The leadership crisis globally, and in the U.S. specifically, draws concern for educators, leadership professionals, and organizations at large. This study evaluates two ways of teaching leadership courses in higher education: a conventional approach where students learn epistemological knowledge and apply such knowledge to case studies, and an ontological, phenomenological, phronetic, transformative (OPPT-in) approach that asks students to practice the being of leadership. Each OPPT-in student was paired with a conventional student as well as a professional role player in a leadership simulation scenario. External auditors evaluated video recordings of the simulation to determine each student's hireability for a job requiring leadership skills. OPPT-in students were selected as hireable for a job requiring leadership more often than the conventional students. Qualitative data suggest that this may be due to differences in students' relational invitations, request-making, task ignition, collaborator enlistment, and forthrightness in apologizing for work undone.

An ongoing debate exists regarding the ontology of emotions; that is, whether emotions are innate biological artifacts, social/discursive constructions, or—although less common in emotion research—both. Growing neuroscientific research provides strong evidence for the third perspective. Yet, this work foregrounds the individual’s experience, overlooking the role and context of organizing. In this article, we developed a new perspective of emotions and organizing. Our “gestalt” framework unites innate, socially constructed, and discursive ontologies to explain how emotions exist as innate yet latent organizational potentialities, become salient through social interaction, and are embedded in organizations through discourse. Together, these aspects comprise the gestalt emotion experience—where the whole is something more than its parts. The gestalt view offers organizational actors and scholars practical wisdom for navigating and analyzing emotions in organizations.

This essay reviews practical application activities performed in the field of organizational communication and poses an alternative approach for creating organizations and employees that flourish and can meet the demands of tomorrow. Much of the discipline's practical application efforts have been focused on analyzing problems and focusing on epistemological and conceptual issues—activities that have been appropriate for creating communication competence, but have fallen short in motivating higher levels of proficiency and expertise. This essay creates a case for how the field might valuably move toward other ways of creating transformed practice not through application of organizational communication knowledge, but via an approach that incorporates practical wisdom, critical self-reflexivity, appreciative inquiry, improvisation, sensemaking/breaking/giving and craft practice.

Critical communication scholarship and pedagogy are vitally important for creating awareness, unpacking social, ideological, and environment forces, and engaging beyond theory (Freire, 1972). The c...