The Nature of Organizational Leadership: Understanding the Performance Imperatives Confronting Today's Leaders - Hardcover

Leadership has always been a major topic of research in psychology, spawning thousands of empirical and conceptual studies. Too often, however, such findings assume that leadership at the top of the organization reflects the same psychological and sociological dynamics as leadership at lower organizational levels. This book, the fourteenth volume in the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology's Organizational Frontiers Series, brings together scholars from the fields of both management and psychology to offer a more broadly defined perspective of organizational leadership, showing how the quality of leadership clearly changes across organizational levels. This valuable resource describes the nature of organizational leadership and the performance imperatives-cognitive, personal, political, technological, financial, and staffing-confronting organizational leaders. Examining these imperatives in detail, the book weaves them into postulates for effective leadership at the top of the organization. The authors identify the "leadership moments" those imperatives give rise to-the places where key leadership decisions, choices, and actions need to occur to ensure organizational effectiveness-and describe their implications for practice and application. The contributors describe the leadership attributes and processes needed to meet performance imperatives and explore how to identify and develop effective executives, examining leader selection, training and development, and assessment. The Nature of Organizational Leadership provides a contextual framework for understanding executive leadership that is lacking in prior theories and models in the psychological literature, systematically integrating multidisciplinary contributions to produce a conceptual perspective that will influence future research on organizational leadership. Stephen J. Zaccaro is associate professor of psychology and associate director of the Center for Behavioral and Cognitive Studies at George Mason University. He is the coauthor (with Anne W. Riley) of Occupational Stress and Organizational Effectiveness. Richard J. Klimoski is professor of psychology, director of the Center for Behavioral and Cognitive Studies, and associate dean, College of Arts and Sciences, at George Mason University. He is the coauthor (with Neal W. Schmitt) of Research Methods in Human Resources Management.

STEPHEN J. ZACCARO is associate professor of psychology and associate director of the Center for Behavioral and Cognitive Studies at George Mason University. He is the coauthor (with Anne W. Riley) of Occupational Stress and Organizational Effectiveness.

RICHARD J. KLIMOSKI is professor of psychology, director of the Center for Behavioral and Cognitive Studies, and associate dean, College of Arts and Sciences, at George Mason University. He is the coauthor (with Neal W. Schmitt) of Research Methods in Human Resources Management.