Journal of Leadership Studies, Volume 17, Issue 4, Page 1-3, Winter 2024 ..read more

Journal of Leadership Studies, Volume 17, Issue 4, Page 4-4, Winter 2024 ..read more

The current article presents examples of video games that specifically seek to enable their players to rethink their ideological assumptions and to develop empathy, critical components of both understanding and practicing leadership. Through these examples, the article suggests that video games are uniquely effective in this capacity because of their emphasis on interactivity and imaginative identification, as well as the wide distribution of games as a medium. Taken together, games' effectiveness at persuasion, ability to develop empathy, and popularity make them particularly well-suited to p ..read more

The use of games to model and understand complex systems has an extensive history in military circles. Gaming is used by commanders at all levels to inform their understanding of the operational environment, evaluate disparate courses of action, and refine future concepts of operation. The current article examines the use of gaming by the U.S. Air Force to mature and promote its Agile Combat Employment operational concept. The case is made that this approach is extensible to allow leaders with varying problem sets a tool to develop a deeper understanding of their leadership options ..read more

The current paper examines how citizen science games, or games that build knowledge and enable the crowdsourcing of tasks, enable leadership. Specifically, the paper describes how both the creators and players of these knowledge-building games are collectively engaged in the leadership process. Players are enacting leadership through collaboration, communication, and problem solving with other players, as well as alongside the creators of these games. The games' developers are also engaged in leadership in how they are framing and enabling problem solving and other collective activities ..read more

The current article introduces the symposium Games for Leadership: an examination for leadership scholars and practitioners to further explore the use of games in the leadership process. Games can be leveraged to influence and solve a wide range of problems. Further, games include an embedded feedback loop that can drive leadership engagement. Examples are provided to illustrate these concepts alongside an introduction to each symposium article ..read more

The current paper explores a transformative approach to leadership that integrates with a view of analog role-playing games (RPGs) as a system for human interaction, aiming to leverage these experiences and foster collective creative leadership. In the face of urgent global challenges, traditional leadership models prove inadequate, necessitating a shift in understanding leadership as a process of adaptive change among human groups. Drawing on phenomenology, relational sociology and constructivist perspectives, I advocate for a conceptualization of leadership as a socially constructed, meaning ..read more

The current paper highlights the fundamentals of employing the play state to lead people toward improved performance across a variety of leadership responsibilities. It offers perspective on the historical, sociological, and psychological characteristics of play and game design toward leading social change. Drawing from experience leading and researching a variety of game-focused interventions to lead social change, the paper focuses on the play state's unique characteristics to encourage iterative problem solving, adjust to complex problems, and optimize performance as tools leaders can use ..read more

Finding creative solutions to organizations' challenges is critical to determining the ability to thrive. Creative leadership promotes an organizational culture based on creative problem-solving skills. Five leadership elements (being digitally and technologically savvy, having a results orientation, promoting collaborative teamwork, possessing business skills, and providing resources to the team) enable leaders to pursue creative or uncreative problem-solving solutions. The current study used a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to identify the elements of creative leadership. The ana ..read more

The current study investigated how individual differences in self–other rating agreement (SOA) were related to leadership emergence. A sample of 4,524 students from MBA programs in the United States and Canada completed a leaderless group task as part of an assessment center. The results revealed that emergence varied by SOA, with underraters exhibiting the highest levels of emergence, followed by self-aware (i.e., accurate), and then overraters. One of the intriguing results is that underraters were more likely to display emergent behaviors than accurate raters, raising questions about the wi ..read more