Richard Bolden

University of the West of England, Bristol | UWE Bristol · Bristol Business School

This paper presents a societal perspective on academic leadership by exploring the preoccupations of academics as citizens rather than as employees, managers or individuals. It uses a listening post methodology to ask ‘what is it like to be a citizen of an academic institution in contemporary Britain?’ Three listening posts, comprising 26 participa...

The aim of this paper is to review conceptual and empirical literature on the concept of distributed leadership (DL) in order to identify its origins, key arguments and areas for further work. Consideration is given to the similarities and differences between DL and related concepts, including ‘shared’, ‘collective’, ‘collaborative’, ‘emergent’, ‘c...

Whilst Day's (2000) description of leadership development as an investment in social capital has been widely cited, there has been little subsequent empirical or theoretical work to explore and articulate the nature and purpose of this ‘social capital’ or how it changes over time. This paper revisits this issue by presenting findings from a qualita...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present a case study tracking the development and engagement of a group of experts by experience (The Independent Futures (IF) Group) who provided a lived experience voice to the Bristol Golden Key (GK) partnership within the Fulfilling Lives programme. The case study reports the genesis and impact of the gro...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present insights into the way in which system change can be activated around the provision of services and support for people experiencing multiple disadvantages in an urban setting. Design/methodology/approach This paper is informed by a thematic analysis of reflections, reports, learning logs, interviews a...

This ‘Leading Questions’ thought piece explores the elusive nature of collective leadership. We use our previous experiences to explore issues that tend to go unnoticed and unreported within the academic analysis of collective forms of leadership, including (1) the motives of those commissioning and conducting applied research to ‘make a difference...

Purpose: This paper reports on the experience of attempting a ‘collaboratory’ approach in sharing knowledge about leadership development evaluation (LDE). A collaboratory intertwines ‘collaboration’ and ‘laboratory’ to create innovation networks for all sorts of social and technological problems. Approach: The authors, alongside a variety of publi...

Theme: Leading to Care – Foregrounding Health and Well-being in Leadership Development and Education We are pleased to announce the 12th Developing Leadership Capacity Conference (DLCC) will be taking place online from 12th-13th July 2022, hosted by Bristol Leadership and Change Centre at the Bristol Business School, UWE. Extreme challenges such...

Objectives Systems leadership is widely acknowledged to be needed to address the many ‘wicked issues’ challenging public health systems. However, there is a lack of evidence on how to develop public health professionals into effective systems leaders. This study scoped the possibilities for developing the systems leadership capacity of public healt...

Background ‘Systems leadership’ has emerged as a key concept in global public health alongside such related concepts as ‘systems thinking’ and ‘whole systems approaches.’ It is an approach that is well suited to issues that require collective action, where no single organisation can control the outcomes. While there is a growing literature on the t...

In this interview, Ruth Hunt, former CEO of the lesbian, gay, bi, and trans equality charity Stonewall and now crossbench peer at the House of Lords, discusses her approach to leadership for social change. She considers the changing context of LGBT rights, her motives for joining the organization, experiences and learning from leading change on thi...

This paper explores the mobilization of systems change through analysis of a ‘systems leadership’ development intervention aimed to develop the capacity of cross-sector partnerships to tackle ‘wicked’ health and social care challenges. Particular attention is given to the role of independent ‘enablers’ in opening up ‘adaptive spaces’ where partners...

The International Studying Leadership Conference provides a forum for scholars and practitioners from around the world to share insights on the nature, processes and outcomes of leadership in contemporary organisations and society. Bristol Leadership and Change Centre is delighted to be hosting the 18th International Studying Leadership Conference...

This interview with Lord Michael Bichard, one of the most distinguished public sector leaders in the United Kingdom, explores his ideas around the relationship between leadership, creativity, and innovation. A champion of place-based approaches to public services, where citizens are actively involved in service design, delivery, and appraisal, Bich...

n the past decade successive UK governments have placed a strong emphasis on, and renewed interest in, the role of higher education in skills development. In the light of recent skills policy developments in England and drawing upon the findings of an empirical qualitative study of specific workforce development initiatives and previous research, t...

Unprecedented changes in the nature and prevalence of digital technology have significant implications for leadership theory, practice and development that, as yet, remain largely unexplored in mainstream academic literature. This article features an interview with Rick Haythornthwaite, Chairman of global businesses including Centrica and MasterCar...

