The overall aim of this volume is to present the research studies carried out in the Middle East and Asia in the fields of culture and gender and their influence on leadership in particular. The cultures and practices of these geographical regions are very much varied and this book, "Culture and Gender in Leadership: Perspectives from the Middle East and Asia," brings together analyses of these themes in selected countries of these two regions. The chapter authors use detailed descriptions, case studies and vignettes to speak to the cultural relativism and gender in leadership in these countries and provide a unique and comparative perspective drawn from their own cultures.
This volume also contributes to the development of theory and empirical research found in these regions and through the collective efforts presented in this book, attempts to strengthen the body of knowledge and practice in the fields of culture and gender in leadership. As Asia is becoming the engine of economic growth for the world and Arab Spring is opening up new vistas in the Middle East, this book is a must read.

Charles Waldo takes a penetrating, behind-the-scenes look at today's trends in the corporate board room. He details the current and likely future roles boards of large firms will have to play and describes the interplay between the CEO and the directors. He describes current board composition and committee makeups and suggests the need for some new and uncommon committees. He notes the impact that changes in roles and structures have on the need for better information by board members and details the the types of financial and operating information directors receive from management today. Waldo prescribes a model information package, emphasizing the use of trend charts, financial ratios, and other kinds of visual and comparative data put together in simple, easy-to-use formats. He also addresses the need for softer, qualitative kinds of information not generally derived from accounting systems, but even more important for directors trying to analyze what is going on and what is likely to happen.

Professionals Making Judgments examines the role of judgment in professional work and as a constitutive principle of professionalism more broadly. The book reviews the professionalism and makes the argument that too many studies of professionalism put emphasis on rational decision-making at the expense of intuition, experiences, and acquired skills that enables professionals to operate effectively. In addition, the volume discusses the concept of heterarchy as an organizational form that not only tolerates but actively encourages alternative views and therefore promotes professional judgment as a key skill. The more theoretical parts of the book are complemented by empirical studies of three distinct domains of professional practice in reproductive medicine, in a faith-based organization (the Church of Sweden), and a regional government agency. The volume thus contributes to the literature on professionalism by making a connection between analytical skills, decision-making capacities, and performance in professional work without reducing professional work to one-dimensional forms of rationality.

Although sustainability efforts in business are still a work in progress, it is increasingly clear that key elements of a new generation of enterprises will be radically different from those of our contemporary modern industrial economy. The core distinctions between what currently exists and what is being created are communicated in this book through the compelling metaphor of "Ants, Galileo, and Gandhi."This collection, developed from The Natural Step's conference on Sustainability and Innovation in 2002, provides radical ideas for generating a new perspective on the dynamics of business systems. 'Ants' symbolize the lessons to be learned from nature and the dependence of individual beings on broader, complex systems. "Galileo" embodies brilliance in perceiving and proving that the current paradigm is flawed. "Gandhi" exemplifies exceptional compassion in fighting for fundamental change. All of these attributes are increasingly relevant in a world where, globally, we are experiencing both a steady decline in life-supporting resources and rising demands. Recognition of these challenges is sparking innovation within the private sector where the first glimmers of systemic change can be seen. The book examines the emergence of 21st-century enterprises that recognize their reliance on broad social and ecological systems ("ants"), incorporate sparks of genius rooted in rigorous analyses ('Galileo'), and acknowledge the importance of compassion and determination within any endeavour ('Gandhi'). With contributions from Ray Anderson, Gretchen Daily, Karl-Henrik Robert, Alois Flatz, Allen White and many more, the book illustrates that pioneering companies recognize that new opportunities emerge from recognizing the broader systems on which all businesses rely. Efforts to work with ecological and social dynamics of vibrancy and resilience offer a new space for innovation. Companies are stepping into this space and exploring innovative approaches to developing sustainability-focused products, operations and strategies. These sustainability-inspired business efforts are considering new ways to address human needs and desires. The most promising approaches are based on systems thinking and recognition of the linkages between 'upstream' and 'downstream' effects of actions. Understanding the undesired 'downstream' impacts of a firm's practices draws attention 'upstream'. This assessment highlights the most expedient approach: to design these impacts out of enterprises from the very start.The book is divided into five sections to present a set of theories emerging about sustainability and its application to: business strategy and operations; financial-sector practices; accountability and reporting drivers; and organizational change pathways. Together, these sections illustrate the current range of sustainability theories and applications."Ants, Galileo, and Gandhi" will be essential reading for both academics looking for robust teaching material, practitioners looking for inspiration and the general reader interested in exploring the state of the art in the realignment of 21st-century business."

