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Distributed leadership, knowledge and information management and team performance in Chinese and Western groups
P. Iles
Salford Business School, University of Salford, Salford, UK, and

Y. Feng
Leeds University Business School, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
Abstract
Purpose More studies are beginning to support the role of distributed, as opposed to solo, leadership in team performance, but distributed leadership (DL) has not always been linked to higher performance. It may need to be co-ordinated, rather than misaligned or fragmented, and may be most effective in teams performing interdependent tasks. DL has not often been linked to team information processing, however; viewing leadership as involving information management, it is proposed that DL may be linked to higher levels of information exchange and information integration, of both shared and unshared information. A series of research propositions are then developed with the purpose of exploring further the role of DL in team decision making, especially in terms of information exchange and information integration processes in Chinese and Western groups. Design/methodology/approach The paper derives a number of research propositions from the literature on DL and information processing and applies them to decision making by Chinese and Western teams. Findings The paper presents a series of propositions on the factors affecting the effectiveness of DL and possible differences between Chinese and Western teams. Originality/value The paper presents a series of propositions about DL and relates the literature on DL to the literature on information processing in an original way. Keywords Leadership, Information management, Information exchange, Knowledge management, Team performance, China Paper type Conceptual paper

Journal of Technology Management in China Vol. 6 No. 1, 2011 pp. 26-42 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1746-8779 DOI 10.1108/17468771111105640

Introduction There has been increasing dissatisfaction with the domination of the concept of the focused or solo leader in much leadership research: leadership is often seen as about what leaders do, in a top-down way where solo leaders are the main originators and directors of leadership (Gronn, 1999, 2002). Concerns with leader centrism and the dependent status of followers, leading to learned helplessness (Gemmil and Oakley, 1997) and the concentration of inuence central to most conceptions of transformational or charismatic leadership has led some to claim that leadership has outlived its usefulness (Kerr and Jermier, 1978). However, little rigorous research has been conducted on alternatives. Most concerns with the traditional leader-centred paradigm centre on the dichotomy of leader-follower, which Gronn (2002, p. 425) argues precludes accurate

understanding of leadership practice, in particular the actual divisions of leadership labour which prevail in different contexts. Such orthodox formulations are seen as prescribing, not describing, a division of labour, at a time when such a division is rapidly changing with new technologies and team-based work structures. More studies are beginning to support the role of distributed, as opposed to solo, leadership in team performance, but distributed leadership (DL) is not always linked with higher performance. DL may need to be co-ordinated, rather than misaligned or fragmented and may be most effective in teams performing interdependent tasks. Our paper suggests that it is important to recognize and model different structural patterns of DL within teams rather than merely assessing the extent to which DL is present. Also, DL has not often been linked to team information processing; viewing leadership as involving information management, the authors proposed that DL may be linked to higher levels of information exchange and information integration, of both shared and unshared information. Such information may be managed differently by Chinese and Western teams, and DL may be found more often in Chinese rather than Western teams. Theory and propositions Distributed leadership If the traditional leadership model means that only one individual is attributed with the status of leader, an additive or numerical view of DL suggests that the aggregated leadership is dispersed among the members of the organisation (Gronn, 2002). One development of this approach is to move away from the individualistic orientation of much leadership theory, focusing on traditional, concentrated, vertical or centralized leadership exercised by a focal, solo leader. Focussing on collective, distributed, democratic, horizontal, decentralized, relational or shared leadership is, as Yukl (1999, p. 293) suggests:
[. . .] to describe leadership as a shared process of enhancing the collective and individual capacity of people to accomplish their work roles effectively [. . .] the leadership actions of any individual leader are much less important than the collective leadership provided by members of the organisation.

