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.
Shared leadership is described as the dynamic process of distributing leadership influence across multiple team members. It is viewed as an effective form of management to deal with increased complexity in youth team sport. However, literature on youth leadership development and reliable and valid measures to assess shared leadership in youth sport is still lacking. This paper seeks to make a contribution to the youth leadership literature by developing an instrument to measure shared leadership among young football players. A total of 746 U17 players from 62 different youth football teams in two samples in The Netherlands were surveyed. The Youth Athlete Shared Leadership (YASL) in football instrument comprises three factors: ‘steering’, ‘coaching’ and ‘intervening’. This research contributes to the common understanding of youth leadership development in general and youth team leadership in particular. The practical contribution is a tool for coaches to develop shared leadership behavior in youth football.
Leadership development concerns a complex subject because it pertains an extensive number of combinations of features of people, purposes and contexts. Much research has been conducted on the development of adult leaders, but little is known about youth sharing the leadership in the context of playing sport, while the ability to choose the right leader is crucial for being successful. Youth leadership development should not only focus on building the capacity of individuals but emphasise the collective, a shared leadership approach, taken the relational network of influence into account. A 5 P’s framework (precondition, person, process, position and purpose) is used to analyse the shared leadership capacity in elite youth team sport. Shared leadership development requires a combined leadership approach whereas youth teams in sport can choose between an individual, distributed or shared leadership approach at which leader - and follower identities are claimed and granted to achieve common purposes.
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The IMPULS-2020 project DIGIREAL (BUas, 2021) aims to significantly strengthen BUAS’ Research and Development (R&D) on Digital Realities for the benefit of innovation in our sectoral industries. The project will furthermore help BUas to position itself in the emerging innovation ecosystems on Human Interaction, AI and Interactive Technologies. The pandemic has had a tremendous negative impact on BUas industrial sectors of research: Tourism, Leisure and Events, Hospitality and Facility, Built Environment and Logistics. Our partner industries are in great need of innovative responses to the crises. Data, AI combined with Interactive and Immersive Technologies (Games, VR/AR) can provide a partial solution, in line with the key-enabling technologies of the Smart Industry agenda. DIGIREAL builds upon our well-established expertise and capacity in entertainment and serious games and digital media (VR/AR). It furthermore strengthens our initial plans to venture into Data and Applied AI. Digital Realities offer great opportunities for sectoral industry research and innovation, such as experience measurement in Leisure and Hospitality, data-driven decision-making for (sustainable) tourism, geo-data simulations for Logistics and Digital Twins for Spatial Planning. Although BUas already has successful R&D projects in these areas, the synergy can and should significantly be improved. We propose a coherent one-year Impuls funded package to develop (in 2021): 1. A multi-year R&D program on Digital Realities, that leads to, 2. Strategic R&D proposals, in particular a SPRONG/sleuteltechnologie proposal; 3. Partnerships in the regional and national innovation ecosystem, in particular Mind Labs and Data Development Lab (DDL); 4. A shared Digital Realities Lab infrastructure, in particular hardware/software/peopleware for Augmented and Mixed Reality; 5. Leadership, support and operational capacity to achieve and support the above. The proposal presents a work program and management structure, with external partners in an advisory role.
