New Horizons in Positive Leadership and Change

Leadership research in the twentieth century has mainly focused on industrial paradigm of leadership characterized by a hierarchical structure of authority and responsibility manifesting in a command and control model of leadership, with an individualistic focus on the personality of the leader—one person directing other people for materialistic, utilitarian ends. Over the last several decades, we have seen the inherent limitations of this approach to leadership. It is too narrowly focused and ignores the fund of creativity and diversity available at the disposal of any organization. More so, it leads to moral ineptitude, untrustworthiness, and self-centeredness on the part of its leaders. If twentieth century was characterized by leadership theories influenced by industrial revolution paradigm; in the twenty-first century, we have spiritual revolution guiding us toward leadership approaches that are humane and are anchored in the leader’s moral compass.

An effective leader of twenty-first century needs to be authentic, principled, and service oriented. As a result, we see the emergence of new forms of leadership—called “positive theories of leadership.” Authentic leadership and servant leadership are two such approaches that we will explore in this chapter. The chapter profiles Gandhi as an embodiment of exemplary virtues such as humility that epitomize authentic and servant leadership. Finally, it highlights the role of humility as a touchstone of effective leadership.

This chapter describes awakened leaders as positive leaders, who are mindful of their experiences in life, as these molded them into the wakeful person they became. Elements of authentic, situational, servant, and transformational leadership are at the foundation of the awakened leadership approach, along with a strong emphasis on responsibility-based qualities, such as morals and values, respect, compassion, courage, deep listening, passion, spiritual connection, and change. The chapter subsequently discusses a critical stakeholder group: followers, emphasizing their influence in the process of accomplishing a common goal. Different types of followers are reviewed, with the aim to demonstrate the need for flexible leadership behaviors, based on the readiness and capabilities of these followers. The chapter subsequently looks into mindfulness and its influence on change-readiness. The difference between change and transition is highlighted to help the reader understand the needed steps to acquire follower support. As an illustration of awakened leadership in real life, the case of Geoffrey Canada, educator, social activist, author, and president of the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), is presented.

One of the enduring images of Christianity is that of Christ as the good shepherd, which is a relevant metaphor for servant leadership’s emphasis on promoting enduring and desirable organizational change. Functional organizational change is a global construct that reflects the overall efficacy of servant leadership in promoting desirable employee attitudes, behaviors, and performance outcomes (Roberts, 2016). Servant leadership emphasizes two meta-dimensions of stewardship and servanthood directly promoting efficacious change management practices (Roberts, 2015). This chapter will review a large sample of servant leader empirical studies and present clear evidence of its positive influence on the attributes of servant leadership that promote effective organizational change. The research literature and subsequent analysis for this chapter is based upon 138 empirical mostly quantitative studies published from 2004 to 2019. Change related studies were then selected from this group of 138 by key word search in the 138 article abstracts. A total of 18 change related studies were identified through this process. The 138 studies generated 285 empirical outcomes of which 275 (96.5%) are favorable in directionality regarding the influence of servant leadership on change related outcomes. There were only nine nonsignificant (3.3%) and one negative (0.35%) relationships identified. Of the 138 studies, a final grouping of 104 studies was selected for the final analysis through the elimination of nonchange related dependent variables.

Servant leadership is a much-examined leadership style wherein leaders lead followers by serving them, providing a pathway for leaders to look beyond themselves and their organization, by serving the common, greater good of humanity. Civilization currently faces environmental and social challenges which can only be managed through sustainable actions. Many of these actions will require individuals, groups, and organizations consider the common good ahead of their own good. Therefore, servant leadership presents a viable avenue for leaders to influence humankind to evolve beyond the short-term thinking that created current unsustainable conditions on Earth. This chapter will examine servant leadership as a pathway to a sustainable future. Readers will be invited to reflect on the relevance of this leadership style through review of the servant leadership and sustainability literature. Because leadership for sustainability requires a new form of leadership based on how individuals desire to be treated, motivated, and led, servant leadership will be examined and modeled as a necessary leadership style for the achievement of a sustainable future. Examples of sustainability leaders who embrace the ethos of servant leadership are included and reviewed.