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For House and Adtiya (1997, p. 457) leadership involves collaborative relationships that lead to collective action: such shared or DL can be delegated, co-leadership, or peer leadership. Team members may interact to share team leadership responsibilities; collective leadership therefore involves relational processes of the entire team, unit or organisation. One issue with alternatives to solo leadership is that many writers use terms interchangeably, or mean different things by the same term, such as shared leadership (Pearce et al., 2008). This seems to be interchangeable with decentralized leadership, contrasted with vertical or centralized leadership. For example:
[. . .] three empirical studies have directly assessed the effects of centralized, vertical leadership and the effects of decentralized, shared leadership [. . .] the research ndings indicated that decentralized, shared leadership was a better predictor of team effectiveness in comparison to centralized, vertical leadership [. . .] taken together, these three studies taken together suggest that shared leadership may indeed provide a more robust leadership system than relying only leadership that is traditional, more centralized and vertical in nature (Pearce et al., 2008, p. 355).

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The three studies referred to are all on small teams or groups, and this tradition seems to have emerged from research on empowerment and self-directed teams. For example, Pearce (1997) and Pearce and Sims (2002) studied 71 change management teams from the US automotive industry, whilst Pearce et al. (2004) studied 28 virtual teams of US community revitalization experts. Ensley et al. (2006) have explored entrepreneurial top management teams and the effects of shared leadership on new venture performance. Pearce et al. (2008) argue that such shared leadership can provide a buffer against corruption, especially executive corruption, and promote pro-citizenship behaviour by moderating the assumed relationship between CEO predisposition for corruption and actual executive corruption. This theoretical origin is reected in earlier work on super leadership and self-leadership (Manz and Sims, 1990) and in the denition of shared leadership as:
[. . .] a dynamic, interactive inuence process among individuals in teams for which the objective is to lead one another to the achievement of team or organizational goals or both. This inuence process often involves peer, or lateral, inuence and at other times involves upward or downward hierarchical inuence (Pearce and Conger, 2003, p. 1).

All team members may be engaged in leadership through simultaneous, ongoing mutual inuence processes involving the serial emergence of ofcial as well as unofcial leaders (p. 354). Shared leadership is also explicitly linked to the CEOs use of empowering leadership-leader behaviour specically focused on the encouragement of leadership from below (Pearce et al., 2008, p. 354). Shared leadership appears to be something that the solo leader shares by dispersing power and inuence through empowering behaviours. This perspective retains the orthodox focus on what the leader does, and so is related to much traditional leadership style theory, especially to research on participative or democratic leadership styles:
[. . .] empowering leadership from the CEO is a critical element in creating shared leadership [. . .] empowering leadership behaviours encourage the development of followers who can make independent decisions, think and act autonomously without direct supervision, and generally take responsibility for their own work behaviours [. . .] the critical element to our model here is the notion that shared leadership is created and developed by empowering leadership from above (Pearce et al., 2008, p. 356).

In contrast, Brookes (2006, 2008) in research on leadership in the UK public sector uses the term shared leadership quite differently, and at a different level of analysis, namely the public sector organization, service or agency. The aim, inuenced by New Public Management theory, is normative, to establish a series of consistent leadership standards by which public leadership can be evaluated through a Collective Leadership Inventory. Collective Leadership is here seen as aiming to achieve shared outcomes through collaborative working between different organizations, distributing responsibility and encouraging teamwork through the collegiate efforts of those in each of the distinct organizations. It operates across and at all levels of public sector activity through collegiate (or distributed) leadership and collaborate or shared leadership. Shared leadership is therefore seen as involving a shared or horizontal approach across traditional partnerships or strategic alliances, aligned with distributed (here oddly termed vertical) leadership within each constituent organization. Despite the use of the terms shared or collegiate, DL is perhaps the most common term in research on collective leadership. It stems from the work of Gibb (1954, 1968)