This book examines the scriptural concepts that apply to leading and managing people. It begins with a chapter that contrasts leaders, managers, and administrators and the roles they each play. The book then presents the seven virtues from the Beatitudes and how these virtues result in leaders and managers' behaviors. The book then reviews the 15 characteristics of what love is and what love is not from the 1 Corinthians 12 passage. The book presents the four modalities of leaders as conveyed in the Ezekiel 1 and 10 chapters, as well as Revelations 4 where Ezekiel and John describe the four faces of the winged beings. The modalities are described in terms of contemporary leaders interacting with employees in the workplace. A chapter follows, based on the Parable of the Vineyard and how leaders should provide a minimum living wage. The book then compares the wife in Proverbs 31 to a good leader/manager in today's contemporary organization. The book ends with an admonition from Ecclesiastes 3:1 about the need for leaders/managers to step away and not meddle when the leader/manager's role is finished. Throughout the book, composite case examples provide practical application of the concepts to contemporary organizations.

Netnography has become an essential tool for qualitative research in the dynamic, complex, and conflicted worlds of contemporary technoculture. Shaped by academic fields, industries, national contexts, technologies and platforms, and languages and cultures for over two decades, netnography has impacted the research practices of scholars around the world. In this volume, 34 researchers present 19 chapters that examine how they have adapted netnography and what those changes can teach us. Positioned for students and researchers in academic and professional fields, this book examines how we can better use netnographic research to understand the many ways networked technologies affect every element of contemporary business life and consumer existence. Netnography Unlimited provides an unprecedented new look at netnography. From COVID-19 to influencer empathy, gambling and the Dark Web to public relations and the military, AI and more-than-human netnography to video-streaming and auto-netnography, there has never been a wider or deeper treatment of technocultural netnographic research in one volume. Readers will learn what kind of work they can do with netnography and gain an up-to-date understanding of the most pressing issues and opportunities. This book is a must-read for those interested in technology, research methods, and contemporary culture.

The performance of an organization ultimately rests on the quality of its people. How well they work together to develop and implement business strategies determines the organization's success in a global and competitive world. This absolute requirement for the right people, teams and organization is widely recognized by business leaders, but the equation behind it remains unknown for many. Performance Equation distills the leading-edge human resources (HR) and organizational performance concepts and models down to their fundamentals, and shows how each variable fits into a simple and integrated performance equation. It offers team leaders and HR practitioners thought-provoking ideas and the necessary challenges to conventional wisdom and political correctness needed to induce reflection and action on what the right HR program is to solve their organizational performance equation.

This second volume in a trilogy on myth making in organizing focuses on organizational virtues and vices, as well as attributes and abilities of organizations, and legendary organizations that have become mythical in themselves. These narratives are presented as organizational sagas to reveal an archetypal dimension of organizing and organizations.

This book presents conscious business as a constantly expanding and powerful approach to reinvent and shape organizations in a human and beneficial manner. In particular it examines the core characteristics, main drivers and challenges of conscious businesses in Germany. The book offers a structured overview of the current situation of the concept and outlines important issues that need to be considered in order to make independent decisions. Four case studies of successful conscious companies - differing in terms of their size, industry, legal form and international orientation - reveal concrete best practices and provide evidence for the approach's ability to deliver business paradigms that are simultaneously purposeful and profitable.

Scenario planning is the principles, methods, and techniques for looking forward into the future and trying to anticipate and influence what is to come next. This book provides students and line managers in organizations with the means to create better scenarios and to use them to create winning business strategies. The purpose is to shed new light on scenarios and scenario-like thinking in organizations for managers at every level within a company. The book covers scenarios such as: economic outlooks; political environments; acquisitions; downsizing, and more.

Organizational change is still an issue of high importance for organizations, yet many change initiatives fail. These failures are often attributed to a lack of consideration of existing organizational culture. This book explores ways to undertake cultural change within a shorter time span without losing sight of complexity and sustainability.

Industrial engineering is not known for its contribution to management requirements, which can be both challenging and varied. However, productivity and profitability are subjects that preoccupy manufacturers, distributors, warehouse managers and third-party logistics firms, many of which are multinational companies that cater to an end customer thousands of miles away. Industrial engineers must therefore follow a balance between maintaining a commitment to basic traditional tools that have been proven to improve productivity and keeping up with the evolution of their profession by staying informed about and trained in modern approaches.

