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This study aims to examine how the characteristics of leader errors impact perceptions and reactions of followers, particularly their willingness to follow a leader in the future and perceptions of error severity. Expanding upon the leader error and transgressions literature, this study considers how the timing of an error may influence how the error is interpreted.

This study’s sample included 283 students engaged in a 2 × 2 factorial designed laboratory experiment. Multiple regression analyses were conducted to determine whether error timing moderated the relationship between error type and two outcomes, willingness to follow and perceived error severity.

Relationship errors resulted in the worst outcomes and perceptions regardless of when they occurred. Task errors were judged as less impactful when occurring early in a task than later in a task. These results suggest that followers are more accepting of task leader errors when they have opportunities to recover from them, but consistently judge relationship errors as damaging.

Organizations should carefully consider the impact of leader errors and their context and develop strategies for error management and recovery.

This research addresses calls from scholars for greater consideration of temporality as a contextual variable in leader-follower dynamics, as well as those to take a more follower-centric approach to leadership research. This study also replicates prior leader error research and extends leader error theories to provide new avenues for future research.

Scholars continue to debate whether planning, in fact, contributes to creativity and innovation. In this chapter, we argue that planning is critical to innovation and will contribute to the generation of viable new ideas. Effective planning, however, must be based on an incremental approach involving a viable portfolio of projects. The implications of this model for the management of innovation at the organizational, group, and individual levels are discussed. Potential new directions for research are considered, along with the model's implications for the management of creative ventures.

Plans and planning have a long and checkered history. In their commentaries, Ettlie (this volume) and Miller and Osborn (this volume) take rather different views on the need for planning in innovative projects. In this commentary, we take the position that innovation requires constraints. These constraints induce certain risk factors that warrant attention, such as oversystemization. By the same token, they produce conditions, including social conditions that make sustained innovation possible. Based on these observations, some potential directions for future research are discussed.

Francis J. Yammarino is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Management and director and fellow of the Center for Leadership Studies at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He received his Ph.D. in organizational behavior (management) from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Dr. Yammarino has extensive research experience in the areas of superior–subordinate relationships, leadership, self–other agreement processes, and multiple levels of analysis issues. He has served on the editorial review boards of seven scholarly journals, including the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, and the Leadership Quarterly. Dr. Yammarino is a fellow of the American Psychological Society and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. He is the author of 12 books and has published over 100 articles. Dr. Yammarino has served as a consultant to numerous organizations, including IBM, Textron, TRW, Lockheed Martin, Medtronic, United Way, Skills Net, and the US Army, Navy, Air Force, and Department of Education.

In their articles on “Innovation in Organizations: A Multi-Level Perspective on Creativity,” Robert Sternberg, along with Jane Howell and Kathleen Boies, broach a critical question bearing on the nature of creativity in organizational settings. Why is creativity in organizations so difficult even though organizations say they want creativity? In the present chapter, we examine some likely sources of this paradox and the ways one might go about resolving this paradox. Subsequently, we discuss directions for future research.

Theories of outstanding, historically notable, leadership have traditionally emphasized charisma. Recent research, however, suggests that charisma may represent only one pathway to outstanding leadership. Outstanding leadership may also emerge from ideological and pragmatic leadership. In this article, we examine the conditions influencing the emergence and performance of charismatic, ideological, and pragmatic leaders. It is argued that different conditions operating at the environmental, organizational, group, and individual levels influence the emergence and performance of each of these three types of leaders. Implications for understanding the origins and impact of charismatic, ideological, and pragmatic leaders are discussed.

In their chapter, Mumford, Bedell-Avers, and Hunter (this volume) confront the nontrivial issue of whether creativity and innovation can be planned, and proceed to support an affirmative answer with a well-organized treatment of the applied research literature relevant to this topic. They outline and reference an incremental approach to this planning process at multiple levels of analysis (organization, group, and individual), and present both a state-of-the-art review and a general, normative approach to this daunting challenge. In reviewing this chapter, this commentary addresses what is worthwhile and important in their presentation that students of this field should find noteworthy. Next, it takes up the issue of what is underdeveloped or missing that would fit nicely into Mumford et al.'s framework, or might provide food for thought to those wanting to go forward with research on the topic of planning for innovation. Finally, it presents conclusions about this topic and the field in general that were stimulated by Mumford et al.'s chapter, including the role of information technology and knowledge management for innovation planning.

“Multi-Level Issues in Creativity and Innovation” is Volume 7 of Research in Multi-Level Issues, an annual series that provides an outlet for the discussion of multi-level problems and solutions across a variety of fields of study. Using a scientific debate format of a key scholarly essay followed by two commentaries and a rebuttal, we present, in this series, theoretical work, significant empirical studies, methodological developments, analytical techniques, and philosophical treatments to advance the field of multi-level studies, regardless of disciplinary perspective.

This chapter presents a contextual model of human resources management (HRM). The hallmarks of this model are that (1) the most advantageous HRM practices vary conditionally upon strategic considerations; (2) each organization has multiple substrategies within it, and each substrategy is aligned with a unique bundle of HRM practices; (3) within each organization, three substrategies are associated with three subsystems; and (4) in terms of contributing to sustainable competitive advantage, the innovation subsystem is the most valuable regardless of the organization in question.