This chapter argues that positive leadership that grows out of positive psychology and strengths-based leadership theories has its own blind spot, which must be overcome in order to understand the process of authentic change and workplace transformation. Various philosophical, religious, and cultural worldviews are used to indicate the interconnected and interdependent nature of positivity and negativity that exists in the physical, biological, and spiritual world. Such an honest, balanced, and integrative approach to what is perceived to be positive (yang) and negative (yin) may overcome the blind spot of positive leadership and pave the way for mutually inclusive yin-yang leader-follower relationships in organizations toward authentic change and workplace transformation.

Organizational spiritual maturity (OSM) is an important new way of understanding organizations. Two core elements of OSM are important for positive leaders when pursuing organizational change. First, all organizational attributes are rooted in an organization’s spirit, and unless the spiritual root is addressed, any negative or undesirable quality will not likely be resolved – even through the strategies of positive leadership. Second, in the highly interconnected and integral world, leaders must fully consider the pervasive impacts of their organization both internally and externally. OSM provides a clearer vision and new strategies that can help positive leaders be even more effective in improving the well-being, health, and effectiveness of the people and organizations they lead. A key quality of OSM is spiritually mature leadership and management approaches. Spiritually mature leaders are described and contrasted with positive leaders and the more general concept of spiritual leaders.

The aim of this chapter is to investigate how servant-leadership’s lexicon can serve as a dialogic bridge across diverse intellectual, philosophical, theological, and wisdom traditions. This narrative unfolds in three movements. First, we revisit the historical and theoretical foundations of servant-leadership, primarily focusing on the vision of Robert Greenleaf (Greenleaf. Servant-leadership: A journey into the nature of legitimate power and greatness (25th Anniversary ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. (Original work published 1977), 2002) and insights of Larry Spears (Reflections on leadership: How Robert K. Greenleaf’s theory of servant-leadership influenced today’s top management thinkers. New York, NY: Wiley, 1995). Second, relying on the work of Kent Keith (The case for servant-leadership. Westfield, IN: Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership, 2008), Fons Trompenaars and Ed Voerman (Servant-leadership across cultures: Harnessing the strength of the world’s most powerful management philosophy. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2009), and Larry Spears (Servant-leadership as an ecumenical bridge. Unpublished manuscript, 2019), we synthesize servant-leadership’s resonance with the world’s various intellectual and spiritual worldviews. Third and finally, our chapter concludes with a brief reflection about how servant leadership can inspire positive leadership and change as well as workplace transformation in nonprofit and corporate settings such as a gang intervention and rehabilitation program, and a closely held, diversified transportation services company.

There is a general consensus that success leads to happiness and successful people are happier than others. Nevertheless, evidence suggests that the relationship between success and happiness is more complex than it appears. One may achieve one’s goals continuously and be successful but one’s level of happiness may not rise continuously. Happiness generated through success is not true happiness but pleasure, thus invariably short-lived. Happiness is inherent within all human beings and can only be experienced when we grow spiritually. With the help of scientific evidence, this study points out that spiritual growth is our inner journey toward attaining the highest state and that we are designed to achieve this purpose and remain happy. Therefore, if any success we achieve is to deliver happiness, the activities we perform to achieve success should be aligned with this purpose – all activities should contribute to our spiritual growth. This applies to the happiness sought when doing business as well. They should be seen as a spiritual practice or a selfless service. Evidence suggests that integrating spirituality into business and managing business as a spiritual practice not only delivers happiness to all parties involved but also increases profits, and spiritual-based leaders inspire, encourage, and drive success.

