Developing leaders' strategic thinking through global work experience: the moderating role of cultural distance.

To respond to the challenge of how organizations can develop leaders who can think strategically, we investigate the relation of leaders' global work experiences--that is, those experiences that require the role incumbent to transcend national boundaries--to their competency in strategic thinking. We further examine whether leaders' exposure to a country whose culture is quite distinct from the culture of their own country (i.e., one that is culturally distant) moderates these relationships. Our analyses of 231 upper level leaders reveals that the time they have spent in global work experiences positively relates to their strategic thinking competency, particularly for leaders who have had exposure to a more culturally distant country. We discuss these findings in light of the research on international work experiences and leader development.

Show and tell: how supervisors facilitate leader development among transitioning leaders.

We argue that studying leaders experiencing a job transition offers a unique opportunity to explore initial changes in leaders' development in their cognition and action. Here, we examine 2 early indicators of leaders' development-their acquisition of knowledge regarding their new role (a cognitive outcome) and the time they allocate toward leading others (a behavioral outcome)-and how supervisors can facilitate these forms of development among transitioning leaders. With a sample of 110 first-line leaders who we tracked over approximately 10 months at 4 different points in time, we tested the efficacy of supervisors' support in the form of modeling effective leadership behavior (i.e., "show") and the provision of job information (i.e., "tell"). Results from random coefficient modeling revealed that the interactive effect of supervisors' "show" and "tell" accelerates the rate of transitioning leaders' self-perceived role knowledge acquisition over time. This upward trajectory is even more pronounced for transitioning leaders who have not been exposed to an exceptional leader during their careers. Further, with a lagged design, we found that leaders who report greater role knowledge allocate more time toward leading others, thus indicating initial changes in these leaders' behavior. We discuss these findings in light of their theoretical and practical importance to the field of leader development.

Better understanding work unit goal orientation: Its emergence and impact under different types of work unit structure.

With a multisource sample comprising 1,150 employees and 230 supervisors, we investigate the effect of leader goal orientation on leader's perceptions of unit performance. We propose that a leader's goal orientation indirectly impacts performance perceptions via the shared achievement goal adopted within the unit (i.e., unit goal orientation). Further, we hypothesize that the presence and impact of unit goal orientation depend on the work unit structure. We find general support for this moderated mediation model, with the strongest evidence being associated with the learning and prove dimensions of goal orientation.

Understanding the emergence of state goal orientation in organizational work groups: the role of leadership and multilevel climate perceptions.

This article attends to a broad range of practically significant employee motivations and provides insight into how to enhance individual-level performance by examining individual-level state goal orientation emergence in organizational work groups. Leadership and multilevel climate processes are theorized to parallel each dimension of state goal orientation to cue and ultimately induce the corresponding achievement focus among individual work group members. It is argued that the patterns of leader behavior, which elucidate the leader's achievement priority, shape group members' psychological and work group climate to embody this priority. Resulting multilevel climate perceptions signal and compel group members to adopt the ascribed form of state goal orientation. The quality of the leader-member exchange relationship is viewed as a means to clarify leader messages in the formation of group members' psychological climate and internalize these cues in the emergence of state goal orientation. Considerations for future research and practice are discussed.