Many students graduating in higher education will achieve a managerial or professional position, with leadership qualities being highly important. The need to reflect on leadership as an important developmental goal in higher education is highlighted by pointing out that many curricula, especially in the managerial, organisational and economic domain, include specific courses on leadership. It seems that some of our thinking on leadership needs revision. According to Kellerman, leaders’ ability to connect to followers is paramount to gain and remain in power. Dutch management scholar Manfred Kets de Vries (2004) underlines that the main responsibility of a leader is to envision and inspire. In this chapter we will examine the role of personality and personal values in the ability of informal leaders to inspire other team members. In the first section we will elaborate on transformational leadership and shared leadership. In the next, we will link these forms of leadership to personality and personal values. In the third section the findings of our empirical study will be discussed. We conclude with the implications of our study for leadership practice and the scholarly field of leadership. From an educational point of view our findings are important. The results shed additional light on the importance of personality traits on leadership, and informal leadership in particular. As leadership is an important phenomenon in society and working life, (under)graduates can be assisted in understanding and developing it. But in the context of this book it should be highlighted that transformational leadership is highly relevant in knowledge innovation (García-Morales et al., 2012), which is a core issue in higher education. Consequently, inspiring others is relevant, because group work is commonly used in higher education. Understanding group dynamics within student teams, informal leadership specifically, can help lecturers to explain and discuss effective and ineffective group work. In our opinion, the results of this study offer interesting evidence-based insights to reflect on and develop those personal characteristics that can be important for informal leadership effectiveness.
This study focuses on revealing and developing personal constructs regarding problem behaviour in classrooms. Twenty-nine teachers (initial and in-service students) took part in the project. The main idea is that teachers opinions about their pupils and themselves influence the way they act in their classrooms. Their thoughts and ideas about students - their personal constructs - are generally unconscious. To clarify and to develop teachers constructs, we used Kellys repertory grid technique and Garmans reflective approach. Both methods give a powerful impulse to the development of thinking and acting of teachers. They can use the experiences as an integral part of their own action research. & I am one of the teachers who took part in the constructs research.A personal set of fifteen constructs on twenty-eight pupils was collected. These constructs showed me what kinds of constructs I have (mainly social-emotional and cognitive ones) and made me reflect. They also made clear to me that I think less positively on problem children. Participation in this research includes coaching, theoretical orientation and continuous reflection, making me conscious of what (problem) behaviour I like or dislike and what I should change to get a professional, holistic view. Then problem behaviour will be more easily tolerated by me and I can teach my colleagues about my new insights in intercommunicative sessions and by personal counselling.
The research described in this paper provides insights into tools and methods which are used by professional information workers to keep and to manage their personal information. A literature study was carried out on 23 scholar papers and articles, retrieved from the ACM Digital Library and Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA). The research questions were: - How do information workers keep and manage their information sources? - What aims do they have when building personal information collections? - What problems do they experience with the use and management of their personal collections? The main conclusion from the literature is that professional information workers use different tools and approaches for personal information management, depending on their personal style, the types of information in their collections and the devices which they use for retrieval. The main problem that they experience is that of information fragmentation over different collections and different devices. These findings can provide input for improvement of information literacy curricula in Higher Education. It has been remarked that scholar research and literature on Personal Information Management do not pay a lot of attention to the keeping and management of (bibliographic) data from external documentation. How people process the information from those sources and how this stimulates their personal learning, is completely overlooked. [The original publication is available at www.elpub.net]