who distinguished focused from distributed leadership, contrasting the emphasis on sole, focal leaders with shared, dispersed or distributed leadership where reciprocal inuence processes operate. This work was neglected until revived by Brown (1989) and Brown and Hosking (1986). For Gronn (2002), it is more helpful to see DL and focused leadership as end points of a continuum, not as separate categories (Figure 1). DL is characterised by interdependence, the complementary overlapping of responsibilities, and the co-ordination and management of such interdependencies. DL can be dispersed or numerical or conjoint and concertive. The rst additive/numerical view of DL suggests that all organisational members can be leaders at some time. The leadership work of particular members is here not privileged, nor is there a presumption about which individuals behaviour carries more weight. The second concertive action view of DL sees leadership as resulting from conjoint, synchronised agency and actions. These can arise through three mechanisms: as spontaneous collaboration, as intuitive working relationships among colleagues or as institutionalised practice (e.g. formal leadership teams). Spontaneous collaboration involves leadership as distributed practice, involving concertively aligned conduct that can vary in scale, complexity and scope. Intuitive working relations may emerge over time, with leadership manifested in a shared role space, as in a partnership of co-leaders, where trust seems to play a key role. Examples might include part-time chairs and full-time CEOs; heads of government and deputies and sports coaches and deputies. Insitutionalized practices may be seen in the design or adaptation of formal structures, such as in a leadership team of rst among equals as may be found in some universities, with co-principals, musical quartets, co-operatives, school heads and senior management teams and social movement organizations. These three forms of concertive action represent successive stages in a process of the institutionalization of conjoint action, synchrony and reciprocal inuence, as in joint authorship. Key properties of DL include interdependence through overlapping or complementary roles and co-ordination of activities. Collaborating agents may be individuals, but may also be individuals and teams in coalition; jointly authored work may be co-performed in close proximity, or collectively performed across a number of sites. Gronn (2002, p. 445) goes on to argue that the study of DL offers an exciting window of opportunity for qualitative, longitudinal eld studies to explore contextual variables inuencing DL. Such studies include Inglis and Sarros (2003), whose study of an Australian voluntary non-prot organisation found leadership to be distributed as institutionalised, concerted and complementary and involving interdependent action between the executive ofcer, president and program manager, all three acting as co-leaders. This appears to be an example of institutionalized practices, in contrast to Doos and Wilhemsons (2003) study of shared leadership in four Swedish organisations: the national football team, a product development company, a management consulting rm and a communications company. In their analysis, leadership was seen in terms

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Distribution Concentration Solo Couples Trios, quads Teams collective

Figure 1. Spectrum of distributed leadership

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of co-leadership as a specic form of shared leadership where the two leaders worked side by side, not in tandem with each other. Each co-leader appeared to exercise equal responsibility and inuence, contributing to organizational sustainability and enhanced competence through intuitive working relationships. Doos and Wilhemson (2003, p. 1) make the point that learning, grounded in interaction and communication is the key to success in DL, with actors as active constructors of knowledge. Such distributed leaders therefore seem to act as members of a community of practice (Drath and Palus, 1994; Horner, 1997; Wenger, 1998). Gronn (2002, p. 445) identies a number of questions for further research in DL, which he considers would benet from longitudinal, qualitative perspectives. Such questions include: RQ1. Evidence of the dynamics of role performance among the conjoint agents [. . .] and of the social construction processes by which concretively performing agents might have been attributed. RQ2. The wider environmental and organizational circumstances governing the genesis and development of forms of distributed leadership and the factors conducive to their duration and continuity [. . .]. RQ3. It would also seek to account for the location of forms of distributed leadership and the frequency of their occurrence, and it would contour the scope and breadth of the properties they embody. RQ4. Such research would endeavour to assess the inuence and impact of distributed forms on short- and long-term organisational performance. Some studies (Doos and Wilhemson, 2003; Inglis and Sarros, 2003) have addressed issues RQ1 and RQ3. With respect to RQ2, Hiller et al. (2006) have explored the impact of cultural values such as individualism/collectivism and power distance on such collective leadership roles as planning and organizing, problem solving, support and consideration and development and mentoring (i.e. both task and relationship dimensions) on US winter road teams. All four leadership dimensions were related to the cultural dimension of individualism/collectivism, as teams whose members endorsed more collectivistic views exhibited higher levels of collective leadership, but not to the dimension power distance. From this review of the literature on DL, we may derive some research propositions, especially with respect to the likely differences between Chinese and Western decision-making teams. This nding on collectivism suggests: P1. Collectivistic values of team members, such as associated with Chinese groups, are associated with greater levels of DL than individualistic values, as associated with Western groups (Hofstede, 2001; Bond, 1988).

