Relational Leadership and Diverse Workplace Identities

Top-down person-centred leadership approaches have proved incapable of meeting the heightened demand for innovative productive output required to help organisations gain a competitive advantage edge. The post-industrial relational leader model, in contrast, due to its depiction of collective leader capabilities as emergent processes that are forged within devolved collaborative processes, has the potential to facilitate the creative expression of all workplace participants. In turn it could free leaders from the legacy of unrealistic and onerous individualist transformational expectations. Therefore, an interrogation of the coupling of participative relational leadership practices, with the integration of a substantive 'productive diversity' approach, is documented in this text. The objective being to chart the enabling characteristics underpinning a more purposeful economic, environmental, and socially sustainable mode of operating for 21st-century organisations. As potential, and currently formally appointed leaders, along with business school educators, researchers and consultants, need exposure to an alternative, new economy, form of immersive learning, then this text outlines what such an integrated theory and practice postgraduate program of education in business schools could fulfill. Given research on contemporary 'knowledge economy' employees indicates they seek well-being focused workplace cultures then the examples provided in this manuscript are designed to assist this evolutionary process.

Leadership and Diversity Management

is a timely exploration in light of the heightened requirement of business for novel solutions to meet the varied economic, ethical and social challenges organisations face, related to fast paced technological developments, increasing global market competition and associated environmental impacts and cultural inequality concerns. To this end, the numerous case study examples outlined will reveal how a more socially orientated form of leadership, in addressing the embodied (cognitive and emotional) needs of diverse organisational participants, will restore a level of humanity to the workplace that has been lacking in organisations throughout the industrial era.

Written for academics, researchers and policymakers alike in the fields of Leadership, Organizational Studies, Strategy and Workplace Diversity Leadership and Diversity Management is an excellent addition to the existing literature and will facilitate a deeper understanding of the connectivity factors that mark the post-industrial workplace.