This "balance" of essential information, theory, case studies, and a thorough examination of many timeless applications for productivity and profitability is evidenced in Beyond World-Class Productivity. It serves as a practical, informative source of information in the field of industrial engineering because it is neither an instruction manual nor a theoretical textbook. Practical examples and commentary come from the author's 40 years of real-world experience on the shop floor and in the boardroom.

Industrial engineering has a tendency to devote its time to "non-real gain" activities, or to making small improvements occasionally with a small-cycle time reduction. The effect of this "improvement" is calculated by annual reduced cycle time - an effect which consequently is practically invisible.

Instead, industrial engineers should aim to achieve real gain; for example, reducing the allocated number of workers to reduce paid hours immediately, but accruing the same or more powerful results. Management, particularly in human resources departments, is most interested in this type of gain and industrial engineering should be a department that fosters such connections with management. Industrial engineering tools are effective enough to support management with these goals in mind.

This work proposes that Carl Menger's Subjective Theory of Value (STV), and its subsequent elaboration by Ludwig von Mises as Praxeology, provides a useful alternative to more common methods in the study of action and social phenomena, and more specifically, to leadership in complex social systems. Rather than being based on rationality assumptions and algorithmic predictability, the STV emphasizes transient subjectivity shaped by a complex world of lacking information, mistakes, disequilibrium, uncertainty and attempted error correction that defy mathematization and exact prediction. As such, it is a framework to make sense of human action systems in terms of subjective understanding, learning, and uncertainty, rather than quantitative predictability. Accordingly, the aim of this work is to explain the STV as a general theory of action and to demonstrate its capability in developing adequate qualitative theory and to elaborate on some of the major topics that its implications raise with regard to leadership. The power of the method can be seen in that its procedure naturally branches out to facilitate an understanding of a broad selection of processes and may provide the basis for a universal theory of leadership.

This book provides a conceptual framework for systemic flexibility and business agility, drawing on a basis of research/case applications in various types of flexibility and agility in business. The selected papers address a variety of issues concerning the theme of systemic flexibility and business agility and are organized into following five parts: (i) Systemic and Strategic Flexibility; (ii) Information and Business Agility; (iii) Flexibility, Innovation and Business Excellence; (iv) Flexibility in Value and Supply Chains; and(v) Financial Flexibility and Mergers & Acquisitions. Flexibility and agility in business are emerging as key dimensions of business excellence that encompass the requirements of both choice and speed. The two concepts, flexibility and agility, have been used in multiple ways and often interchangeably, both in literature and in practice. The growing need for flexibility/agility in business can be seen from reactive as well as proactive perspectives. A business enterprise is expected to possess reactive flexibility/ agility (as adaptability and responsiveness) in order to cope with the changing and uncertain business environment. It may also endeavor to intentionally generate flexibility/agility as a strategic change in a variety of ways, such as leadership change, reengineering, innovation in products and processes, use of information and communication technology, and learning orientation.

This book shows the patterns of the fuzzy front end of innovation and how it can be managed successfully. Topics in this book cover traditional instruments and processes such as technology monitoring, market-oriented research management, lead-user developments, but also modern approaches such as frontloading, user community-driven innovation, crowdsourcing, anthropological expeditions, technological listening posts in global R&D settings, cross-industry innovation processes, open innovation, and IP cycle management. Contributions are based on latest research and cases studies on this new paradigm. The authors investigate this phenomenon, linking the practice of the early innovation phase to the established body of innovation research. Conceptional articles complement case studies to provide the reader with insight on managing the fuzzy front end of innovation.Lessons learned with success factors and checklists complement each chapter. "

This book develops a unified framework to explain the phenomena of competitive advantage and firm value creation in dynamic environments. Through a new strategic value creation theory, it explores how a firm can measure and sustain its competitive advantage through management incentives, capital market forces, organizational culture and structure, and social complexity. It also considers how management can utilize their resources and capabilities, shadow options, product market forces, customer needs, and organizational learning as a means to differentiate them from the competition. With an innovative approach to theory and research, it will be positioned to inform both scholars and practitioners in management, business strategy, and entrepreneurship on the process of competitive and sustainable value creation.

