The Unconventional Leadership of Corporate Leaders in the 21st Century
This paper discusses the various traits that modern corporate leaders of the 21st century that have adopted a different approach towards leadership and have guided their company to newer heights. Amongst the leaders discussed in this research paper is, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page. The purpose of this paper is to explore the decisions and choices that these revolutionary leaders have made and what made them different. At the end of this paper, we will learn of what are the good ideologies or practices we can take from them.
The Moderating Effect of Leader-Member Relationship on Introverted and Extroverted Personality Traits of Leaders and Organizational Citizenship Behavior of Followers: An Empirical Study of IT Industry in Sri Lanka
This study focuses on investigating the relationship between personality and leadership supports the claim that individual differences may be the predictors of leadership effectiveness in contemporary organizations. Extended studies stress that ‘Big-Five ‘personality dimensions are related to leadership criteria and further identified introversion-extroversion as a key element of an individual personality. In general, the main differences between effective and less effective leaders are that, effective leaders make positive differences to themselves from their personality traits and the relationship building with followers. However, relatively few studies have tested how and why introvert and extrovert leaders’ personality traits relate to follower behaviors. In addition, if so; the mechanisms through which a leader’s personality traits relate to follower behaviors. Accordingly, the aims of the present study are to examine whether the introverted and extroverted personality traits of leaders affect the organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) of followers and to examine the role of leader-member relationship as a moderator, in social exchange process. To advance the understanding of these, simple regression analysis and regression analysis with moderator effects were performed to test hypotheses with a sample size of 46 introvert managers and 50 extrovert managers as leaders and 92 and 100 subordinates as their followers respectively from IT industry in Sri Lanka. The study found that there is a positive direct effect of introverted personality traits of leaders and no negative direct effect of extroverted personality traits of leaders on organizational citizenship behavior of followers. Yet, leader-member relationship moderates the positive and negative relationships between introverted, extroverted personality traits of leaders and organizational citizenship behavior of followers. Present study makes several theoretical contributions to path-goal theory of leadership with the support from theory of trait leadership and big five model. Further, managerial contributions of the present study make IT firms successful through better selection of leaders based on personality traits which facilitates organizational citizenship behavior.KeywordsIntroverted personality traits, extroverted personality traits, OCB, Leader-member relationship, IT industry in Sri Lanka
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.