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

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