effect of three demographical variables (i.e., gender, experience, school sector) was also studied in predicting teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs. A randomly selected sample of 1335 secondary school teachers completed self-report questionnaire comprising three parts i.e., demographic section, 23 item Distributed Leadership Inventory (Hulpia et al., 2009) and 10 item Teacher Self-efficacy Scale (Schwarzer et al.,1999). Results of descriptive analysis revealed that secondary school teachers perceived themselves as highly self-efficacious. Pearson correlation coefficient showed that all the independent variables related to distributed leadership i.e., support, supervision and coherent leadership team and dependent variable i.e., teacher self-efficacy were found to be substantially related with each other. Standard multiple regression analysis indicated that coherent leadership team variable was the strongest predictor of secondary school teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs. Results also suggested that coherence among leadership team affects secondary school teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs more positively in comparison with all the other independent variables. As regards demographical variables, school sector found to be a significant predictor of secondary school teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs. Finally, this study recommends that school leaders should work in cooperation with all the teachers with a clear view on school goals in a trustworthy and open environment avoiding any role conflicts.

Analysing Mindset Theory and Strategies Supporting the Implementation of Real PE to Develop a Growth Mindset Culture

Growth mindset continues to be a popular topic of conversation in the field of education and Physical Education (PE). However, despite the existence of various schemes for delivering curriculum PE, there are limited studies analysing how they seek to directly develop children’s mindsets. This study analyses the process taken for one of these frameworks, Real PE, to be implemented within a school to develop their growth mindset culture, drawing upon the theories of key educational thinkers. The study is based upon the authors’ experiences as PE Subject Leader and member of the school Senior Leadership Team (SLT) within a single-form entry primary school in Leicestershire, United Kingdom; testimonials from other schools who utilise Real PE and existing literature on the effectiveness of growth mindset. Implementing a growth mindset culture is not straightforward; although important, it is not solely about intelligence and praising effort, nor a battle of fixed versus growth mindsets as within PE, mixed mindsets exist, and, the fixed mindset should be legitimised. Therefore, a long-term, rigorous approach to change considering policies, individual beliefs, training needs, strategies and feedback methods needs to be developed. This study adds to the growing conversation about growth mindset and seeks to support other school settings considering embedding mindset culture within their school setting and PE provision.

The moderating role of previous venture experience on breadth of learning and innovation and the impacts on SME performance

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the moderating role of previous venture experience on the relationship between learning breadth and innovation breadth, defined as the range of innovation types within a firm, and the impacts on SME performance.Design/methodology/approachA theoretical model was developed, and hypotheses were tested using step-wise multivariate regressions on survey data from 509 North American SME respondents.FindingsThe results demonstrate that the previous venture experience of a firm's top management plays a key role in enhancing the innovation breadth for a given level of learning breadth. There is a curvilinear relationship between innovation breadth and learning breadth, and increases in innovation breadth lead to increases in firm performance.Practical implicationsThe results indicate that organizations seeking higher performance returns by expanding their breadth of innovations need parallel attention on higher learning breadth in order to adequately capture the value from this broader set of innovations.Originality/valueThe paper contextualizes learning and innovation in the SMEs and argues that the consideration of diversity (breadth) of learning and innovation can help us understand their performance implications across industries. It also extends the effect of previous venture experience (PVE) of the leadership team in explaining performance. Beyond their ability to address external factors, PVE has a moderating effect on the relationship between learning and innovation breadth across the organization. Previous venture experience serves as both a guide and catalyst for investments in learning activities that lead to a broader range of innovation activities across the firm.

Identity Leadership, Employee Burnout and the Mediating Role of Team Identification: Evidence from the Global Identity Leadership Development Project

Do leaders who build a sense of shared social identity in their teams thereby protect them from the adverse effects of workplace stress? This is a question that the present paper explores by testing the hypothesis that identity leadership contributes to stronger team identification among employees and, through this, is associated with reduced burnout. We tested this model with unique datasets from the Global Identity Leadership Development (GILD) project with participants from all inhabited continents. We compared two datasets from 2016/2017 (N = 5290; 20 countries) and 2020/2021 (N = 7294; 28 countries) and found very similar levels of identity leadership, team identification and burnout across the five years. An inspection of the 2020/2021 data at the onset of and later in the COVID-19 pandemic showed stable identity leadership levels and slightly higher levels of both burnout and team identification. Supporting our hypotheses, we found almost identical indirect effects (2016/2017, b = −0.132; 2020/2021, b = −0.133) across the five-year span in both datasets. Using a subset of N = 111 German participants surveyed over two waves, we found the indirect effect confirmed over time with identity leadership (at T1) predicting team identification and, in turn, burnout, three months later. Finally, we explored whether there could be a “too-much-of-a-good-thing” effect for identity leadership. Speaking against this, we found a u-shaped quadratic effect whereby ratings of identity leadership at the upper end of the distribution were related to even stronger team identification and a stronger indirect effect on reduced burnout.

Crowdsourcing Global Perspectives in Ecology Using Social Media

Transparent, open, and reproducible research is still far from routine, and the full potential of open science has not yet been realized. Crowdsourcing–defined as the usage of a flexible open call to a heterogeneous group of individuals to recruit volunteers for a task –is an emerging scientific model that encourages larger and more outwardly transparent collaborations. While crowdsourcing, particularly through citizen- or community-based science, has been increasing over the last decade in ecological research, it remains infrequently used as a means of generating scientific knowledge in comparison to more traditional approaches. We explored a new implementation of crowdsourcing by using an open call on social media to assess its utility to address fundamental ecological questions. We specifically focused on pervasive challenges in predicting, mitigating, and understanding the consequences of disturbances. In this paper, we briefly review open science concepts and their benefits, and then focus on the new methods we used to generate a scientific publication. We share our approach, lessons learned, and potential pathways forward for expanding open science. Our model is based on the beliefs that social media can be a powerful tool for idea generation and that open collaborative writing processes can enhance scientific outcomes. We structured the project in five phases: (1) draft idea generation, (2) leadership team recruitment and project development, (3) open collaborator recruitment via social media, (4) iterative paper development, and (5) final editing, authorship assignment, and submission by the leadership team. We observed benefits including: facilitating connections between unusual networks of scientists, providing opportunities for early career and underrepresented groups of scientists, and rapid knowledge exchange that generated multidisciplinary ideas. We also identified areas for improvement, highlighting biases in the individuals that self-selected participation and acknowledging remaining barriers to contributing new or incompletely formed ideas into a public document. While shifting scientific paradigms to completely open science is a long-term process, our hope in publishing this work is to encourage others to build upon and improve our efforts in new and creative ways.

Crossref Annual Meeting LIVE21

The Crossref annual meeting and board election took place on November 9th, 2021, online. The outputs include slide deck, transcript of Q&A, recording, and recording transcript (all in English). The content includes strategic updates from our leadership team as well as the results of the board election.

Crossref Annual Meeting LIVE21 presentation

The Crossref annual meeting and board election took place on November 9th, 2021, online. This slide deck includes strategic updates from our leadership team as well as the results of the board election.