Leaders in pre-school and primary settings--administrators, directors, lead teachers, and others--often find themselves consumed by the numerous tasks that must be accomplished daily. Gardenswartz, Cherbosque, and Rowe state that "teams as well as individuals need to develop emotional intelligence skills that help enhance teamwork, improve group…

Attracting, developing, and retaining employees, ensuring a pipeline of qualified people, and building a culture of engagement and productivity are important to the success of any organization. It is called "talent management." With the right technology support, talent management's real value is that it allows organizations to identify high…

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) was an efficiency expert whose concerns were less about avoiding worker fatigue and more about increasing profit margins by any means necessary. Taylor was devoted to finding the One Best Way to carry out a task and then training workers to do that task unvaryingly; attempts by employees to improve their own…

Organization of electronic resources workflow is critical in the increasingly complicated and complex world of library management. A simple organizational tool that can be readily applied to electronic resources management (ERM) is the use of checklists. Based on the principles discussed in The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, the…

Purposively selected urban California superintendents and assistant superintendents participated in surveys and interviews which examined their views about the impact California university Tier I school leadership preparation programs have on overall preparedness for the position, effectiveness of job performance, longevity, transference of skills…

This article provides a discussion of how different dynamics in production processes and communication structures in the organization serve as different environmental contingencies favoring different behavioral patterns and variability of performance in organizations. Finally, an elaboration on a systems perspective on the selection of corporate…

Why don't employees always do what they're supposed to do? The reasons are often as ambiguous to them as they are to their supervisors. Different roles come with different perceptions. Understanding and finding solutions will help one create an approach to staff development that will target the reasons why staff don't always perform at their best.…

Principals, as one of the professional leaders in a school, are accountable for the quality of education in the school. This is a part of the normal job description and expectations for the person in such a post. In the South African context with a large number of underperforming schools, there is an intention to have an additional performance…

Drawing on agency literature, this paper demonstrates how teachers' professional agency emerged when seemingly conflicting strategies were imposed on them in policy reform. Policy discourse is often linked to performance and accountability measures, which teachers respond to in a number of ways. Some education researchers identify tensions caused…

English teachers have always had a hard time getting kids to read books, but in recent years the problem has spread and taken new directions. The rejection of books by teens and young adults has become a common feature. One by one, recent studies and surveys have charted the decline. With the advent of the Digital Age, teens have more diversions…

The preceding article (Clarke, 2010) examines an important and interesting question; that is, under what conditions can learning contribute to the development of emotional intelligence (EI)? Despite the controversy surrounding the definition and construct of EI, its prevalence for the human resources development (HRD) field and its implications…

Competencies represent an important and popular topic in human resource development. Despite this popularity, a divide exists between practitioner approaches to developmental competency measures and the empirical scrutiny of such approaches. However, the scarce empirical studies on competency measures have begun to bridge this gap. In the present…

Recently, theory and research have supported psychological capital (PsyCap) as an emerging core construct linked to positive outcomes at the individual and organizational level. However, to date, little attention has been given to PsyCap development through training interventions; nor have there been attempts to determine empirically if such…

Directors of early childhood programs are an amazing lot! There's so much dedication, such hard work and creative problem solving. But then that inevitable undertow of deadlines, crises, and illness begins to suck directors down. With crisis management becoming a way of life, they don't even recognize their vital signs slipping away. The author…

This article shares the authors' personal stories that shed light on what to watch out for when the board takes up a performance review. The authors describe what they considered less-than-satisfying experiences with their board of education's process of performance assessment. They offered to do so with candor in hopes of helping their colleagues…