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Among the key challenges facing today’s business organizations is that of ongoing innovation for survival. To meet this challenge, new skills for effective leadership are required: knowledge workers need to be creative and entrepreneurial. Leading them, however, can be like ‘herding cats’. The classic metaphor of the organization as a machine does not offer an effective approach to leading complex human organizations. New thinking is needed, such as complexity theory, which considers the organization as a living organism and so provides a basis for innovative approaches to organizational structure and management. In this context, performing arts organizations can be a fruitful source of leadership inspiration. Performing arts organizations have never adopted the concept of the organization as machine and have therefore managed to keep alive the passion of their people. Thus these organizations constitute a valuable example for managers in the Knowledge Age, who must replace traditional leadership approaches to attract, keep and grow talent. Here, a case study is presented in which the authors, including the conductor Maestro Roni Porat, decode the key success factors in conducting an orchestra and consider their transferability to talent management in business organizations. While setting the tone, the conductor gives each of the players a chance to shine and co-evolve with the rest, thus creating a winning harmonic orchestra.

In 2012, the Israeli Ministry of Education and its Testing and Evaluation Department introduced a new tool to evaluate the quality of kindergarten teachers’ work. This paper aims to identify how kindergarten teachers perceive the new multiple domains performance tool.

The study applied a qualitative paradigm of data collection and analysis. Data collection consisted of semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted with 36 kindergarten teachers.

Findings indicated that most kindergarten teachers perceive their work plan and the kindergarten climate as the most important evaluation domains, while perceiving involving parents as the least important and even an unnecessary domain. One-third of them indicated that an innovation domain should be added. Also, the kindergarten teachers perceived the use of the KT-MDPT as both positive and negative.

There is a clear dearth in scholarly literature dealing with the evaluation of the quality of kindergarten teachers’ work. This study is the first to reveal Israeli kindergarten teachers' attitudes regarding this new tool for work quality evaluation.

The paper examines two discourses of bereavement that crystallized simultaneously in Israel as the third millennium began. One is “the economic discourse of bereavement,” with which official organizations dealing with bereavement sought to “free themselves” from the state's directives on entitlement to compensation. Army widows argued that compensation should not depend on their refraining from remarriage, while bereaved parents demanded it would not be contingent on a means test. They urge for liberation from “role demands” and for presenting entitlement to compensation as entitlement to personal rehabilitation, without using it to support pro-establishment behavior or unending interactions with establishment supervision. Those claims express the linkage of bereavement to globalization and individuation, and the desire to rebel against the republican equation conditioning entitlement to welfare on “proper” establishment-compliant behavior. A second discourse is the “hierarchy of bereavement discourse” – which was placed on the agenda together with the first one, and by the same organizations. Unlike the economic discourse, this one acted to replicate the monopoly held by families of IDF dead in the Israeli pantheon, with attempts to bring into it a group of families of civilian bereavement (families of terror victims). The discourse relies on purely republican underpinnings, complying with the spirit of the local–national period. Exploring the two discourses, that were promoted simultaneously by the same agents, assists an analysis of the Israeli discourse of bereavement that results in its definition as “glocal.” This transpires from a review of the literature showing that – even in the face of globalization processes – national–local foundations remained stable. The paper first engages with the concept of glocalization, the ethos of republican citizenship, and, as a facet of it, the identification of social policy as an agent of the social hierarchy, as well as changes in citizenship during globalization. The second section reviews the status of bereaved families, and the central discourses they have promoted in Israeli society. The third and major part contains an analysis of both discourses – the economic discourse of bereavement, and the hierarchy of bereavement discourse. Finally, we attempt to analyze and explain how apparently antithetical discourses took shape in tandem, drawing on the term “glocalism” and the impact of citizenship models.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of politicians’ facial attractiveness on their online popularity as reflected in audience engagement with their Facebook posts during the 2015 Israeli election campaign.

Using Israel’s 2015 election campaign as the case study, the authors analyzed all messages posted (n=501) on 33 politicians’ official Facebook pages during the week leading to Election Day.

The results demonstrate that audiences do engage more with posts of the more facially attractive politicians. These posts generated more shares, more comments and more participants in their discussions – but not more likes – relative to posts of less attractive politicians. These effects became even stronger when the posts were accompanied by one or more visual image, and remained significant even after controlling for other engagement predictors, such as a politician’s gender, seniority or the timing of a post’s publication.

The findings emphasize the importance of attractive looks for politicians. The findings highlight that attractive politicians’ posts attract more attention, allowing them to better spread their ideas. Thus, politicians should aim to post aesthetic images and visuals to promote better engagement with their ideas on social media.

The study expands our understanding of online presentations of politicians, focusing on the effect of politicians’ facial attractiveness on their online popularity. Recent studies have demonstrated that physically attractive politicians enjoy more and better media attention on television news, but not in non-visual media such as radio and newspapers. This effect has not been examined in the social media environment, a central arena for today’s political debates and one that involves many visual messages.