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Studies of corporations' environmental, social, and governance (ESG) sustainability efforts typically focus on the central responsibilities of CEOs and boards of directors in strategic decision-making. However, given the unique secretarial political culture in China, we argue that corporate (i.e., board) secretaries also play an important role in ESG strategic decision-making that goes beyond merely the implementation and communication of firms' strategic decisions. Specifically, we posit that when firms face positive market performance, they are more likely to escalate their ESG strategic response (i.e., adopting Global Reporting Initiative standards) based on previously disclosed ESG information. In addition, we postulate that overconfidence, diversified perspectives, and diligence of board secretaries will distort the secretary's understanding of positive market value performance information and ESG decision-making, which in turn will affect the firm's ESG response decision. Accordingly, we examined personal attributes of Chinese A-share listed firms' board secretaries and their role in market capitalization performance feedback and ESG strategic response decisions. We found empirical evidence consistent with our premise that decision implementers can also play an important role in the performance feedback decision-making process. Our study yields important implications for understanding the role of board secretaries in ESG decision-making processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though the values of George Pullman's porters were incongruent with those embodied by their founder and organization, many porters zealously consented to performing the imposed role of dutiful servant for decades. Their respective life-stories and autobiographical memories provide first-hand accounts of their compliance in sustaining a façade of conformity, while simultaneously resisting an eclipsing internalization of their work roles into their personal identities. A review of the extant literature suggests that maintaining such a dissonant enacted role over time can engender negative employee stress-related consequences, including increased turnover, reduced job commitment, and diminished personal well-being. Yet, the Pullman porters appear to tell a different story regarding their enduring façade in the face of organizational values misfit. As recounted by the porters, their narratives of constructing difference as a productive resource to underpin their counter-institutional group identity is one of coping via the co-constitution of consent and dissent. Accordingly, we performed a form of historical retrospective case analysis of the Pullman porters as an organizational collective to elaborate a theory of how coping with values incongruence through façades of conformity may be sustainable in conjunction with the fusion of personal and counter-institutional identities to buffer deleterious employee effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents historiographically-informed examination of paternal capitalists from industrial paternalism era in the U.S. The underlying intent and paternalistic leader behavior of H. J. Heinz, founder of food company H. J. Heinz Co., has been discovered to be lacked the degree of intrusion and coercion found in other paternalistic leaders of the era, even when equated to leaders whose paternalism urged by benevolence. The paternalistic leadership style of Heinz has been analyzed with benevolent, such as Henry Ford, and contemporaneous archetypical exploitative, such as George Pullman, paternalistic leaders.

While historical examinations of individual leaders and various forms of leader behavior are often portrayed in the management history literature, more macro views of the relationship of influence amongst leaders and followers have rarely been described. In the attempt to alleviate this oversight, I examine the leadership council of the non-treaty Nez Perce, a celebrated Native American tribe, as an exemplar of Rost and Smith's (1992) notions of a postindustrial approach to leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article integrates theory and practice from the disparate writings of the historical figure Xenophon to offer his conceptualization of the leader/follower dyad. Xenophon (c.430 B.C.-c.354 B.C.) was a Greek historian who left the tutelage of Socrates and the comforts of Athens to join the Greek army that was under the command of Cyrus the Younger. When Cyrus was killed in the battle of Cunaxa (401 B.C.), the Greeks were forced to flee or surrender to the Persians. They chose to retreat by fighting their way through very hostile territory. After the Greek generals were duped and executed by the Persian leaders, Xenophon was chosen as a leader for this seemingly impossible journey. He records this expedition in his most celebrated story, 'The Anabasis.' 'The Anabasis,' however, is not the only work in which Xenophon discusses his notions of leadership and follower motivation. Xenophon spoke of leadership and the art of command in many writings including 'Hellenica,' 'Cyropadia,' 'Hipparchicus,' 'Memorabilia of Socrates,' and 'Oeconomicus.' This article attempts to take the next step and presents a comprehensive representation of the work motivation process based upon the extensive writings of the ancient Athenian, Xenophon. He clearly believed enhanced follower motivation required effective leadership. Many today agree that a one size fits all approach will not improve the state of motivation of many followers. This implies that leaders must engage in dyadic relationships with followers with respect to the particular task and situation.

