Leaders and Their Contingencies – Implications for the Development of Leader-Follower Relations

Dear Colleagues,

War, the climate emergency, famine, and the pandemic crisis are subjects that have marked the agenda of countries worldwide as they try to find viable/sustainable/appropriate solutions and responses to the problems we face. Current events in the world have drawn attention to leadership, its styles, behaviors, and effectiveness.

On observing an emergency context such as the current one, and considering that leaders are the result of their contingencies, this Special Issue seeks contributions from different perspectives of leadership. In this sense, of particular interest are those which adopt innovative, comprehensive, and interconnected—but also theoretically or empirically grounded—viewpoints that go beyond existing relevant studies to propose what the direction of research should be, how leadership should be understood, and what leadership studies should explore or clarify on this long path that research in this area has proved to be.

Many studies over decades of research have studied the impact of leadership on the behavior and attitudes of followers (Judge and Piccolo 2004), principally at the individual level and, more specifically, on job satisfaction (Podsakoff et al. 2004; Podsakoff et al. 1990). With a strong focus on transformational leadership, existing studies underline the importance of leaders' behavior in influencing/motivating/stimulating/transforming followers' behavior (Walumbwa et al. 2005). The underlying idea is that followers' job satisfaction (and other positive individual outcomes) will depend, in part, on direct individual experiences with the leader but will also indirectly depend on the interference of other organizational variables (Jung and Avolio 2000). Thus, the second aim is to further analyze relations between individuals and leaders, and explore the desired outcomes for individuals and organizations. In this view, of particular interest are studies that explore how leadership should impact on organizations and their followers, but also on external stakeholders and society in general, what leaders should prioritize, and how they should encourage responsible, ethical, and confident behavior from their followers.

Relevant theoretical perspectives might include (but are not limited to):

• Transformational leadership;
• Ethical leadership;
• Leadership and sustainability;
• Responsible leadership;
• Women in leadership;
• Leadership effectiveness;
• Followers’ satisfaction, commitment, motivation;
• Organizational citizenship behaviors;
• Leader competency and effectiveness;
• Sustainable leadership;
• Humble leadership.

References

Judge, Timothy, and Ronald Piccolo. 2004. Transformational and transactional leadership: A meta-analytic test of their relative validity. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89: 755–768.

Jung, Dong, and Bruce Avolio. 2000. Opening the black box: An experimental investigation of the mediating effects of trust and value congruence on transformational and transactional leadership. Journal of Organizational Behavior 21: 949–964.

Podsakoff, Philip, Scott MacKenzie, Jeong-Yeon Lee, and Nathan Podsakoff. 2003. Common method biases in behavioral research: A critical review of the literature and recommended remedies. Journal of Applied Psychology 88: 879–903.

Podsakoff, Philip, Scott MacKenzie, Robert Moorman, and Richard Fetter. 1990. Transformational leader behaviors and their effects on followers' trust in leader, satisfaction, and organizational citizenship behaviors. The Leadership Quarterly, 1: 107–142.

Walumbwa, Fred, Bani Orwa, Peng Wang, and John Lawler. 2005. Transformational leadership, organizational commitment, and job satisfaction: A comparative study of Kenyan and U.S. financial firms. Human Resource Development Quarterly 16: 235–256.

Dr. Carla Maria Freitas Da Costa Freire
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Administrative Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• transformational leadership
• ethical leadership
• leadership and sustainability
• responsible leadership
• women in leadership
• leadership effectiveness
• leader competency and effectiveness
• sustainable leadership
• humble leadership