Research on leadership development in organizations is abundant, as are the resources invested in developing their leaders.Although rarely made explicit, much of this writing and activity is driven by functionalist assumptions, with a primary concern for good design and enhanced corporate performance. Given the politically sensitive, culturally complex and institutionally embedded nature of leadership, as well as controversy over the way leadership itself is best defined and developed, the author argues that this reliance on a single perspective is potentially limiting. The aim of this paper is to enhance leadership development practice in organizations by proposing a fresh and theoretically informed approach for exploring the multiple meanings of leadership development. This is done, first, by clarifying the discursive assumptions underlying studies in this field and revealing the distinctive insights that arise from functionalist, interpretive, dialogic and critical discourses of leadership development; and second, by exploring how each of these discourses, or 'readings', might promote quite different approaches to leadership development in organizations.

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Much recent writing on Human Resources Management (HRM) has emphasized the desirability of a committed workforce and the central role of H R M practices in establishing and maintaining such commitment. Little empirical evidence for such effects has been presented however, and the conceptualization of employee commitment has often been confused, failing to recognize its multi-dimensional nature. Researchers have sought to identify the antecedents of commitment, concentrating on personal/demographic, task, role and supervisory style variables taken from job satisfaction research. With regard to organizational and career commitment, it may be more fruitful to examine the impact of H R M policies and practices. Several studies undertaken by the authors demonstrating the impact on employee commitment of such H R M practices as selection, assessment, induction and training are reviewed, indicating the possibilities for research and practice in this area. Such studies also reveal some pitfalls in the over-simple, uncritical models of commitment often presented, and some paradoxical findings from the authors' own work are used to present a more adequate perspective on the commitment process.

The life-blood of most organizations is knowledge. Too often, the very mechanisms set up to facilitate knowledge flow militate against it. This is because they are instituted in a top-down way, they are cumbersome to manage and the bridges of trust fail to get built. In their thirst for innovation, the tendency is for firms to set up elaborate transmission channels and governance systems. As a result, staff are drowned in a deluge of mundane intranet messages and bewildered by matrix structures, while off-the-wall ideas and mould-breaking insights are routinely missed. Added to this is the challenge of operating across professional, cultural, regional and linguistic boundaries, where ways of sharing knowledge differ markedly, even within the same project team. Drawing upon extensive research with scientists in the ATLAS collaboration (a high-energy particle physics experiment comprising 3,500 scientists from 38 countries), we explore five paradoxes associated with knowledge exchange in global networks. Each paradox leads to a proposition which takes the theory and practice of knowledge management in a fresh direction. We conclude by outlining a number of HRM priorities for international knowledge-intensive organizations.

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