Leadership remains one of the most sought-after qualities in contemporary society, yet after centuries of research, education and debate it remains just as elusive as ever. Leadership Paradoxes: Rethinking Leadership for an Uncertain World argues that the key to understanding and enhancing leadership education, theory and practice lies in the recog...

Over recent years, concepts of shared, distributed and collective leadership have become increasingly popular and are now widely advocated across public, private and not-for-profit sectors in the UK, US, Australia and elsewhere. Within higher education, it has been suggested that such perspectives might offer an alternative to the discourse of ‘man...

Recent literature has emphasised the distributed nature of leadership in higher education and the multitude of actors and factors that contribute towards organisational outcomes. Gronn (2009, 2011) suggests, however, that rather than using such evidence to provide broad, normative accounts of leadership practice, greater attention should be directe...

The concept of Ubuntu is an alternative to individualistic and utilitarian philosophies that tend to dominate in the West. It is a Zulu/Xhosa word, with parallels in many other African languages, which is most directly translated into English as ‘humanness’. Its sense, however, is perhaps best conveyed by the Nguni expression ‘umuntu ngumuntu ngaba...

This paper explores the growth of corporate branding in higher education and its use by academic and professional managers as a mechanism for not only enhancing institutional reputation but also for facilitating internal culture change. It uses Bourdieu’s framework of field, capital and habitus to analyse case studies of branding in two English bus...

Seven years ago, leadership scholar Keith Grint (2006) estimated that there were 20,000 books on leadership in print. That number will only have grown in the intervening years. If we add to this the tens of thousands of articles and essays – including, of course, those in this volume – then we are faced with a truly colossal body of literature and...

1. INTRODUCTION: EXPLORING LEADERSHIP Not Another Book on Leadership! Leadership: The Panacea Of Our Times? Changing Perspectives on Leadership Studying Leadership Dissatisfaction With Leadership and Management Theory and Education Reframing Leadership Studies Chapter Summary 2. THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES ON LEADERSHIP The Contested Nature of Leaders...

In recent years the call for more inclusive, ‘post-heroic’ perspectives on leadership has become increasingly common and relational theories that consider leadership as ‘a social influence process through which emergent coordination (i.e. evolving social order) and change (i.e. new values, attitudes, approaches, behaviours, ideologies, etc.) are co...

Broad, yet critically informed, overview of the field of leadership studies Up-to-date review of contemporary theory and research Sets out implications for development and practice Accessibly written with lively practical examples by a team of leading experts Multidisciplinary approach

Research report This is the third in a series of reports summarising the outcomes of research to support the South West Higher Level Skills Pathfinder Project. The first of these mapped out the higher skills and employer engagement (EE) landscape as portrayed through policy and research literature. The second summarised a series of in-depth case st...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present experiences and insights from an higher education‐led initiative to build leadership capacity within the South West of England in order to the shed light onto the processes and mechanisms of regional capacity building. Design/methodology/approach – The approach was one of participative action resea...

Author's draft version; post-print. Final version available on Sage Journals Online

Author's draft; final version available on Sage Journals Online The term ‘distributed leadership’ has been prominent in research into educational management for some time. A number of articles have recently questioned the explanatory utility of the concept; in this essay we examine its rhetorical function in higher education institutions. We sugges...

This article provides an account of meanings and connotations of `African leadership' emerging from research with a cohort of participants on a Pan-African leadership development programme. We begin by reviewing current approaches to leadership, and how they have been applied to the study of leadership and management across cultures, before introdu...

Accepted for publication in Educational Management, Administration and Leadership, 2008/9. Final version available online on Sage Journals Online at http://ema.sagepub.com/ In this paper we present findings from research in 12 UK universities that sought to capture a range of perspectives on ‘distributed leadership’ and reveal common and competing...

Article © 2009 Association of MBAs This article considers changes in the UK higher education system and the extent to which the need to build more effective, enduring and equitable partnerships with employers may help inform our understanding of collaborative leadership and our ability to contribute in a positive way towards the development of lead...

Conference paper Presented at the Annual Conference of the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE), December 2007 In this paper we will present findings from a recent LFHE-funded study comprising interviews with 152 university leaders at various levels in 12 UK universities to explore competing perceptions, experiences and approaches to l...

