Servant Leadership and its Relationships with Core Self-Evaluation and Job Satisfaction

Servant leadership is a growing topic in the leadership literature. Our study considered servant leadership’s relationship to two outcomes, core self-evaluation and job satisfaction. The former is particularly noteworthy because if servant leadership predicts core self-evaluation this would confirm that servant leadership affects important changes in employees as people, a central tenet of servant leadership. In addition, if servant leadership predicts core self-evaluation, this could add to the question of whether core self-evaluation is a non-changeable personality trait or is potentially malleable. We conducted a field study of three firms and found that servant leadership predicts both core self-evaluation and job satisfaction, and that core self-evaluation also predicts job satisfaction. This study contributes to servant leadership, and in general to values-based leadership, by observing a predictive relationship to core self-evaluation, which potentially adds new information about the impact servant leadership can have on individuals. This study confirms the findings of previous authors who found that servant leadership predicts job satisfaction

Burning Man Values Examined: Gratitude as a Culturally-Driven and Value-Based Organizational Mainstay

Gratitude expression is examined as a culturally-derived principle that can be adopted as a best practices strategy that can make organizations more dynamic and human relationships more meaningful. Burning Man is presented as an exemplar of gratitude implementation by crafting the expression of gratitude into an elevated organizational phenomenon (including a cultural principal of unconditional gifting). Burning Man has also crafted a “Culture of Appreciation” as a set of organizationally-derived practices complementary to processes of gratitude implementation. The paper concludes with a discussion of gratitude and appreciation as an organizational mainstay

Cultures of Servant Leadership and Their Impact

Servant Leadership has primarily been studied at the level of individual leaders and their impact, yet Greenleaf, who first formally proposed the idea in 1970, also considered the construct as an important institutional element. Further, because it is values-based, and culture is the organizational mechanism for developing and transmitting shared values, an organizational lens for studying servant leadership is also needed. The current study of three firms examines organizational differences in servant leadership. We found organizational differences in levels of servant leadership, suggesting a cultural explanation. We also found that individual (i.e., supervisor) and organizational (i.e., cultural) servant leadership have different effects on employee outcomes, suggesting a unique asset attributable to a culture of servant leadership. Finally, we found that employees high in core self-evaluation are more likely to identify leaders with a servant leadership orientation, suggesting that such individuals can facilitate cultural transmission of servant leadership in an organization. Implications to theory and practice are discussed

Assessing the Effectiveness of Whole Person Learning Pedagogy in Skill Acquisition

We describe a whole person learning experiential/behavioral skill pedagogy developed in an executive skills course. The pedagogy was designed to address recent criticisms of MBA education relative to program relevancy and the skill sets of students entering the workforce. We present an experiential learning model based on the concept of whole person learning, discuss how the model is used in the class, and provide an empirical assessment of skill improvement over a 5-year period. Using a pre–posttest with control group design to test student skill levels by way of an assessment center, the effectiveness of the pedagogy was supported. The skills assessed included communication, teamwork, leadership/initiative, decision making, and planning/organizing. Guidance is provided for implementing the pedagogy into MBA curricula. We describe a whole person learning experiential/behavioral skill pedagogy developed in an executive skills course. The pedagogy was designed to address recent criticisms of MBA education relative to program relevancy and the skill sets of students entering the workforce. We present an experiential learning model based on the concept of whole person learning, discuss how the model is used in the class, and provide an empirical assessment of skill improvement over a 5-year period. Using a pre–posttest with control group design to test student skill levels by way of an assessment center, the effectiveness of the pedagogy was supported. The skills assessed included communication, teamwork, leadership/initiative, decision making, and planning/organizing. Guidance is provided for implementing the pedagogy into MBA curricula

