The dual career couple is a contemporary and growing phenomenon in western industrialised nations. There are numerous human resource management issues associated with the dual career couple. The focus of this paper is on just one of these issues — employee relocation. The research reported here found that dual career employees are concerned about their partner's career prospects and unless current career levels can be maintained for the trailing partner, organisations may experience relocation resistance. Of specific interest in the Australian context is that organisations with operations in country areas may be particularly affected, since country areas are less likely to offer desirable career opportunities for trailing partners. Further, organisational mobility expectations frequently force couples to decide which partner's career will take precedence. Historically it has been the male partner's career, even in dual career relationships. The findings from this study suggest that such decisions are becoming more complex, with couples placing greater emphasis on economic and quality of life concerns. Traditionally, organisations have relied on employee mobility as a career development strategy. However, greater emphasis on long-term human resource planning is advocated to facilitate career development strategies which are less reliant on geographical relocation. Further, if organisations are to retain their dual career employees, relocation assistance packages may need re-assessment to reflect the needs of those employees who are unwilling to sacrifice their partners' careers for the sake of their own.

This paper is born of a deep concern about the premise upon which Enterprising Nation, Report of the Industry Task Force on Leadership and Management Skills (The Karpin Report), was undertaken. I argue that the review, report and recommendations are based on a set of simplifying assumptions that are essentially limiting. By conforming to a view of business embedded in neoclassical economic theory, the Task Force has not explored the implications of current developments worldwide that demonstrate the remarkable capacity of small-scale production to galvanise regions like the Third Italy and the Basque provinces of Spain. These enormously productive regions base their economic activity upon a capacity to cooperate as well as compete and this is anathema to the unmitigated competition that the Task Force takes as given in its recommendations about the development of management/leadership in Australia. Moreover, a reliance on this particular theoretical perspective has limited the Task Force's understanding of, and response to, organisational inequality. Ultimately, I argue that the five challenges articulated by the Task Force are important, but I interpret them differently in the light of a broader and more socially-embedded understanding of the importance and nature of business. In particular, management/leadership of the future will be an integral part of all worker's roles; it will no longer be confined to an organisational or societal elite. Understanding and preparing for the universalism of management in the future is a key challenge for both industry and management education.

The impact of executive leadership on organisational performance has been the focus of study for many years. This study, of CEOs of Australian publicly listed companies, used the Competing Values Framework developed by Hart and Quinn (1993) to measure CEO role behaviour. It consists of four competing roles: Vision Setter, Motivator, Analyser, and Task Master. These roles were tested against three dimensions of firm performance: Financial, Business, and Organisational Effectiveness Performance. The results showed that there was little functional connection between executive leadership and firm performance.

Further, the organisational effectiveness factor was the domain of firm performance most influenced by CEOs. Task Master role was the only role behaviour which had a positive relationship with any domain of firm performance.

Behavioural complexity of leadership behaviour had a positive relationship with organisational effectiveness performance in large firms and for firms following an analyser type of strategy. Behavioural complexity also had a positive relationship with business performance for firms following an analyser type of strategy. However, there was no association between behavioural complexity and financial performance regardless of situational factors.

These findings suggest that effective CEOs are required to demonstrate paradoxical skills, and that any approach for developing management skills must involve a heavy dose of practical application.

Contemporary writers on management highlight the need for improved leadership within organisations. In this respect, this paper proposes and tests a model that incorporates leadership behaviours, situational variables, and traditional managerial behaviours. The results of this study indicated that, in highly formalised work environments, increasing work group cooperation reduces the need for direction provided by management. Furthermore, the transformational leader behaviours of individualised consideration and intellectual stimulation appeared to impact positively on perceptions of work group cooperation. These findings provide a basis for further research that examines the effects of transformational leader behaviours together with situational variables.