What role do values play in organizational life? How do they shape the efficiency and effectiveness of organizational change? This volume examines what we actually mean when we use the term values and what it means to act according to values in ordinary everyday life. The contributors to this volume provide an exposition of the circular relationship between values, conflict, and compromise. It can be said that current research lacks a thorough exploration of what we actually mean by human values and what it means to act according to values in ordinary, everyday life in organizations. This is what the chapters in this volume seek to address through the reflections of organizational practitioners on their ordinary work in organizations. Covering subject areas such as organizational theory and behaviour, and organizational analysis as well as the sociology of work and industry, this book will appeal to researchers and practitioners alike.

The experienced leaders, consultants and managers contributing to this book provide an alternative way of making sense of experience in a rapidly changing world, using reflective rather than idealized accounts of everyday life in organizations.

In an unpredictable world, how do we go about supporting leaders to develop more democratic and inclusive ways of working and living? The second edition of Leadership Development in Practice: A Complexity Approach draws on autoethnographic accounts of experience from practitioners across three continents to explore the leadership development approaches that best support managers to work with uncertainty by taking their experience seriously. It offers an alternative perspective on leadership and organisation for business schools, consultancies, and corporate training functions to adopt in their development of leaders. Additions to this second edition include as follows: A new chapter on creating large group dialogue A more explicit emphasis on what it means to take gender, diversity, and social justice seriously A review of the burgeoning interest in complexity perspectives on leadership and leadership development since publication of the first edition This book is essential reading for leadership and organisational development professionals, researchers, and students. It will also be of interest to managers looking for an approach to leadership development that works with how things are rather than with idealisations of how things ought to be.

This book undertakes a critical exploration of the tools and techniques of leadership and management, favoured by many of today's books. It contests the claims that the tools and techniques are based on evidence and explains why human activities of leading and managing are simply not amenable to scientific proof and consequently, why long-term futures of organizations are unpredictable.

Leading organisations in our contemporary world means grappling with unpredictability, painful pressures and continual conflict, all in the context of an acceleration in the pace of change. We expect the impossible from heroic leaders and they rarely live up to expectations. With countless recommendations, self-help books and new concepts, scholars and management consultants often simplify and dream unrealistically. This book challenges the more orthodox discourse on leadership and presents a way of thinking about leadership that pays closer attention to experience. The contributors in this book, all senior managers or facilitators of leadership development, resist easy solutions, new typologies or unrealistic prescriptions. Writing about their experiences in Denmark, the UK, Israel, Ethiopia, South Africa and beyond, they are less concerned with traits that people can possess and learn, or magical promises of recipes for success, and more with the socio-political process of the interaction between people from which leadership emerges as a theme. We focus on understanding leadership as a practice within which communication, research, imagination and ethical judgements are continuously improvised. So rather than idealising leadership, or reducing it to soothing tools and techniques, we suggest how leaders might become more politically, emotionally and socially savvy. This book is written for academics and practitioners with an interest in the everyday challenges of both individual and group practices of formal and informal leaders in different types of organisations, and is an ideal resource for executives and students on leadership development programmes. We hope this volume will help readers to expand the wisdom found in their own experience and discover for themselves and for others, a greater sense of freedom.

Since the early 1990s, public sector organisations have been overwhelmed with what has come to be termed New Public Management (NPM) methods. NPM idealises performance, metrics, transparency and marketisation. This book explores some of the tensions which arise in institutions where NPM methods prevail, introduces different ways of thinking about the task of managing for public good and offers a radical challenge to the dominant assumptions regarding why and how professional communities of practice may (or may not) come to change their working practices. In this third book in the Complexity and Management series, the expert authors bring together their experiences to provide vibrant accounts of how to manage in everyday public sector organisational situations using practical judgement. The book includes a brief introduction to complexity and public sector management, real-world narratives illustrating concrete dilemmas in the workplace and a concluding chapter that draws together the practical and theoretical implications of a complexity perspective. With both theoretical grounding and practical insights from senior managers and consultants, the book provides an ideal resource for students on management or executive leadership programmes for the public sector, as well as managers in and consultants to the sector.

Bringing together some of the world’s leading thinkers, academics and professionals to provide practitioners, students and academicians with comprehensive insights into implementing effective service innovation. This book presents service innovation holistically and systemically across various service areas, including health, education, tourism, hospitality, telecommunications, and retail. It addresses contemporary issues through conceptual and applied contributions across industry, academia, and government, providing insights for improved practice and policy making. Featuring cutting-edge research contributions, practical examples, implementations and a select number of case studies across several growth service industries, this book also includes examples of failed service innovation attempts in order to demonstrate a balanced view of the topic and to make clear the pitfalls to be avoided. Culminating in a suggested step-by-step guide to enable service organization’s managers to understand and implement the concepts of service innovation and manage its evolutionary processes effectively, this book will prove a valuable resource to a wide reaching audience including researchers, practitioners, managers, and students who aspire to create a deeper scientific foundation for service design and engineering, service experience and marketing, and service management and innovation. Includes endorsements from professionals in the field of service innovation.