A. Erin Bass, Ivana Milosevic, Mary Uhl-Bien and Sucheta Nadkarni
Accountability within distributed leadership (DL) is critical for DL to drive positive outcomes in health services organizations. Despite this, how accountability emerges in DL is…
Abstract
Purpose
Accountability within distributed leadership (DL) is critical for DL to drive positive outcomes in health services organizations. Despite this, how accountability emerges in DL is less clear. This study aims to understand how accountability emerges in DL so that distributed leaders can drive improvements in healthcare access – an increasingly important outcome in today’s health services environment.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors use an instrumental case study of a dental institution in the USA, “Environ,” as it underwent a strategic change to improve healthcare access to rural populations. The authors focused on DL occurring within the strategic change and collected interview, observation and archival data.
Findings
The findings demonstrate accountability in DL emerged as shared accountability and has three elements: personal ownership, agentic actions and a shared belief system. Each of these was necessary for DL to advance the strategic change for improved healthcare access.
Practical implications
Top managers should be cognizant of the emergence processes driven by DL. This includes enabling pockets of employees to connect, align and link up so that ideas, processes and practices can emerge and allow for shared accountability in DL.
Originality/value
The overarching contribution of this research is identifying shared accountability in DL and its three elements: personal ownership, agentic actions and a shared belief system. These elements serve as a platform to demonstrate “how DL works” in a healthcare organization.
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Jeffrey R. Moore and William Hanson
Fixing problems in an organization often involves developing managers in order to increase leader effectiveness. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned issue.
Abstract
Purpose
Fixing problems in an organization often involves developing managers in order to increase leader effectiveness. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned issue.
Design/methodology/approach
Data collection includes multiple surveys and small group interviews. Analysis uses rigorous coding methods to construct a model of critical organizational values and behaviors essential for leadership effectiveness. The authors bring “theory to practice” by applying complexity leadership concepts in the authors’ intervention strategy.
Findings
Findings are categorized into three parts: identifying critical culture value gaps, applying complexity concepts to a scenario-based training intervention, and identifying intervention outcomes. Outcomes include transformed work environment led by leaders who respect others, share decision-making and enable employees to be interdependent.
Research limitations/implications
This explanatory case study contributes to research by applying complexity leadership theory to create a practical consulting intervention.
Practical implications
This work provides a template and process for managers using complexity leadership to inform their client interventions.
Originality/value
This case study identifies value shortfalls in a manufacturing plant, documents a scenario-based training intervention which develops managers to build organizational trust. Results include reducing turnover, improving job satisfaction and increasing production.
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Mary Uhl-Bien and Melissa Carsten
Through his call to “reverse the lens” in leadership, Shamir (2007) helped trigger the emergence of followership theory as a new field of study in leadership research. While…
Abstract
Through his call to “reverse the lens” in leadership, Shamir (2007) helped trigger the emergence of followership theory as a new field of study in leadership research. While followership theory brings exciting new opportunities to leadership studies, it also introduces theoretical and conceptual challenges for researchers. In this chapter we address these challenges by showing how followership can be positioned fully within the leadership construct. We extend Shamir’s (2007) call for a balanced view in leadership by showing how followership theory adds new perspectives on the ways in which we can study leadership as a dynamic, fluid, relational process. The alternative views we present (e.g., position, role, identity, constructionist, and co-creation) approach leadership study from a range of paradigmatic perspectives that allow us to more fully capture the behaviors, interactions, relational dynamics, and processes through which leadership and followership are created and constructed. We conclude by reflecting on Shamir’s legacy as a scholar, and the contributions he made through his willingness to not only open his mind, but also to constructively challenge alternative perspectives and views.
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This part aims to push thinking on strategic leadership one step further. In all of the previous parts we follow quite a hierarchical model, in which leaders at the top outline…
Abstract
This part aims to push thinking on strategic leadership one step further. In all of the previous parts we follow quite a hierarchical model, in which leaders at the top outline the vision, the strategy, and the key implementation tools. Here, Russ Marion and Mary Uhl-Bien challenge the validity of this view of strategic leadership. They argue that strategic leadership is about interacting effectively within a complex interplay of environmental and organizational forces to enable fit environments and adaptive organizations. For them this means that strategic leaders need to pay significant attention to the interdependence between their organizations and both competitors and other relevant organizations in the niches in which they operate. It also means that they need to develop adaptive leadership capacity far down in the organization and show a willingness to follow those leaders at the lower levels. Marion and Uhl-Bien then argue both that strategic leaders have a more interdependent view of organizations and that they have a greater willingness to act as followers than we see in any of the leadership and/or strategy literature. As this approach to strategic leadership is quite new, we do not have application chapters here.