Uhl-Bien and Arena (2018) recently advanced a nascent complexity leadership framework of leadership for organizational adaptability. Within their integrative meta- theory, they made a compelling argument for the recognition of the concept of enabling leadership as a critical form of leadership for adaptive organizations. Enabling leadership requires the social facilitation of ideological tensions to engender the adaptive space needed for new understandings to emerge within the rich interconnectivity of complexity. To further explore how leaders enable adaptive processes, Uhl-Bien and Arena (2018) called for future research using in-depth case studies of social actors centered on emergence in complex environments. During archival research of Whitney Young, Jr.'s largely overlooked and misunderstood leadership in the historic social drama of the 1960s U.S. civil rights movement, we discovered evidence to support and extend their theoretical arguments. Accordingly, using a relational leadership-as-practice lens, we interpret the dramaturgical performance Young directed to facilitate coherent emancipatory dialogue, affect the social construction of power relations, and enable the adaptive space needed for social transformation to emerge." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maggie Lena Walker arose from humble beginnings as the daughter of an ex-slave to become a prominent banker, entrepreneur, and community leader in the American state of Virginia in the early 1900s. As a heroine of history, she was the first woman in the United States to establish and lead an African American financial institution. In addition, Walker played a principal leadership role in a major African American mutual aid social service organization: the Independent Order of St. Luke (IOSL). In this paper, we investigate the historic emergence of intersectional leadership by exploring the leader identity development of Maggie Lena Walker while she was leading the IOSL. The method that we apply to the Walker case is intersectional microhistory, which is the study of unique social actors and the intersections of their gender, race, and other social categories as they change over time. We use our intersectional microhistory approach to unpack phenomenon of emerging intersectional leadership, offering deeper insights about the oppressive and multi-layered barriers that Maggie Walker surmounted as a black woman in order to effectively function as an accepted and acknowledged leader of the IOSL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although leadership is co-constructed through a complex interchange among leaders and followers, leadership research is still primarily leader-centric in its focus. This state has led to calls for more follower-centric perspectives of leadership to explore the significant role of followers in the social construction of leadership. Yet, we still know little about the nuances of how followers enact their reciprocal roles to influence the socially constructed identities of their leaders. Towards this aim, Blom and Alvesson (2013) advanced the metaphor of 'Leadership on Demand' to describe how followers with a shared leadership-structure schema may initiate or inhibit leadership by their acceptance or rejection of a leader's identity claim. However, Leadership on Demand may be unrealistic when the proactive participation of followers is constrained by the leadership context. We argue that in leadership settings that demand hierarchical leadership-structure schemas, where the granting of leader identity and claiming of follower identity is essentially obligatory, followers may still purposely shape their leader's socially constructed identity. We pose the idiom of 'Leadership on Request' and apply this perspective to interpret the historical case of the Gilded Age paternalist, Milton S. Hershey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars are calling for greater consideration of narrative studies in order to explore the nexus of generative philanthropic efforts and entrepreneurial identity. While the origins and roles of entrepreneurial generativity are likely many, contributing mechanisms are thought to be organized into a central generativity script consistent with an entrepreneurs' personal identity. Yet, little attention within this domain has been paid to the effects of an interruption in the coherent narration of identity. The extant literature indicates that when a breakdown appears in an identity script, the ego is compelled to reconstruct identity to remain congruent with the ego ideal. From this perspective, we argue that entrepreneurial generativity can be considered redemptive identity capital and discursively incorporated as a facet of entrepreneurial identity. To develop this argument, we interpret the historic case of Andrew Carnegie to illustrate a reconstructed capital theoretic model of entrepreneurial generativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a unique combination of ANTi-historical and Microhistorical methodological approaches, we analyze the exemplary historical case of James Meredith's contested leadership role in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960's. The analysis of several hundreds of archived letters written to Meredith by opponents of his actions revealed not only the importance of collective opposition in