The radical restructuring of organizations can have momentous effects and not all of them are good. In fact, many are actually bad and may cause serious harm. How management can remedy these ill effects systematically and restore stability to their traumatized organizations is the theme of Dr. Geisler's compelling new book. How do we clean up the mess from poorly conceived, badly implemented, and ultimately unsuccessful restructurings? How can managers, who have been caught up in these changes and who are as disrupted by them as anyone, regain their own equilibrium and help the healing and reconstructive process take hold? Geisler's answers to these questions are essential reading for corporate executives in all types of organizations (public and private both), and for academics and students.

Dr. Geisler lists the problems associated with radical change and describes the futility of total corporate transformations in general. In addition, he develops a staged process by which managers can counteract the side effects of radical change programs. By showing that the beneficial effects of radical corporate change are usually transient, Dr. Geisler's process is a key ingredient in any effort designed for the long-term survival of the firm and the preservation of its strategic goals and methods. Thus, not only does Geisler provide a sound, well-reasoned criticism of corporate restructuring, but he offers something that few if any other books can offer: a workable means to cope constructively with the effects of its many failures.

This volume presents an alternative perspective on the problem of leadership in organizations. Dr. Charles H. Kime argues that while individuals ultimately take actions we call leadership, structural and non-structural characteristics of the organization influence the ability and inclination of organization members to engage in these actions. Further more, evidence is presented suggesting that these organizational features become assimilated into the normative structure of the organization over time and formal and informal organizational norms shape the ways in which organization members envision their roles, functions and relationships to the organization. Once institutionalized, organizational leadership may be understood as the capacity of the organization to respond to endogenous and exogenous stimuli, which present themselves as challenges, opportunities, and threats to the organization. Drawing upon general systems and complexity and chaos theory, Kime presents organizational leadership as a normative feature of organizations, that can help or hinder their negotiation of a complex, nonlinear environment. Kime tests his formulation on a sample of fire services organizations in the United States. In addition to confirming the viability of organizational leadership as a concept, he explores the empirical relationship of organizational leadership with organizational size, texture, age, labor management process and other variables.

This book contains a series of papers which were presented during the Fourth International Symposium on Human Factors in Organizational Design and Management, held in Stockholm. The symposium was primarily concerned with human organization in the development, introduction and use of new technology as a challenge for human resource development in a changing world. The focus of the symposium was on organizational and management issues (macroergonomics) rather then the more traditional microergonomic aspects of human factors. Particular attention was paid to the improvement of the quality of work life including human resource development and productivity.

A broad selection of papers on theory, methodology, research findings, reviews and case studies from leading scientists and professionals throughout the world. These papers provide the reader with a good insight into the ODAM field with special attention to the development, introduction and use of new technologies.

A comprehensive introduction to Organisational Behaviour, steering a neutral path through the sociological, psychological and managerial approaches to the discipline. It balances coverage of the micro- (organisational behaviour) with the macro- (organisational analysis) level issues, with a cross-cultural theme running through the book. It is written for students on undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes in business, or business-related disciplines.

Expanding upon Leadership Development for Interprofessional Education and Collaborative Practice and Leadership and Collaboration, the third installment to this original and innovative collection of books considers a variety of research models and theories. Emphasizing research and evaluation in leadership aspects, Leading Research and Evaluation in Interprofessional Education and Collaborative Practice showcases examples from around the globe in various multicultural contexts. Crucial for academics and researchers in this field, the book includes studies on traditionally under-represented countries and aims to prompt new ideas for future research and policy structures in Interprofessional education and practice.

The disproportionate aging of the population of working age in many nations around the world is a unique occurrence in the history of humankind. In the light of demographic change, it is becoming increasingly important to develop and use the potential of older employees.

This edited volume "Age-differentiated Work Systems" provides a final report on a six-year priority program funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and presents selected research findings of 17 interdisciplinary project teams. The idea is that it will serve both as a reference book and overview of the current state of research in ergonomics, occupational psychology and related disciplines. It provides new models, methods, and procedures for analyzing and designing age-differentiated work systems with the aim of supporting subject matter experts from different areas in their decisions on labor and employment policies. Therefore over 40 laboratory experiments involving 2,000 participants and 50 field studies involving over 25,000 employees were conducted.

Further objectives of the edited volume were to provide a pluridisciplinary compilation of the extensive information acquired over the six-year program period, to illustrate the range of the research field, and to convey an integrated understanding of age-differentiated work systems to readers.