A much-needed study but lacking in sufficient scientific rigor.
Nash’s scholarly study of how transactional and transformational leadership impacts the relationship between mental health counselors and their managers.
To his credit, the author identifies a gaping hole in academic research on leadership—while the literature on leadership in business contexts is copious, few studies address the relationship between mental health counselors and their managers. In response, Nash has devised an empirical study that specifically focused on the difference between two kinds of leadership, transformational and transactional. Transformational leadership is defined by its four principal aims: inspiration, positive motivation, the promotion of self-confidence, and “allowing the follower to visualize the purpose of his or her work progress.” By contrast, transactional leadership expresses itself as a narrower “give-and-take type of interaction” that focuses on a system of rewards and punishments for employee performance. In order to understand what works best between mental health counselors and their managers, Nash interviewed 10 counselors and four managers at two different mental health facilities. But this is quite a narrow pool of participants to draw definite conclusions from. The author surmises that while transactional leadership can be effective at increasing productivity, transformational leadership is ultimately “more effective in producing long-term improvements in performance and counselor-manager relationships.” Given the extraordinary stress mental health counselors face—they are uniquely vulnerable to problems related to morale and burnout—the author’s attempt to understand that environment is timely and important. However, Nash’s study as a whole, like the field of leadership literature at large, is frustratingly vague—the categories investigated are too broadly defined to be a consistently helpful guide. Moreover, the author could have presented his findings more succinctly in a brief article. (For example, he constantly defines and redefines the two types of leadership in question without any increased specificity.) One hopes Nash's call for a greater scrutiny of the way in which mental health centers are run is answered by more ambitious empirical explorations than the ones carried out here.
A much-needed study but lacking in sufficient scientific rigor.Pub Date: June 8, 2022
ISBN: 9781663237545
Page Count: 158
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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