the formation of socially-endorsed, yet contested leadership, but the underlying latent process through which opponents demonstrated their collective angst against Meredith's leadership. Our unique approach to historically uncovering theoretical concepts and processes holds promise for future management and organizational research through a historical lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although trait narcissism has been related to entrepreneurial tendencies, research regarding the influence of narcissism on the entrepreneur's intrapsychic and interpersonal processes is limited. Furthermore, while entrepreneurship researchers have proffered theoretical explanations and performed empirical research on the cognitive and relational impacts of venture failure, longitudinal studies explaining how these processes develop and interact over time are largely missing from the extant literature. With the current resurgence in scholarly interest in entrepreneurial trait research, however, scholars have called for greater focus on the role of specific characteristics on the cognitive and relational processes of entrepreneurs. Accordingly, we respond to these calls with an analysis of the historical case of W.C. Durant, a forefather of the automobile manufacturing industry in America, to shed light on the intrapsychic and interpersonal processes of this self-deceptive narcissistic serial entrepreneur. Consistent with our abductive approach to theory elaboration, we iterate between theory and archival data to illustrate and explicate the interaction of intrapsychic and interpersonal processes of self-deceptive narcissistic serial entrepreneurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine the life and work of Frank Gilbreth using a critical biographical approach in order to draw connections between his meaningful life experiences and the major contributions he made to management history. First, a biography is provided that reveals critical incidents from his childhood, his early career before marriage, his life after his marriage, and also his key personality traits. This biographical overview is followed by an exploration of the major influences on Gilbreth's career including Lillian Gilbreth and Frederick Taylor. Gilbreth's major contributions to management thought are then considered in context of his biography, followed by a discussion that focuses on his work in advancing efficiency through motion studies and consideration of the human element in the workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have begun calling for broader conceptualizations of moral disengagement processes that reflect the interaction of dispositional and situational antecedents to a predilection to morally disengage. We argue that collective leadership should be considered as one such contingent antecedent. Although the limitations of collective leadership have been debated with regard to effectiveness and practicality, researchers have yet to substantively approach leader constellations from their potential dark side. While researching leaders from the Gilded Age of American business history, we encountered a compelling historical case example that facilitates theory elaboration within these intersecting domains. Interpreting evidence from the embittered leader dyad of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, we show how leader egoism can permeate moral identity to promote symbolic moral self-regard and moral licensing, which augment a propensity to morally disengage. We use insights developed from our analysis to illustrate a process conceptualization that reflects dispositional and situational interaction as precursor to moral disengagement and explains how collective leadership can function as a moral disengagement trigger/tool to reduce cognitive dissonance and support the cognitive, behavioral, and rhetorical processes utilized to justify unethical behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite evidence linking narcissism to leadership, the influence of leader narcissism on leader/follower social exchange remains unclear. Moreover, while researchers acknowledge that narcissistic personality is a dimensional construct, the preponderance of extant literature approaches the concept of narcissistic leadership categorically by focusing on the reactive or constructive narcissistic extremes. This bimodal emphasis ignores self-deceptive forms of narcissistic leadership, where vision orientation and communication could differ from leaders with more reactive or constructive narcissistic personalities. We argue that we encountered a compelling example of a communal, self-deceiving narcissist during archival research of Robert Owen's collective experiment at New Harmony, Indiana. In order to explore Owen's narcissistic leadership, we utilize an analytically structured history approach to interpret his leadership, as he conveyed his vision of social reform in America. Approaching data from a 'history to theory' perspective and via a communicative lens, we use insights from our abductive analysis to advance a cross-paradigm, communication-centered process model of narcissistic leadership that accounts for the full dimensional nature of leader narcissism and the relational aspects of narcissistic leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rugged and individualistic