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What are the best interventions that Work and Organizational Psychology offers today for promoting high work motivation in organizations? This paper seeks to answer this question in two steps. First, we briefly summarize the main findings from 26 meta-analyses concerned with traditional practices such as goal setting, feedback, work design, financial incentives, or training. These practices can improve both organizational performance and the well-being of organizational members. Second, we examine in more depth a new, increasingly important high performance work practice: Employee involvement in organizational leadership (EIOL). This approach is built on theories focusing on organizational participation, shared leadership, and organizational democracy. We also illustrate recently constructed measurement instruments for assessing these constructs. This synopsis leads us to the development of a new integrative, multilevel model of EIOL. The model includes several mediator (e.g., knowledge exchange) and moderator variables (e.g., self-leadership competencies of actors) that explain why and when this approach is effective. We conclude that future research should focus on cross-level interactions of different forms of organizational participation, shared leadership, and organizational democracy, and seek to identify the processes mediating their interplay.

Leadership of public universities has come under fire-from scandals, from funding, from students, from every direction. Top-down leadership of institutions of higher education has been described as a "disease." Shared governance-a mechanism of faculty representation in the leadership and decision-making processes-a seeming alternative, has been described as "a recipe for paralysis." In this article, the authors proffer shared leadership as a potential elixir for leading public institutions of higher learning, unleashing creative potential, focusing on pressing strategic imperatives, and enabling sustainable systems that leverage true talent to maximum effect. It is time to move beyond the moribund myth of top-down heroic leadership and beyond the bureaucratic, political quagmire of the current state of affairs in shared governance. Is shared leadership the answer?