During its 12-year history, the JVBL has featured the lifework and interviews of scores of scholars and practitioners of leadership, most notably the 2009 interview of Ray C. Anderson, the founder of Interface, Inc., conducted by the author. The chapter brings together some important lessons culled from various issues of the journal on various positive forms of leadership.

Change is inevitable for organizations in today’s ever-changing, fast-paced environment. Organizations should embrace change in order to remain competitive in their environments. Across time, research has reported that the majority of organizational change initiatives fail. This preconception leads to resistance from employees and hesitance from leaders. To this end, having leaders who are skilled at leading change is vitally important. Change is hard, but it simply requires hard effort to succeed. Leading positive change is about leading people and organizations toward new opportunities. Successful leaders will be able to understand why people resist change, help employees accept change, and act as change agents in creating a culture of change for the organization. Even very experienced leaders can struggle with leading positive change. Change management research has been conducted for decades. As a result, there are many models and processes for change that leaders can use as a guide in implementing organizational change.

Creativity changes over the lifespan. Therefore, creative thinking should be investigated at different life stages and in different contexts. In this chapter, the careers of two exceptionally creative leaders are explored. The investigation is based on a comparative, longitudinal, psychobiographical case study design and employed a purposive sampling method to select the participants. The aim of psychobiographical case studies is to describe and interpret the contributions of exceptional individuals. Psychobiographical case studies provide a valuable method to further application and refinement of psychological theories. This study explored the manifestation of creativity in the life histories of the cardiac surgeon and medical pioneer, Christiaan Barnard, and the politician and German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. The data included both primary and secondary documentary data. The data analysis strategy proposed by Irving Alexander was used to interpret the data according to Robert Sternberg’s WICS model. To maintain ethical standards, the authors were guided by respect, empathy, and accountability in dealing with the documentary data. The investigation demonstrates the interplay of wisdom, intelligence, and creativity during the careers of extraordinary individuals.

Positive leadership has evolved from the study of positive psychology and brain research (Carleton et al, Can J Behav Sci 50:185–194. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1037/​cbs000010, 2018; Hannah et al, J Organ Behav 30:269–290. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1002/​job.​586, 2009; Luthans, J Organ Behav 23:695–706. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1002/​job.​165, 2002; Saladis, Positive leadership in project management. Paper presented at PMI Global Congress 2015—EMEA. Project Management Institute, London/Newtown Square, 2015; van Dierendonck, J Manag 37:1228–1261. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1177/​0149206310380462​, 2010) and seeks to better understand the role that leaders have on their followers through invoking positive and purposeful modeling, leading to enhancing positive emotions and outcomes. The work of Kim Cameron (Positive leadership. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., San Francisco, 2008) provides a solid launching pad for the study positive leadership, which includes vital traits and skills such as positive affect, mindfulness, virtuousness, moral integrity, emotional stability, and hope. Cameron’s three connotations of positive leadership are as follows: (1) it facilitates positively deviant performance; (2) it features an affirmative bias, meaning that it is oriented toward positive instead of negative strengths; and (3) it fosters the good in people. This chapter builds on Cameron’s notion that positive leadership “fosters the good in people” and creates a formula that Virtuous Ethics + Inclusivity = Positive Leadership. This new organic leadership (and followership) framework uses virtuous ethics and inclusiveness as a roadmap to the state of organizational and personal flow. If positive leaders increase the flow of positive emotions for people to optimize their inherent strengths, then this intentional leadership style will bring out the best in people. There will be “net” positive interactions (more positive than negative); the culture will be inclusive, transparent, supportive; and there will be underlying virtue ethics at the core.

The success of companies today largely depends on leadership capabilities of employees throughout the organization. Managers with an interest in how people perform their work must be aware of the significance various leadership models have on organizational performance.

In conversations among management ranks, the concept of leadership is often discussed as an implied skill, either naturally imbued or associated with generally accepted personality traits or characteristics. As such, the measure of efficient leadership does not consider qualities such as spirituality in leading an organization.

