Navigating the Organisational Landscape: A Scholar-Practitioner's Guide to Effective Leadership

Navigating the Organisational Landscape: A Scholar-Practitioner’s Guide to Effective Leadership is an open-access edited volume examining contemporary leadership practice through the lens of reflective, experience-based inquiry.

The book brings together thirteen chapters authored by experienced leaders working across business, public sector, and non-profit environments. Contributions explore leadership as a moral and intellectual practice, integrating established theoretical perspectives with lived professional experience. Topics addressed include leadership frameworks in practice, organisational change, ethics and values-based leadership, power and influence, communication in crisis, diversity and inclusion, leadership assessment, and decision-making in complex and uncertain contexts.

The volume adopts a scholar-practitioner orientation, emphasising the application of theory under real-world conditions. Rather than presenting leadership as abstraction or prescription, the chapters examine leadership as craft, judgement, and responsibility, shaped through action, reflection, and consequence.

All contributing authors are graduates of the Diploma in Organisational Leadership at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. The book emerged from work developed during and following the programme, including a period of global disruption that required leaders to translate theory rapidly into practice.

The volume is edited by Shawn D. Mathis, with associate editors Shamini Murugesh and Lukas-Kajetan Gruber. A foreword is provided by Professor Sue Dopson, Programme Director of the Diploma in Organisational Leadership.

Published as an open-access resource, this book is intended for leaders, practitioners, scholars, students, and institutions seeking reflective and practice-informed approaches to leadership in complex organisational settings.