Mary Uhl-Bien – författare

An accessible and practical discussion of organizational behavior

In the newly updated third edition of Organizational Behavior, a team of accomplished educators delivers a multidimensional text that combines analysis, knowledge, personal development, and synthesis with useful pedagogical features that bring organizational behavior to life. This edition reconsiders organizational behavior from an interdisciplinary vantage point, showing students the interdependence of factors that explain human behavior. Frequently addressed organizational behavior subjects are considered from within an integrated framework and are employed to answer functionally relevant questions about why people behave the ways in which they do, as well as how to effectively influence and manage others.

This book introduces leadership and organizational scholars to the potenial of complexity science for broadening leadership study beyond its traditional focus on leaders’ actions and influence, to a consideration of leadership as a broader, dynamically and interactive organizing process. The book offers a primer on complexity science and its applications to organization studies, and compares the logics of complexity science with those underlying traditional leadership approaches. It describes methodological approaches for studying leadership from a complexity perspective, and offers examples of applications of complexity science to leadership theory. Chapters are written by top scholars in complexity and leadership theory.

Leaders and followers live in a relational world—a world in which leadership occurs in complex webs of relationships and dynamically changing contexts. Despite this, our theories of leadership are grounded in assumptions of individuality and linear causality. If we are to advance understandings of leadership that have more relevance to the world of practice, we need to embed issues of relationality into leadership studies.

This volume addresses this issue by bringing together, for the first time, a set of prominent scholars from different paradigmatic and disciplinary perspectives to engage in dialogue regarding how to meet the challenges of relationality in leadership research and practice. Included are cutting edge thinking, heated debate, and passionate perspectives on the issues at hand. The chapters reveal the varied and nuanced treatments of relationality that come from authors’ alternative paradigmatic (entity, constructionist, critical) views. Dialogue scholars—reacting to the chapters—engage in spirited debate regarding the commensurability (or incommensurability) of the paradigmatic approaches. The editors bring the dialogue together with introductory and concluding chapters that offer a framework for comparing and situating the competing assumptions and perspectives spanning the relational leadership landscape. Using paradigm interplay they unpack assumptions, and lay out a roadmap for relational leadership research. A key takeaway is that advancing relational leadership research requires multiple paradigmatic perspectives, and scholars who are conversant in the assumptions brought by these perspectives.

The book is aimed at those who feel that much of current leadership thinking is missing the boat in today’s complex, relational world. It provides an essential resource for all leadership scholars and practitioners curious about the nature of research on leadership, both those with much research exposure and those new to the field.

Each section represents a distinctive slant on leadership:

- Macro perspectives - including strategic leadership, organization theory, charismatic leadership, complexity leadership, and networks.

- Political and philosophical perspectives - including distributed leadership, critical leadership, ethics, the military and cults.

- Psychological perspectives - including personality, leadership style and contingency theories, transformational leadership, exchange relationships, shared leadership, cognition, leadership development, gender, trust, identity and the 'dark side' of leadership.

- Cultural perspectives - including spirituality, aesthetics, and creativity.

- Contemporary and emergent perspectives - followership, historical methods, virtual leadership, emotions, image, celebrity, and the quest for a general theory of leadership