Mindfulness has been increasingly proposed as one of several leadership paradigms with potential for unleashing inner strength within individuals. Therefore, in this chapter, we discuss the importance of Mindfulness in the preparation of organizational leadership. However, we enhance this view to suggest that mindfulness alone is a necessary but not sufficient intervention to produce the best leadership outcomes. As such, we extend this discussion by proposing an enhanced view of leadership that blends Mindfulness + Spirituality in a working model to optimize leadership efforts. This research considers the role of leadership at the individual level based on the mindfulness and spirituality literatures and includes a higher order concept of Spiritual guidance as revealed in Wisdom writings.

The vast majority of change initiatives fail to meet their objectives and most decimate their organization’s levels of engagement in the process. The effect of plummeting employee engagement during turbulent times creates a downward spiral that can result in permanent damage to the organizational culture and capabilities. This phenomenon has led some to believe that change can only be achieved at the cost of employee engagement and that engagement can only be improved during periods of stability. Our work suggests that this is a false dichotomy. Through careful planning and active management, some organizations utilize these times of change to deploy strength-based, positive approaches to successfully deliver their change agenda while simultaneously cultivating greater work meaningfulness and engagement. In this chapter, we examine a case study that demonstrates, through the use of Appreciative Inquiry (AI) as one such approach, how taking on aggressive change initiatives in this manner can be leveraged as an opportunity for widescale reinvention of the organization, enabling greater work meaningfulness, engagement, and flourishing.

This chapter explores the structural, oral, and attitudinal aspects of positive organizational change strategies among leadership by addressing and analyzing the paradigms of leadership and how they connect to organizational change management (Cameron. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 44(1):7–24, 2008). Specifically, the authors sought to determine how women encounter, serve, and work within organizational structures and understand the levels of discourse present in elevating personal and professional identities for future leadership efforts and contributions in the workplace. This analysis focuses on positive leadership and the outcomes of assumed, administered, and perceived changes. The authors recommend that institutions of higher education must articulate and develop an environment where academics can be nurtured and exposed to a more broadened range of professional experiences from the beginning of their employment and continue their spiritual development as an investment to enable the development of potential leaders. The authors further suggest that educators who seek a place to enhance aspects of their leadership formally acquired through personal life histories should also promote the acquisition of new leadership experiences among the human resources, political, and referential contexts when practicing mindfulness in the workplace.

To understand the role of culture in leadership, and to develop methods for research and practical applications, two terms have been used in trying to understand and to improve international interactions: cross-culture and intercultural. Cross-culture leadership is the dominant paradigm, and a large number of papers have been published on this concept. A more recent term in the literature is intercultural leadership. The literature reviewed on cross-cultural leadership research gives the impression that cultural differences exist only between countries or people from different nationalities, not within countries. Thus, the concept of cross-cultural leadership provides insights in multicultural settings, meaning international, but in populations trying to build a social fabric under the concept of intercultural societies, including indigenous and non-indigenous people, the concept of intercultural leadership offers a better framework to develop methods, training, and the like, needed for good governance. However, the conceptual framework of intercultural leadership is not well defined in the literature; sometimes, it overlaps with cross-cultural meaning. On the other hand, the indigenous approach to intercultural leadership is also missing in the literature. This article builds on concepts of culture, leadership, cross-culture, and intercultural views to examine the indigenous factor in the concept of intercultural leadership.

In the twenty-first-century workforce, shame seems to be an often unconscious and neglected topic which is hardly addressed on micro-, meso- and macro-levels in different cultural contexts. Shame is generally viewed as a negative emotion which impacts negatively on the self within the context of others. Previous research has shown that shame affects individuals in organisations and needs to be addressed and transformed to impact constructively on leaders, employees and the organisation. This chapter presents an overview on relevant aspects of shame in the workplace and places it into the discourse of positive psychology (1.0) and the second wave of positive psychology (2.0).