This article reviews the outcomes of a three year workshop series with senior leadership and management development managers from a range of public and private sector organisations. The aim of this enquiry was to explore the interface between performance management and leadership development systems and the extent to which they can complement one a...

Executive summary to the interim report, October 2006; full text of the final report may be downloaded free from LFHE website but registration is required Leadership Foundation for Higher Education

Published in Leadership: the key concepts / edited by Antonio Marturano and Jonathan Gosling. Routledge, 2008 The concept of ‘distributed leadership’ has become popular in recent years as an alternative to models of leadership that concern themselves primarily with the attributes and behaviours of individual ‘leaders’ (e.g. trait, situational , sty...

Pre-print of article Developing senior leaders is necessary but insufficient for improving leadership across an organisation and restructuring alone won’t resolve all challenges. Rather, leadership development and organisational development should be regarded as complementary and integrated activities comprising the development of leaders (‘human c...

Pre-print; authors' draft Developing senior leaders is necessary but insufficient for improving leadership across an organisation and restructuring alone won’t resolve all challenges. Rather, leadership development and organisational development should be regarded as complementary and integrated activities comprising the development of leaders (‘hu...

This article indicates how the competency approach to leadership could be conceived of as a repeating refrain that continues to offer an illusory promise to rationalize and simplify the processes of selecting, measuring and developing leaders, yet only reflects a fragment of the complexity that is leadership. To make this argument we draw on two se...

Are we mistaken when we attempt to cultivate the individual capabilities of charismatic-, visionary-, transformational-leaders in abstraction from the cultural and institutional settings that shape leadership behaviour. Rather than locate ‘leadership’ as something resident in one or more individuals, should we instead think of leadership as somethi...

Conference paper, British Academy of Management Conference, Belfast, 12-14 September 2006 Recent theories of leadership have shifted emphasis from the traits and behaviours of “leaders” to the social and contextual processes of “leadership”. Despite this, however, much leadership development remains firmly focussed on the individual leader rather t...

Conference paper from 'Studying Leadership: Future Agendas', the 4th International Conference on Leadership Research, Lancaster University Management School, 12-13 December 2005 In this paper we will draw on our experiences of researching a pan-African leadership development initiative to explore the manner in which participants use their understan...

research report The second in a series of research reports from Leadership South West, the regional Centre of Excellence in leadership, based at the Centre for Leadership Studies at the University of Exeter. Whereas the first report explored the question “What is leadership?” this second report will look at “What is leadership development: purpose...

Following a review of leadership competency frameworks and reflections from senior managers on the future requirements of leadership it is possible to identify a dissonance between current leadership assessment and development priorities and the qualities demanded of leaders over the coming years. A review of 29 public, private and generic leadersh...

Welcome to the first in a series of research reports from Leadership South West, which gives an introduction to some of the key issues in the field of leadership, including what is it, how can it be measured and what impact does it have upon performance? This report does not claim to be the definitive guide to all things leadership, but rather to p...

This article describes a longitudinal study of how openness to change, job satisfaction, anxiety and depression are affected by exposure to a change situation - in this case, the implementation of new technology and work practices. Measures were taken before the change was fully implemented and again several months later. Employees fell into two gr...

Traditional qualitative data analysis software, while greatly facilitating text analysis, remains entrenched in a tradition of semantic coding. Such an approach, being both time-consuming and poor at incorporating quantitative variables, is seldom applied to large-scale survey and database research (especially within the commercial sector). Lexical...

Objectives. The aim of this paper is to describe the development and refinement of nine measures of perceived work characteristics for use in studies of the psychological wellbeing of health services employees. The constructs measured are: autonomy/control, feedback, influence, leader support, professional compromise, role clarity, role conflict, p...

In this paper we describe a survey of the current use and effectiveness of key modern manufacturing practices within the UK. The findings from the survey are based upon a ten-percent sample of British manufacturing companies employing more than 150 people. The most common practices in use are supply-chain partnering, total quality management, team-...

It is widely suggested that many National Health Service (NHS) workers experience high levels of minor psychiatric disorder. However, inadequacies of sampling and measurement in studies to date have not allowed this suggestion to be properly evaluated. The present study was designed to overcome these methodological weaknesses by using a sample of o...