With respect to RQ4, higher mean levels of team-related collective leadership in respect of planning and organizing, support and consideration and development and mentoring of team members, but not problem solving were related to supervisor ratings of team effectiveness (Hiller et al., 2006). Sharing in relationship-oriented leadership behaviours might be more important than task-behaviour sharing for this kind of team

(medium-level interdependence); highly autonomous teams engaged in interdependent tasks might, however, engage in more collective creation of a team vision or monitoring of the external environment. As Hillier et al. (2006, p. 395) state, collective leadership in highly interdependent teams might be even more important than found in the present study. Future research should address this possibility. Some studies have looked at DL in undergraduate student teams; Avolio et al. (1996) found that perceptions of shared leadership were related to perceptions of team effectiveness, whilst Sivasubramaniam et al. (2002) found that team-level leadership was associated with higher project grades. It seems as if collective leadership is related to team effectiveness when teams are engaged in complex tasks with high interdependence; in routine conditions the benets of DL have yet to be shown (Neubert, 1999; Hiller et al., 2006). This leads to Propositions 2 and 3: P2. P3. Higher levels of DL in both Chinese and Western teams are associated with higher team performance. DL has a greater impact on team performance in highly interdependent teams in both Chinese and Western contexts.

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Much research-like Gronns own empirical work comes from the education sector; in the UK, DL has become the normative orthodoxy, with support from the National College of School Leadership. Harris (2008) and Harris and Chapman (2002) have reviewed the evidence for the effectiveness of DL in this sector, especially on staff and student outcomes (Leithwood et al., 2006). However, different patterns of DL seem to be critical in achieving organizational improvement and change. In Canada, effective DL required leadership processes distributed to those who have or can develop the expertise and knowledge required to carry out leadership tasks. Effective DL needed to be co-ordinated in some way (Leithwood et al., 2006). As with Gronns institutionalized practice, where leadership tasks or functions have been given thoughtful consideration and agreement; this is one example of planful alignment. Where leadership tasks are distributed with little or no planning, but tacit and intuitive decisions are made, we may nd spontaneous alignment, perhaps similar to Gronns spontaneous collaboration/intuitive working relations. However, we can also nd spontaneous misalignment or anarchic misalignment where many organizational members engage in active rejection of inuence from others, and so behave in a competitive and independent way. Planful and spontaneous alignments seem to have the greatest potential for short-term organizational improvement, and planful alignment for long-term organizational productivity (Figure 2). This leads to the next three propositions: P4. Co-ordinated or aligned DL, whether spontaneous or planful, has a greater positive impact on team performance than misaligned or fragmented DL in both Chinese and Western groups. Co-ordinated DL has a greater positive impact on team performance if team members have relevant expertise, skills and knowledge in both Chinese and Western groups. Planful alignment of DL has the greatest positive impact on team performance in the long term, compared to spontaneous alignment in both Chinese and Western groups.

P5.

P6.

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Planned

Anarchic

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Alignment Misalignment

Tacit and intuitive

??????

Figure 2. Forms of distributed leadership

Spontaneous Source: Adapted from Leithwood et al. (2007)

Distributed leadership and information exchange in teams Teams often seem to fail to exchange information appropriately. Shared information is discussed by teams more than unshared information because shared information is known by more people and has more sampling opportunities during early discussion. This phenomenon has been referred to as the collective information sampling bias (CIS bias). Interest in CIS bias has emerged recently, and many questions still remain unanswered. Future research needs to extend beyond the limited sampling processes by incorporating leadership processes, especially D, into research and theory. Information sampling bias may be moderated by the efforts of the team leader, who plays an important role in team discussion (Larson et al., 1998a, b). Larson and Christensen (1993) and Larson et al. (1995, 1996) examined the role of leaders in information exchange, nding that leaders are in an especially advantageous position to increase the teams meta-knowledge base. Team leaders increasingly contribute to more information exchange as discussion progresses, and they also facilitate the use of members knowledge when making nal team decisions. Some research has investigated whether a directive or participative leadership style can promote more information sharing in teams. Larson et al. (1998a, b) found that teams with a participative leader discussed more information (both shared and unshared) than teams with a directive leader. Similarly, Srivastava (2001) found that empowering leadership emerged as an important antecedent of knowledge sharing, while directive leadership was not found to be related to knowledge sharing. However, existing research on leadership has mainly focused on the behaviours of the formally appointed team leader. With the increasing use of empowered teams and attening of organizational structures (Mohrman et al., 1995), the traditional top-down model of leadership has been questioned. Organisational teams seldom have only one team leader; even when there is a formally assigned team leader, other informal leaders

