A Lack of Willpower May Influence a Leader’s Ability to Act Morally

Acts of moral leadership do not come without risks of loss of employment, a lessening of personal stature, and compromised mental and physical wellbeing. Thus, the quest to act as a values-based leader necessarily commands the exercise of unfettered willpower and a tenacious willingness to assume such risks

We Are Asking the Wrong Question about Leadership: The Case for ‘Good-Enough’ Leadership

This chapter presents the argument that leadership is not always effective, even though we know a great deal about what makes leadership effective. Consequently, we are asking the wrong question when we inquire into what makes leadership effective. A more interesting question is that when we know so much about effective leadership, why are leaders sometimes unable to exercise effective leadership? Why do not they do as they should? The answer discussed here is that leadership is often ineffective because people are imperfect, including leaders. Therefore, there are individual and organisational barriers to effective leadership, as well as constraints in the environment. Better education and training programmes for leaders, as well as more robust and transparent methods of recruitment and selection of leaders, may remedy this to some extent. But it is perhaps more important to accept the fact that leadership is often ineffective and that we should settle for ‘good enough’. This perspective offers us the opportunity to investigate the barriers to effective leadership and what may be done to reduce them. This is a better way forward for researchers and practitioners than the present dominating focus within leadership literature on unobtainable ideals involving flawless acts carried out by perfect human beings operating in rational organisational environments

Leadership in times of crisis: Who is working on a dream?

[Excerpt] The author of this commentary is based in Norway, a small, rich country in the far north of the world. As in many other countries, Norwegian society is being put to the test, and our political leadership, or lack of it, is coming under the spotlight. The coronavirus crisis certainly requires value-based leadership on many different fronts, involving not only medicine and economics but also political leadership. This latter area is the subject of this commentary

What Do We Really Mean By Good Leadership?

The article discusses the concept of good leadership. According to classical philosophy, good leadership requires voluntary followership towards good goals. It is argued that leaders in any case are rarely able to independently practice good leadership because of all the barriers and restrictions, such as environmental, organizational and personal obstacles. People are fallible; so are leaders. Also, many people and leaders themselves have too high expectations of what leadership can achieve. The answer to the question of what constitutes good leadership is that leadership should be “good enough”, without leaders lowering the requirements of how they treat other people or without taking ethical shortcuts

Leadership is a Practice Shaped by Everyday Actions in Messy Organisational Realities

Practice-oriented perspectives of leadership suggest that we should relate more to organisational realities as they are ‘in practice’. This entails studying patterns of actions with a certain form, direction, purpose or objective. Leadership researchers have not often focused on conducting empirical studies of everyday life and challenges within organisations, which may have contributed to a possible gap between theory and leadership practice. Thus, there is a need for other perspectives, both for researchers and leaders. Rather than presenting idealised notions of what leaders should do, the premise of practice perspectives is that leadership is shaped through leaders’ actions in their everyday environments. The sum of such actions over time constitutes a practice that takes place within a community of collective practice. This entails leadership is understood as a function, a process and an action. Accordingly, research into practice is not so much concerned with identifying normative models and characteristics of the individual but rather shifts the focus from the individual to processes and actions. For leaders, this means that they must develop their own leadership practice regarding how to deal with organisational realities, their messiness and complexity

Constructing managerial manoeuvring space in contradictory contexts

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The role of values in collaborative consumption: insights from a product-service system for lending and borrowing in the UK

Collaborative consumption is an emerging socio-economic model based on sharing, renting, gifting, bartering, swapping, lending and borrowing. Made possible through community interaction and, increasingly, use of network technologies, these alternative and more sustainable ways of consuming have attracted growing attention for their potential to prevent new purchases, intensify the use of idle assets and promote reuse of possessions that are no longer wanted. Nonetheless, the uptake of Product- Service Systems (PSSs) that enable collaborative consumption is still very limited. This paper investigates how consumers' values can influence the acceptance, adoption and diffusion of collaborative consumption. It reviews two theoretical frameworks used to understand pro-environmental behaviour, social psychological models of behaviour and social practice theory. Coming from contrasting disciplinary perspectives, these approaches conceptualise values differently. The paper evaluates the possibility of resolving these differences through a mixed methods study. It examines values empirically through a case study of Ecomodo, a UK-based online marketplace where people can lend and borrow each other's objects, spaces and skills, and present the results of a quantitative study which identified and measured value priorities among Ecomodo users through Schwartz's Portrait Value Questionnaire. It concludes with a discussion of the role of values in relation to the introduction and scaling up of PSSs that enable collaborative consumption

Maximizing diversity in biology and beyond

Entropy, under a variety of names, has long been used as a measure of diversity in ecology, as well as in genetics, economics and other fields. There is a spectrum of viewpoints on diversity, indexed by a real parameter q giving greater or lesser importance to rare species. Leinster and Cobbold proposed a one-parameter family of diversity measures taking into account both this variation and the varying similarities between species. Because of this latter feature, diversity is not maximized by the uniform distribution on species. So it is natural to ask: which distributions maximize diversity, and what is its maximum value? In principle, both answers depend on q, but our main theorem is that neither does. Thus, there is a single distribution that maximizes diversity from all viewpoints simultaneously, and any list of species has an unambiguous maximum diversity value. Furthermore, the maximizing distribution(s) can be computed in finite time, and any distribution maximizing diversity from some particular viewpoint q > 0 actually maximizes diversity for all q. Although we phrase our results in ecological terms, they apply very widely, with applications in graph theory and metric geometry.Comment: 29 page