Towards an organisational theory of hubris: Symptoms, behaviours and social fields within finance and banking

Hubris has become a popular explanation for all kinds of business failure. It is often reduced to the one-dimensional notion of ‘over-confidence’, particularly on the part of CEOs. There is a need to clarify the extent to which other attitudes and behaviours constitute hubris, and how they are affected by such organisational dynamics as the struggle for power, status and material rewards between actors. This article explores these issues within the finance and banking sectors. It uses the Critical Incident Technique to identify behaviours associated with hubris and probes the interaction between them and the organisational contexts in which they occur. Five categories of behaviour based on an analysis of 101 incidents are described, as are a series of ‘inflection dynamics’ that reinforce the behaviours in question and constitute a social field conducive to hubris. I challenge the reductionist views that hubris is primarily a psychological state consisting mainly of ‘over-confidence’. This article seeks to complexify the term hubris and to develop an organisational rather than purely psychology theory of its emergence and institutionalisation within finance and banking.

Positive Practices in the Workplace: Impact on Team Climate, Work Engagement, and Task Performance

Positivity in organizations accentuates that which is flourishing and life-giving to discover and promote the best of the human condition, exemplified in the recent focus on positive practices, behaviors that enhance positive affect in employees and lead to organizational performance. A quantitative study of positivity in a team-based food service context elucidated significant relationships between positive practices, social climate, work engagement, and task performance. Finer delineation of positive practices demonstrated the importance of team members discovering meaning in their work through mutual interaction that promotes trust, respect, and confidence, with employees believing the best in one another and inspiring one another in their performance. The findings suggest that in an intensive service climate positivity can foster team member engagement and performance through prosocial actions that demonstrate appreciation, affirmation, and respect, thus promoting greater meaningfulness in work.

Leadership: Convergence and Divergence in Leadership Relations

The article argues for theorizing and studying the significance of how so-called leaders and followers converge or diverge in their views and understandings of the leadership/followership relations they may be part of. Divergence or misfits may be common yet missed by the researcher who takes only one party’s view of leadership into account and/or assumes that people involved define the relationship in a similar way. The article identifies and illustrates four typical forms of shared/diverse meanings regarding leadership: high-alignment leadership (shared meanings), value misfit (diverse assessment), construction misfit (different views of what goes on), and multiple breakdowns (high level of confusion of what goes on and how to assess it). Given variations in views of leadership, this article makes a case for considering “divergent relationalities”—in some opposition to common ideas about “smooth” leadership/followership relations based on convergent meanings.

The critical incident technique reappraised

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to offer a reconceptualization of the critical incident technique (CIT) and affirm its utility in management and organization studies.

Design/methodology/approach

Utilizing a case study from a leadership context, the paper applies the CIT to explore various leadership behaviours in the context of nonprofit boards in Canada. Semi-structured critical incident interviews were used to collect behavioural data from 53 participants – board chairs, board directors, and executive directors – from 18 diverse nonprofit organizations in Alberta, Canada.

Findings

While exploiting the benefits of a typicality of events, in some instances the authors were able to validate aspects of transformational leadership theory, in other instances the authors found that theory falls short in explaining the relationships between organizational actors. The authors argue that the CIT potentially offers the kind of “thick description” that is particularly useful in theory building in the field.

Research limitations/implications

Drawing on interview material, the authors suggest that incidents can be classified based on frequency of occurrence and their salience to organizational actors, and explore the utility of this distinction for broader theory building purposes.

Practical implications

Principally, the paper proposes that this method of investigation is under-utilized by organization and management researchers. Given the need for thick description in the field, the authors suggest that the approach outlined generates exceptionally rich data that can illuminate multiple organizational phenomena.

Social implications

The role of nonprofit boards is of major importance for those organizations and the clients that they serve. This paper shed new light on the leadership dynamics at the top of these organizations and therefore can help to guide improved practice by those in board and senior management positions.

Originality/value

The CIT is a well-established technique. However, it is timely to revisit it as a core technique in qualitative research and promote its greater use by researchers. In addition, the authors offer a novel view of incidents as typical, atypical, prototypical or archetypal of organizational phenomena that extends the analytical value of the approach in new directions.

Reflexive work and the duality of self-leadership

The concept of self-leadership is known and accepted, but still under-researched. By considering the reflexive work involved in the process of self-leadership, we seek to understand what factors are relevant for managers to be effective in a sustainable and productive way. We ask how managers engage in self-leadership. Empirically, we find that self-leadership is a process that can be translated into the capability of handling and sustaining four dualities: challenge and routine; self and others; nonwork and work; mind and body.

Lessons for leaders: Positive organization studies meets Niccolò Machiavelli

Machiavelli should be a central and canonical text for management education, even in the age of positive organizational literatures. We give it this role by considering the case of the virtuous leader. Our proposition is simple: virtuous leaders live and act, like anybody else, in the power circuits that are constitutive of reality. Therefore, they participate in power dynamics that sometimes make them face the need to decide in ways that do not correspond to normative positive precepts. Machiavelli shows that even virtuous leaders must do what needs to be done, while trying to preserve one’s values and move in the direction of noble, high purpose goals.

The case for transcendent followership

Based on the model of transcendent leadership, we suggest that subordinates need to display competences that mirror those of their leaders and propose transcendent followership as a framework for the responsibilities of followers in contemporary organizational environments. A transcendent follower is someone who expresses competence in terms of their management of relations with self, others and organization. Competence in the domain of self refers to being self-aware and proactive in developing individual strengths. Competence in the domain of others refers to the processes of interpersonal impact, in relation to leaders and peers. Competence in the domain of organization refers to collective maintenance and change. The article offers an integrated view of the roles and responsibilities of followers in dynamic organizational environments, presenting them as fellows rather than subordinates.