may emerge (Mehra et al., 2006). As shown in Figure 1, the dominance of a single individual as the leader only serves to represent one of the pole positions at the extreme end of a dimension where individuals are contrasted against teams and collectives (Rodgers et al., 2003). It is interesting, therefore, to explore how the behaviour of appointed team leaders versus distributed inuence from within the team accounts for the exchange of information in teams. This leads to Proposition 7: P7. DL will be associated with more information exchange than solo leadership in both Chinese and Western teams.

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In teams with distributed leaders, leadership is dispersed widely across team members (Mehra et al., 2006). When there are many leaders within a team, they may contribute more information in order to make a nal decision. By creating an atmosphere that encourages participation and information vigilance, it can be expected that teams exhibiting high levels of DL exchange a larger percentage of the available information. Although no direct research evidence has been found, some insights may be generated from recent research on interpersonal dominance. The unique information of a well-regarded team member is better retained in memory than similar information communicated by a less well-regarded member. Brown and Miller (2000) found that team members higher in interpersonal dominance tended to send more messages to others and also to receive more messages from them. Consistent with Brown and Miller (2000), Christensen and Larson (1993) found that the status of a team member inuences the overall amount of information he or she initiates, as well as the overall amount of information he or she receives from others. In general, more information is both initiated and received by high status members. Since informal team leaders exert more inuence over team members (Schneier and Goktepe, 1983), they tend to have higher interpersonal dominance and status within a team. More information, therefore, might be communicated with high levels of DL. In light of the above discussion, it could be expected that for teams exhibiting more DL, more information during team discussions will be discussed. This leads to Proposition 8: P8. The more DL is exhibited within a team, the more decision relevant information (both shared and unshared) will be discussed in both Chinese and Western teams.

Distributed leadership and information repetition in teams Information repetition may be a reection of the depth or thoroughness of information integration, because repetition may be a way of ensuring that the team as a whole continues to attend to the information and fully consider it in developing a problem solution (Larson et al., 1996, p. 318; Scholten et al., 2007). In other words, information repetition indicates that the information is regarded as important enough to be considered in the decision-making process (Scholten et al., 2007). Repeated information, therefore, tends to have a higher probability of being integrated into team decisions (Larson et al., 1998b). Many studies, however, reveal that unshared information is not effectively utilised after it is shared; it is repeated less often, and unshared information is generally

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discounted (Dennis, 1996; Dennis et al., 1998; Gigone and Hastie, 1993, 1997; Hightower and Sayeed, 1996; Larson et al., 1998b; Lavery et al., 1999; Stasser and Titus, 1985; Stasser et al., 1989; Stewart and Stasser, 1995; Thompson, 1991). Although most previous research has focused on the factors that inuence the exchange of unshared information, little research has explored factors that inuence information integration in the decision-making process (Fleming and Kaiwi, 2002). The information sampling model does not explain very well why teams more often repeat their shared than their unshared information (Larson and Harmon, 2007). Here, the information management role that team leadership plays is further explored. The team leader may repeat information more than subordinate members for two possible reasons. First, information integration is an essential leadership function in problem-solving teams. According to Maier (1967), in order for decision-making teams to be effective, someone must take responsibility for managing the information entering team discussion, and this information management role is most naturally played by the team leader. The information repetition process may be one way to ensure that team members continue to attend to the information and fully consider it in developing a solution. Leadership in decision-making teams implies an information management role, as leaders are expected to repeat information that surfaces in team discussion more than subordinate members (Larson et al., 1996). For Wittenbaum and Park (2001), a good leader keeps the discussion of the team focused and ensures that critical information is brought to the table and factored into the teams nal decision. This leads to Proposition 9: P9. Effective leadership in both Chinese and Western teams is associated with the repetition of information.

