Book excerpt: Leadership and Organizational Climate is a book that shows how leaders impact organizational performance by manipulating the environmental determinants of motivation. Consciously or unconsciously, effective leaders arouse and direct the motivational energy that compels people to action. This book explains how specific leadership practices shape the dimensions of organizational climate and how different climates influence people's energies and efforts. Stringer discusses both the direct and indirect aspects of leadership: how the "memory" or "shadow" of a leader creates a certain atmosphere or climate within an organization, and how this climate impacts motivation. Leadership is too often explained in terms of the leader's direct face-to-face impact on people. This book describes and validates the less dramatic but more lasting impact that certain leadership practices have on people's thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Filled with examples showing how leaders can manage performance by using organizational climate, this book attempts to be a "cloud chamber" for the practice of leadership--it traces the normally unseen, but very real, motivational influences that leaders exert when they move through an organization. For individuals looking for tools they can immediately use to improve their leadership effectiveness and organizational performance.