CEO succession and the CEO’s commitment to the status quo

Chief executive officer (CEO) commitment to the status quo (CSQ) is expected to play an important role in any firm’s strategic adaptation. CSQ is used often as an explanation for strategic change occurring after CEO succession: new CEOs are expected to reveal a lower CSQ than established CEOs. Although widely accepted in the literature, this relationship remains imputed but unobserved. We address this research gap and analyze whether new CEOs reveal lower CSQ than established CEOs. By analyzing the letters to the shareholders of German HDAX firms, we find empirical support for our hypothesis of a lower CSQ of newly appointed CEOs compared to established CEOs. However, our detailed analyses provide a differentiated picture. We find support for a lower CSQ of successors after a forced CEO turnover compared to successors after a voluntary turnover, which indicates an influence of the mandate for change on the CEO’s CSQ. However, against the widespread assumption, we do not find support for a lower CSQ of outside successors compared to inside successors, which calls for deeper analyses of the insiderness of new CEOs. Further, our supplementary analyses propose a revised tenure effect: the widely assumed relationship of an increase in CSQ when CEO tenure increases might be driven mainly by the event of CEO succession and may not universally and continuously increase over time, pointing to a “window of opportunity” to initiate strategic change shortly after the succession event. By analyzing the relationship between CEO succession and CEO CSQ, our results contribute to the CSQ literature and provide fruitful impulses for the CEO succession literature

Why Have we Neglected Vicarious Experiential Learning?

The literature of experiential learning has failed, almost exclusively, to address the perspective of vicarious experiential learning in research schema or conceptual models. We have not found any ABSEL references, for example, that focus on the vicarious dimension as a research perspective or as a fully expressed conceptual framework. Therefore, we ask the question “Why have we neglected vicarious experiential learning?” We address this question by reviewing the genesis of vicarious experiential learning from the literature of modeling and self-efficacy. We develop a model comparing vicarious experiential learning with direct experiential learning. The paper concludes with some explanations of the efficacy of vicarious experiential learning and methodological definitions of the concept

An Exploration of Overconfidence in Experiential Learning of Behavioral Skills among MBA Students

Several problems cited by instructors in organizational behavior (OB) (Burke & Moore, 2003) may be attributable in part to overconfidence among students. One question of interest to ABSEL scholars is the extent to which experiential learning environments interact with this phenomenon. While overconfidence is a well-known OB construct, its effect on acquisition of interpersonal behavioral skills in experiential learning settings is not well understood. In a study of MBA students exposed to an experiential behaviorally-based class featuring assessment centers, we found that overconfidence was a pervasive phenomenon, that it was an even larger phenomenon in the most interpersonally-oriented skills (leadership and teamwork), and we found that overconfidence was reduced between assessment centers and when disconfirming feedback was provided. Finally, we found some evidence that overconfident individuals performed more variably on a subsequent assessment center measurement. Implications for experiential learning theory and educational practice are discussed

Diversity's harvest: Interactions of diversity sources and communication technology on creative group performance

Our research is based on arguments that three different diversity sources in groups - agreeableness, openness, and ethnicity - might simultaneously possess separation properties that result in social categorization and variety properties that provide non-redundant and value-adding information resources. To help understand how these diversity sources interact with the additive and reductive features of communication technology to impact group creativity, we designed two studies involving computer mediation, nominal group technique, and face-to-face (control) communication. Our findings suggest that agreeableness, openness, and ethic diversity possess both negative separation and positive variety properties. Whereas the separation properties of all three diversity sources, as well as the variety properties of openness diversity, are evident in newly-formed groups, the variety properties of agreeableness and ethnic diversity are only manifest in mature groups. Finally, the additive and reductive features of communication technology interact with all three diversity sources to impact creative group performance in different ways.Group diversity Computer mediated communication Creativity

An Empirical Test of “Behavioral Immersion” in Experiential Learning

This paper describes a study of the effectiveness of experiential learning of behavioral skills by proposing the concept of “behavioral immersion” or learning intensity as a potential pedagogical asset in experientially based management education. The experiential learning literature, including the collected works published by ABSEL, has little to say specifically about the efficacy of behavioral immersion techniques. Nor does the extant literature offer guidelines as to how to increase experiential learning effectiveness by increasing learning intensity. We tested and found support for our hypothesis of the power of behavioral immersion by assessing improvement on a pre-test, experiential pedagogy, post-test design, such that MBA students in an immersive (summer session) environment displayed greater skill acquisition through assessment center testing than did traditional (fall/spring session) students

Voices from the Trenches: Personal Reflections of an MBA Program

Three instructors with extensive experience teaching a behaviorally-based required MBA course in executive skills utilized whole person experiential learning methodologies over a period of years. This paper discusses the rewards, opportunities, challenges, and frustrations these instructors encountered. Borrowing from the format employed by the Academy of Management Learning and Educatio