This paper argues that the traditional approach to datamining is dominated by quantitative tools which assume knowledge to be inherent in the data: the data miners task simply being to find it. We propose, however, that true knowledge arises from an interaction between the information and the user. The notion of user interaction in datamining dema...

Outlines a comprehensive taxonomy of modern manufacturing practices. Previous attempts have tended to be partial in coverage and to concentrate on performance issues, rather than explain the reasons why a particular practice may have been adopted. In order to overcome these problems, the new taxonomy categorizes manufacturing practices according to...

We summarize empirical work examining the impact on users of information technology (IT) and identify some gaps in current knowledge. We outline some alternative multivariate models of users' reactions to IT, describe an initial empirical test of this work and argue the need for the specification of multivariate models to guide further empirical, t...

We summarize empirical work examining the impact on users of information technology (IT) and identify some gaps in current knowledge. We outline some alternative multivariate models of users’ reactions to IT, describe an initial empirical test of this work and argue the need for the specification of multivariate models to guide further empirical, t...

In this article I review recent trends in management and leadership development in the UK, arguing that much of the current growth is driven by financial, political and market pressures, to the relative neglect of philosophical and pedagogical perspectives on the nature and purpose of management, leadership and education within contemporary society...

This paper provides an account of meanings and connotations of ‘African leadership’ emerging from research with a cohort of participants on a Pan-African leadership development program. We begin by reviewing current approaches to leadership, and how they have been applied to the study of leadership and management across cultures, before introducing...

With the ever increasing amount of data directly accessible by end-users one needs to find new ways of reviewing and managing vast quantities of textual information. The techniques of lexical analysis can extend the effectiveness of research by aiding the rapid reading and interpretation of large texts via lexical approximation and textual data ana...

Welcome to the third in a series of research reports from Leadership South West, the regional Centre of Excellence in leadership, based at the Centre for Leadership Studies, University of Exeter. This report builds on from the last one, ‘What is leadership development: purpose and practice’, which explored the range of approaches to leadership deve...

This report presents a review of leadership theory and competency frameworks that was commissioned to assist the development of the new National Occupational Standards in Management and Leadership. The report begins with a review of leadership theories and tracks their evolution over the past 70 years from the “great man” notion of heroic leaders,...

Discussion with experts and a review of business and leadership literature reveals an urgent need to address leadership development issues in small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). This research, based upon interviews with 20 SME directors, is the first part of a three phase programme and goes some way towards meeting this need by identifying t...

This report presents the outcomes of a two-phase programme on leadership development in Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) in South West England. Phase One of the programme was an independent piece of research to identify leadership challenges within SMEs. Data was collected by means of face-to-face interviews with 20 SME leaders across the...

In this article I review recent trends in management and leadership development in the UK, arguing that much of the current growth is driven by financial, political and market pressures, to the relative neglect of philosophical and pedagogical perspectives on the nature and purpose of management, leadership and education within contemporary society...

Conference paper presented at the RAF Leadership Centre Conference, ‘Air Force Leadership - Changing Culture?’ RAF Museum, Hendon, London, 18-19 July 2007 The inspiration for this paper comes from a quote from the French aviator and author Antoine de St. Exupery (1900-1944) who wrote: “if you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wo...

Pre-print; author's draft Whilst much is written and said about the benefits of effective leadership, far less consideration is given to the possible negative impacts of a culture that promotes ‘leadership’ as the answer.

Pre-print; author's draft; Final version published as From `Leaders' to `Leadership' : nurturing a leadership culture This article presents a view of institutional leadership that is a relational process of organisational member (and other key stakeholders), irrespective of position or status, taking up their role in the purposes of the enterprise.

Research report Produced in collaboration with the Council for Industry and Higher Education, this report summarises the findings from analysis of 27 case studies of HE-employer engagement initiatives, particularly those targeted at upskilling people in or entering the workforce. From examination of these cases it is concluded that the nature of HE...

A South West Higher Skills Report This report has been produced as part of the South West Higher Level Skills Project. It summarises recent literature on employer engagement with higher education (HE), with a central focus on HE involvement in work based learning for people in employment, where employers play a central role in the design, delivery...

This thesis outlines a personal attempt to explore leadership in a holistic manner that recognises the contribution of both individuals and the collective whilst remaining sensitive to contextual factors. It endeavours to do this through presentation, analysis and discussion of two empirical studies of leadership, informed by distributed and practi...