reputation of Samuel Colt and the Colt Company are the stuff of legend in the American psyche. Largely constructed from themes aligned with American exceptionalism and the taming of the Western frontier, this firearm maker built a powerful and pervasive image. In this study, we examine how the Colt Company used rhetorical history in an agentic, proactive way to appropriate history and tradition for strategic purposes. Specifically, we apply a genealogical method to analyze the ways that rhetorical history was used by Colt in order to augment our understanding of rhetorical history and its utilization as a competitive image enhancing practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we conceptualize collective leadership as institutional work. We interpret this phenomenon based on the historical evidence collected from the first African American town in Mississippi, Mound Bayou, which was founded by freed slaves. We use interpretivist epistemology into which we incorporate and utilize historiometric methodology to code and interpret archival data. We used archival data to inductively theorize the process by which the leaders of Mound Bayou collectively forged and directed a functional community in the Mississippi Delta. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While scholarly interest in artful perspectives of leadership seems to be on the rise, research development of these concepts is still at a nascent stage. As a result, there have been calls for more examinations of artistic leaders and further development of aesthetic leadership constructs. A review of the extant literature, however, reveals no broad conceptual framework for leading aesthetically. In the attempt to fill this gap, grounded in emerging theories of leadership as art, we examined the historical case of the San Antonio Conservation Society and its prominent artist-leaders, Emily Edwards and Rena Maverick Green, to represent a hermeneutic approach to authentic aesthetic leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

DeRue and Ashford (2010) proposed a social process of leadership identity construction, asserting that leadership identity is co-constructed by way of claims and grants of leader and follower identities. They argued that through this progression, leader and follower identities are internalized, relationally recognized, and collectively endorsed within the social context. In addition, these authors suggested that the collective endorsement of the broader social context might serve as a catalyst to initiate the leadership identity construction process. As a result, they called for qualitative studies to further develop this idea. During archival research of James Meredith's historic and defiant integration of the University of Mississippi, we discovered compelling evidence to support and extend their theoretical arguments. Accordingly, we interpret the archival evidence of support and opposition of Meredith's defiant integration to compare and contrast the leader identity construction processes of Meredith alongside his contemporary antagonist, former Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett. We use this analysis to illustrate how the distinctive social context broadly recognized the key element of defiance and collectively endorsed Meredith as a leader, thereby initiating his leadership identity construction process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce the concept of social justice entrepreneurship based on the complementary natures of social justice and social entrepreneurship. First, we explain how social justice activities and entrepreneurial activities both utilize resource convergences to mobilize constituents and foster amendments to inequitable practices and policies. Then we utilize a socio-historical archival method to analyze principal concepts in the case of Frances Wright's formation of a freed-slave community during the Industrial Revolution. Our undertaking yields a construct of social justice entrepreneurship as a distinct form of entrepreneurial activity that drives policy change based on needs for societal welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although interest in the implications of ethical stewardship, responsible leadership, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) is mounting, research development of these concepts is still at a nascent stage with critical issues regarding frameworks yet to be resolved. Regrettably, much of the current research has focused solely on macro concerns, largely ignoring the significant micro level leadership questions. In addition, the preponderance of the emerging literature in these domains has fixated on large corporations, ignoring the realities of most entrepreneurial ventures and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In the smaller entrepreneurial setting, we argue that current interpretations of what constitutes ethical stewardship and socially responsible leadership should be adapted. Towards this aim, we examined the historical case of Lillian Shedd McMurry, the extraordinary entrepreneurial leader of Trumpet Records, a 1950s independent record label, to define entrepreneurial stewardship and identify specific elements inherent within the role of entrepreneur as ethical steward and socially responsible leader. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]