Melissa K. Carsten, Mary Uhl-Bien and Tracy L. Griggs
Building upon relational leadership theory, we develop a theoretical model examining the association between leader-follower congruence in follower role orientation and manager…
Abstract
Building upon relational leadership theory, we develop a theoretical model examining the association between leader-follower congruence in follower role orientation and manager and subordinate relational and well-being outcomes. Follower role orientation represents individuals’ beliefs regarding the best way to enact a follower role. We predict that managers and subordinates who share similar role orientations will experience higher quality leader-member exchange (LMX) relationships and greater eustress than those who differ in their follower role orientations. Propositions are presented for direct effects between congruence and stress and indirect effects through LMX. Our theoretical model contributes to nascent research on followership by offering greater understanding of manager and subordinate beliefs regarding how followers should enact their roles, and the importance of considering leader (i.e., manager) as well as follower outcomes in the workplace. It also extends current thinking about stress as an important outcome of leader-follower relationships.
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Mikael Sundström and Robert Holmberg
The purpose of this paper is to study a class of issues that in spite of recognised needs and explicit managerial demands have proven hard to have “stick” in organisations…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to study a class of issues that in spite of recognised needs and explicit managerial demands have proven hard to have “stick” in organisations (information security is used as an example). It offers a theory-driven rationale why superficially different issue areas can indeed be considered as instances of the identified class, and builds on complexity leadership theory (CLT) to explain how the related strategic challenges can be explained and possibly alleviated.
Design/methodology/approach
A. Kenneth Rice’s notion of organisations’ “primary task” is used to home in on its opposite that is here labelled “peripherality”. Existing strands of organisation research that can be related to this notion are then revisited to ground the fundamental concept theoretically. The CLT is finally used to provide a detailed understanding of the underlying dynamics.
Findings
The paper explains how and why certain issue areas seem resistant to common managerial intervention methods even though it would seem that organisational members are in fact favouring proposed changes (a state that would normally increase the chances of success). It also offers ideas how these challenges may fruitfully be approached.
Originality/value
Problems related to the suggested “peripherality” class of issues have thus far been approached as wholly unrelated (and for that reason as idiosyncratic). The proposed framework offers a hitherto never attempted way systematically to link these challenges – and so structure and concentrate discussion about possibly common remedies.
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Mackenzie's LAMPE theory provides a new view of leadership that is multi-level, processual, and reflective of leadership as it actually occurs in practice. While we see this…
Abstract
Mackenzie's LAMPE theory provides a new view of leadership that is multi-level, processual, and reflective of leadership as it actually occurs in practice. While we see this approach as representing a much needed frameshift for leadership research, we believe Mackenzie may be able to “break the frame” even farther by incorporating elements of complexity science into his thinking. We suggest how complexity science might help Mackenzie flesh out his ideas about distributed leadership, as well as consider leadership that is not only about alignment and control but also about enabling and releasing informal, interactive dynamics within the organization.
The current strategic leadership literature tends to advocate a leader-centric (upper-echelon) approach to strategy, one in which the leader positions the organization…
Abstract
The current strategic leadership literature tends to advocate a leader-centric (upper-echelon) approach to strategy, one in which the leader positions the organization competitively within an environment. Based on complexity theory, we argue that strategic leadership in a fast-paced environment works to organize both the environment and the organization in ways that enhance the firm's adaptability, innovativeness, and fitness. We propose a two-pronged strategy: Foster cooperative relationships with the organization's environment, and enable adaptive organizations that are “partners” in the strategic leadership function.
This chapter relates quantum storytelling consulting (QSC) to ensemble leadership theory (ELT) by Rosile, Boje, & Claw (2016). What kinds of leadership does it take to attend to…
Abstract
This chapter relates quantum storytelling consulting (QSC) to ensemble leadership theory (ELT) by Rosile, Boje, & Claw (2016). What kinds of leadership does it take to attend to the forecaring in advance of the future and how does this relate to quantum storytelling? In a music ensemble, no one musician is the star: they are equal, all are the stars of the show, emerging as stars and then taking a supporting role in cyclic rotation. ELT is important to the world ecology because it is a together-we-are-all-leaders approach. Rather than restricting leadership to one or a few people, the ensemble of many networks of leadership is important. I will contrast ELT with more familiar models of leadership: dispersed, distributed, and relational that restrict leadership to a few. One primary difference is that ELT includes both community and ecology and it is rooted in Indigenous Ways of Knowing (IWOK) that extend from the ancient Southwest US and Mexico. My contribution here is to recognize that ELT is rooted in the rhizomatic fractal, whereas the other models of leadership discussed here (dispersed, distributed, and relational) have been linear-, cyclic-, or spiral-fractal waves. A fractal is defined as recurring self-sameness patterns across scalabilities. I will look to Deleuzian rhizomatic-fractals, which ELT purports to be and make an observation: ELT revived and reinvented in late modern capitalism, must be a correlate with the dominant hierarchic kinds of leadership of here and now, which is this world situation we are now in. Does not each revolution (steam, diesel/gas combustion, cyber-information, and liquid modernity) actually create anew the enslavement of human beings in hierarchic forms of leadership? At the end of this chapter, ensemble leadership will be related to whole-world ecological health.