A (Blurry) Vision of the Future: How Leader Rhetoric about Ultimate Goals Influences Performance

Physician Motivation: Listening to What Pay-for-Performance Programs and Quality Improvement Collaboratives Are Telling Us

“…A recent articles that involved an archival study of 151 hospitals in California documented an association between such image-laden visions and higher performance. 37 Patient-centered outcomes lend themselves more naturally to being framed in terms of shared ultimate goals.…”

“…Such organizational incentives can help hospital leaders to declare and communicate goals, create enabling infrastructure to support the improvement effort, engage clinicians and connect them in peer learning communities, and transparently report performance and create accountability systems. 37,43 …”

Envisioning innovation: Does visionary leadership engender team innovative performance through goal alignment?

“…Arguably, under visionary leadership, followers align their goals to the vision because they all feel motivated to pursue the collective future that they adopt as their own (Stam, Lord, Van Knippenberg, & Wisse, ). Indeed, supporting this line of argumentation, Carton et al () found that the amount of vision imagery used by the leader (a way of communicating a vision) predicted the extent to which group members had shared perceptions of the group's goal.…”

“…In the visionary leadership condition , the leader gave a speech that was future‐oriented (e.g., “The creation of the poster is actually the start of a successful career!”), full of optimism (e.g., “You and your teammates have all that it takes to make this future reality”) and confidence in the participants' capabilities (e.g., “I am confident that you can be that person”; Berson, Shamir, Avolio, & Popper, ), and that made ample use of image‐based rhetoric (e.g., “All of you can be creative, innovative, leaders of a new world”; Carton et al, ; Van Knippenberg & Stam, ). In the control condition , the leader linked the task to the participant's short‐term goals (e.g., “Making the poster is actually helpful for finishing your study”).…”

Leader opportunity versus threat verbal framing and nonverbal emotional expressions impact followers' creative performance

“…While the content of these messages is important, the manner in which they are framed and delivered may have an equal or even greater impact on followers, whether by design or by accident (Awamleh & Gardner, 1999). Studies of leader rhetoric generally have focused on aspects of message content such as imagery (Naidoo & Lord, 2008), metaphor (Mio, Riggio, Levin, & Reese, 2005), vision (Berson, Shamir, Avolio, & Popper, 2001), and values (Carton, Murphy, & Clark, 2015). However, there is little rigorous research on leader communication in general (van Knippenberg & Stam, 2014), and on the specific question of how leader message framing (e.g., issues framed as opportunities versus threats) may impact follower creativity and other outcomes.…”