Envisioning innovation:Does visionary leadership engender team innovative performance through goal alignment?

Visionary leaders paint an image of the future with the intention to persuade others to contribute to the realization of that specific future. In the current study, we test the hypothesis that visionary leadership stimulates team creativity and innovation because visionary leadership promotes goal alignment amongst team members which, in turn, facilitates team creativity and innovation. In an experimental study (N = 50 groups), we found that goal alignment indeed mediated the relationship between visionary leadership and team creativity, but not between visionary leadership and team innovation. In a field study (N = 308 respondents) we found visionary leadership to be related to both team creativity and innovation through goal alignment. Moreover, the field study also showed that communication quality strengthened the relationship between goal alignment and team innovation. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of visionary leadership in teams where creativity and innovation are desirable team performance outcomes

Integrating Values, Purposes, and Visions for Responsible Development

This chapter highlights a study showing that knowledge sharing and envisioning processes can have positive effects on human and social capital growth within a network. The chapter begins by arguing that a responsible development perspective can be more proactive approach than a sustainability perspective. Some actors (non-profit, public, and private) have achieved responsible development goals by integrating values, purposes and visions. More specifically, we conducted a study testing a methodology that can guide a process of building a strategic vision within a network with the goal of improving their responsible development orientation. The chosen methodology is “Participatory Action Research”. The implementation of the envisioning process was studied via quantitative/qualitative research tools. The methodology was tested in an official cross-country project funded by the European Commission. The project was selected as a best practice by the same European Union Commission. The study highlights the importance of envisioning processes in building social and human capital at the inter-organizational level and, in particular, in highly complex sectors such as those oriented towards improving social responsibility. In fact, work on the envisioning process itself represents an essential instrument for developing strategic objectives to be shared among actors within networks that intend to promote responsible development and improve their human and social capital. This bottom-up process of envisioning can also facilitate cultural interaction among community members, even in a cross-country context. This relevant “learning-by-interacting” experience, can create a growth process for the human and social capital of entire communities. The creation of social capital also promotes the development of shared knowledge and advances leading to the general understanding of common core objectives and appropriate ways of acting within the social system. The chapter ends with recommendations for future research

Business groups and corporate responsibility for the public good

This paper analyses the relationship between Business Groups as a distinct way of organizing economic activities and their relation to the public good. We first analyze the phenomenon of Business Groups and discuss some of their core features. Subsequently, the paper moves to analyzing the existing literature on Business Groups and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as the most common label for the topic of this Special Issue. Subsequently, specific peculiarities of Business Groups in the context of CSR and their contribution to the public good are fleshed out. Based on this analysis, the paper delineates some implications for the field of CSR and the wider debate on the nature of the firm. We close with some perspectives for future research