This interpretation is in line with Larson and Christensens (1993) functional analysis of team problem solving. They proposed that cognition can be understood at the team level of analysis and that many individual information-processing functions can also be observed at the team level. Repeating and asking questions about already pooled information can be viewed as serving team-level functions (Larson et al., 1998a). However, team members are likely to enact behaviours that full various team-level cognitive functions only to the extent that those functions have not been addressed by the actions of others and are required by the task. Thus, to the extent that one team member is able to keep that information alive, others need not concern themselves with this function. It is therefore not surprising that the team leader should tend to repeat and ask questions about case information signicantly more than subordinates (Larson and Christensen, 1993; Larson et al., 1998a). In the empirical literature, team leaders are more likely to repeat information than other members, and leaders help to keep information alive by bringing it to members attention (Fleming and Kaiwi, 2002; Wittenbaum et al., 2004). Larson et al. (1996) designed an experiment with three-person teams of physicians who were given two hypothetical medical cases to diagnose. As predicted, it was found that team leaders repeated substantially more case information than did other members; over time, they repeated unshared information at a steadily increasing rate. Similarly, Larson et al. (1998a) examined the unique role that team leaders play in managing the information integration process empirically in a medical decision-making context similar to the one used in Larson et al. (1996). It was found that team leaders were consistently more likely than

other members to ask questions, to repeat shared information and to repeat unshared information as the team discussion proceeded. For teams with DL, decision alternatives can be evaluated together to reach agreement (Manz and Sims, 1991; Srivastava, 2001; Yukl, 1998). According to Yoo and Alavi (2004), informal leaders have three important roles in teams: initiator, scheduler and integrator. In ambiguous situations, when team members have relatively little information to solve problems, informal leaders are able to take advantage of this ambiguity to integrate and repeat all team information. In recent research examining emergent leadership in virtual teams, it was found that emergent leaders controlled the nal outcome of the project by playing the role of an integrator (Yoo and Alavi, 2004). Therefore, the more distributed the leadership, there are more chances for actors to repeat and manage team information. This leads to Proposition 10: P10. The more leadership is distributed within a team, the more decision relevant information (both shared and unshared) will be repeated, and better information integration will occur, leading to higher performance in both Chinese and Western teams. Conclusion and implications The behaviour of the appointed or elected leader of some team or organization has been typically the focus of most studies on leadership (Bass, 1990). However, although normative leadership research sees the leader as a centred subject with a particular orientation, leaders are not the autonomous, self-determining individual with a secure unitary identity (at) the centre of the social universe (Alvesson and Deetz, 2000, p. 98). More studies are beginning to support the role of distributed, as opposed to solo, leadership in team performance, but DL is not always linked to higher performance. As Harris (2008, p. 184) points out, we must not fall into the trap of believing that any form of distributed leadership is inherently good. It depends. This conclusion is supported by Iles and Macaulay (2007) in their research on ethical leadership in English local government; though some participants claimed that leadership of the ethical agenda was distributed across various actors (e.g. government departments, the Standards Board for England, local standards committees, monitoring ofcers, chief executives, council leaders) it appeared that such leadership was fragmented rather than distributed. Mehra et al. (2006) in a study of US sales teams using sociometric analysis also failed to nd support for the idea that the more leadership is distributed across the members of a team, the better the teams performance; decentralization of the leadership network was here not signicantly related to superior team performance. However, certain kinds of decentralized leadership structures were associated with better team performance, indicating the importance of structure with respect to the impact of DL on team performance. DL may need to be co-ordinated, rather than misaligned or fragmented, and may be most effective in teams performing interdependent tasks. Distributed-coordinated structures were more associated with higher team performance than both traditional leader-centred leadership networks and distributed-fragmented leadership networks: team performance is not simply a matter of having more leaders. It also matters whether or not the leaders see each other as leaders (Mehra et al., 2006, p. 241). In addition, DL has not often been linked to team information processing. Viewing leadership as involving information management, it is proposed in the present paper