Literary writings have a significant space in the arena of academic disciplines. No doubt, while these writings are a common, ordinary reader’s delight, they also serve as beacons to a discerning scholar/researcher who wants to explore yet another horizon of truth. As such, with its wider dimensions and its implication in other related fields, literature serves as a powerful tool for academic exploration in other areas of study. The various theories of leadership and other scientific studies on modern management which are being practised in the modern times are deeply rooted in and influenced by all those creative writings of the past. This chapter intends to identify the literary texts as a reliable source of knowledge on positive leadership. It would be profitable venture, and academically trustworthy too, to excavate and re-examine the literature that was written thousands of years ago. It develops new criteria of learning various aspects of the positive, spiritual and servant leadership through literary texts like the Rāmāyanā and the Śrīmad Bhagavad Gītā, and also enriches the field of leadership through the theoretical understanding of creative writings.

Five people in leadership positions in two Midwest higher education institutions were selected because of their familiarity with synchronicity experiences, those meaningful coincidences that draw on spiritual intelligence. Four research questions would illuminate how they identified their synchronicity moments; how each used their spiritual intelligence to make meaning of the moments and integrated that knowing into generative outlooks within their organizations or themselves; how their transpersonal evolutions from the synchronicity experiences resulted in more mindful, generative leadership styles; and any implications the experiences have for generative leadership in general. Narrative inquiry for this transpersonal human research allowed for capturing the stories, and provided a direct knowing of how they became mindful of their internal personal events. Sixteen themes emerged from the collective narratives that illustrated the leaders’ capacity to discern the incidents; attended to interconnections between them and God or something beyond them guiding them toward higher purposes; how they relinquished their self-focused thinking to participate with the incidents to a greater outcome; and submit that this way of internal discerning is accessible by anyone to integrate into their leadership practice. They named successes far greater than they imagined without decimating their workforces or budgets in the process.

Authentic leadership is a commonly used term; however, its significance and merits may not be fully grasped without paused reflection. Authentic leaders are true to the self and true to the values that they hold dear. They transmit those values to their followers. Those values are not arbitrary inventions or personal interests, but they are the core values that enable both leaders and followers to find meaning in their activities and to reach their goals. This chapter explores the concept of authentic leadership, highlighting its characteristics and the role it plays in the development of organisations. Authentic leadership fosters the growth of firms by giving meaning, core values and purpose to all who work there, thus empowering them to exercise their creativity in attaining their own fulfilment in a way that is compatible with the firm’s development. Authentic leadership thus differs from self-satisfaction and self-affirmation. It involves a sincere concern for the integral well-being and development of followers.

This chapter explores the values-based, Vedāntic perspective on transformational leadership. Drawing upon various key Vedāntic texts, it explains why Self-knowledge is so crucial to transformational leaders. As a system of Self-knowledge, Advaita Vedānta is free from sectarian bias or dogma. Its tenets are rational, universalistic, and scientific in spirit. After briefly reviewing some variants of transformation leadership (such as authentic leadership, responsible leadership, and servant leadership), this chapter presents the values-based leadership examples of two stalwarts of modern India—Vivekananda and Mahatma Gandhi. Finally, it discusses the leadership style of Dr. E. Sreedharan, widely known as the Metro Man of India, as a case in point of a values-driven leader.

Advaita Vedānta teaches that the phenomenal world, though real at the relative level, is merely a manifestation of an underlying Absolute Reality, known as Brahman. The philosophy of Vedānta advocates Oneness of the Universe. This understanding fosters equality in ethical conduct stemming from realizing the divinity of all beings and serving them with altruistic motive. Vedānta teaches respect, tolerance, and understanding of the other faiths and, thus, nurtures humanity and solidarity in the contemporary fragmented world. As different beings are just the expressions of one universal consciousness, hurting the other means hurting oneself. This realization is the source and foundation of all philanthropy, ethical conduct, and social contract. The teachings of Vedānta have profound relevance in context of transformational leadership and values-based leadership.