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that DL may be linked to higher levels of information exchange and information integration. This is very important for understanding collective information processing in teams and, as understanding team behaviours becomes increasingly essential, it is hoped that the theory can lay the groundwork for understanding collective information processing and invoke further interests on the issue by integrating the efforts of researchers studying DL and team performance. As collectivism has been found to be associated with higher levels of DL in teams, it may be that Chinese decision-making teams are more likely to display higher levels than Western teams. If this can be aligned or co-ordinated, rather than anarchic or fragmented, such teams are likely to show higher levels of performance. Such propositions need further empirical testing with decision-making teams drawn from homogenous Chinese and Western members and heterogeneous teams composed of mixed Chinese and Western team members.
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Further reading Alimo-Metcalfe, B. and Alban-Metcalfe, R. (2001), The development of a new transformational leadership questionnaire, Journal of Occupational & Organizational Psychology, Vol. 74 No. 1, pp. 1-28. Alvesson, M. and Sveningsson, S. (2003), Good visions, bad micro-management and ugly ambiguity: contradictions of (non-) leadership in a knowledge-intensive organization, Organization Studies, Vol. 24 No. 6, pp. 961-88. Antonacopolou, E. and Bento, R. (2004), Methods of learning leadership: taught and experiential, in Storey, J. (Ed.), Leadership in Organizations: Current Issues and Key Trends, Routledge, London, pp. 81-102. Bass, B. (1985), Leadership and Performance Beyond Expectations, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Bass, B. and Avolio, B. (1993), Transformational leadership: a response to critiques, in Chemers, M.M. and Ayman, R. (Eds), Leadership Theory and Research: Perspectives and Directions, Academic Press, San Diego, CA, pp. 49-80. Bennis, W. (2004), The seven ages of the leader, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 82 No. 1, pp. 46-53. Bennis, W. and Nanus, R. (1985), Leaders: Their Strategies for Taking Charge, Harper and Row, New York, NY. Blake, R. and Mouton, J. (1985), The New Managerial Grid, 3rd ed., Gulf Publishing, Houston, TX. Bourdieu, P. (1986), The forms of capital, in Richardson, J. (Ed.), Handbook for Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, Greenwood, New York, NY, pp. 241-58. Boydell, T., Burgoyne, J. and Pedler, M. (2004), Suggested development, People Management, Vol. 10 No. 4, pp. 32-4. Burns, J. (1978), Leadership, Harper and Row, New York, NY. Cabinet Ofce (2000), Strengthening Leadership in the Public Sector: A Research Study by the PIU, Performance and Innovation Unit, London. Dale, M. and Iles, P. (1992), Assessing Management Skills: A Guide to Competencies and Evaluation Techniques, Kogan Page, London. Davidsson, P. and Honig, H. (2003), The role of social and human capital among nascent entrepreneurs, Journal of Business Venturing, Vol. 18 No. 2, pp. 310-31. Day, D. (2000), Leadership development: a review in context, Leadership Quarterly, Vol. 11 No. 4, pp. 581-611. Dixon, N. (1993), Developing managers for the learning organization, Human Resource Management Review, Vol. 3, pp. 243-54. Dulewicz, S. and Higgs, M. (2000a), Emotional intelligence: a review and evaluation study, Journal of Managerial Psychology, Vol. 15 No. 4, pp. 341-68. Dulewicz, S. and Higgs, M. (2000b), Emotional intelligence: the key to future successful corporate leadership?, Journal of General Management, Vol. 25 No. 3, pp. 1-14. Dulewicz, S. and Higgs, M. (2004), A new instrument to assess leadership dimensions and styles, Selection and Development Review, Vol. 20 No. 2, pp. 7-12. Dulewicz, S. and Higgs, M. (2005), Assessing leadership styles and organisational context, Journal of Managerial Psychology, Vol. 20 Nos 1/2, pp. 105-23. Ehrich, L., Cranston, N. and Kimber, M. (2005), Muddling through ethical dilemmas for educational leaders: towards an exploratory model, paper presented at the British Academy of Management Annual Conference, Oxford.

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