Plural Leadership

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sigrid Endres ◽  
Jürgen Weibler
Keyword(s):  
Plural Leadership

Leading Professionals

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Empson
Keyword(s):  
Mergers And Acquisitions ◽  
Distributed Leadership ◽  
Investment Banks ◽  
Professional Organizations ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Consulting Firms ◽  
Complex Power ◽  
Plural Leadership ◽  
External Stimuli

This book analyses the complex power dynamics and interpersonal politics that lie at the heart of leadership in professional organizations, such as accounting, law, and consulting firms, investment banks, hospitals, and universities. It is based on scholarly research into many of the world’s leading professional organizations across a range of sectors, including interviews with over 500 senior professionals in sixteen countries. Drawing on the latest academic theory to analyse exactly how professionals in organizations come together to create ‘leadership’, it provides new insights into how leaders lead when there is no traditional hierarchy to support them, their own authority is contingent, and they must constantly renegotiate relationships with relatively autonomous professional peers. It explores how leaders persuade highly intelligent, educated, and opinionated professionals to work together; how change happens within professional organizations; and why leaders so often fail. Part I introduces the concept of plural leadership, analysing how leaders establish and maintain their positions within leadership constellations, and the implications for governance in the context of collective or distributed leadership. Part II examines the complex, challenging relationships between professionals as they seek to influence their organizations, including the phenomena of leadership dyads, insecure overachievers, social control, and the rise of the management professional. Part III examines the shifts in the locus of power as professional organizations grow, adapt, and react to external stimuli such as mergers and acquisitions and economic crises. The conclusion identifies the paradoxes inherent in professional organizations and examines the role of leaders in attempting to reconcile them.

scholarly journals Online company blogs as narrations of plural leadership

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 609-621
Author(s):  
Arja Ropo ◽  
Elina I. Mäkinen ◽  
Inka Seppä
Keyword(s):  
Leadership Style ◽  
Narrative Analysis ◽  
Leadership Practices ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Online Data ◽  
Analytical Strategy ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Leadership Research ◽  
Plural Leadership ◽  
Second Category

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how companies that characterise their leadership style as plural, shared or distributed narrate their actions and practices in online blog texts. Design/methodology/approach The data consist of online blog texts published by seven Finnish IT companies. The analytical strategy draws on both thematic and structural approach to narrative analysis. The blog texts were analysed thematically to uncover different aspects of plural leadership. The analysis revealed a narrative pattern consisting of three categories that explain why and how companies implemented plural leadership. Findings The first category in the narrative pattern describes the motivation for engaging in plural leadership. The second category explains how the companies broke down existing hierarchies in order to create new flexible work roles. The third category describes how the organisations sought to create a communal culture and a strong sense of trust using symbols, material objects and spaces. Research limitations/implications The study contributes to leadership research that emphasises post-heroic leadership conceptualisations. The narrative pattern provides future empirical studies a framework for analysing plural leadership practices in different organisational settings. Whereas this study sheds light on the ways in which organisations and their leadership practices can be investigated using online data, traditional organisational ethnographies can make a further contribution to this line of research. Practical implications Implementing plural leadership in organisations can lead to informal power plays. Attention should be paid on to how plural leadership evolves in flat hierarchies and promotes community building. Originality/value Company webpages have rich information on how companies operate and perceive themselves. They provide yet another window for observing organisational activities. This study makes a novel contribution to how plural leadership is practiced and conceptualised in online blog texts.

The USSR: Oligarchy or Dictatorship?

Slavic Review ◽  
1972 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 314-322 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert G. Wesson
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Head Of State ◽  
Plural Leadership ◽  
General Secretary

By the summer of 1971 Leonid Brezhnev had apparently become effective head of state of the Soviet Union and its spokesman. When Chancellor Brandt visited the Soviet Union in September he conferred with no one else, and Pravda reported (September 19) that “responsible members of the Secretariat of the General Secretary” participated in the conversations. One is reminded of the power obscurely exercised by Stalin’s personal secretariat, especially the mysterious Poskrebyshev during the later years of his rule, and of the role of Hitler’s secretariat, headed by Martin Bormann. Yet Brezhnev is certainly not the despot implied by these analogies. Officially, he has assumed no new powers. More important, no one has been ousted from the top circle since 1965, when the regime seemed to be truly a plural leadership in which no individual was clearly dominant. Yet it is practically the first task of a new tyrant to replace with his dependents those who were formerly his equals or at least potential rivals.

Leadership Dynamics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Empson
Keyword(s):  
Unstable Equilibrium ◽  
Professional Organization ◽  
Professional Organizations ◽  
Leaders And Followers ◽  
Plural Leadership

This chapter explains in detail how leadership actually happens in a professional organization. The concept of plural leadership emphasizes that leadership is something that happens between people and is therefore co-constructed through interaction. This chapter develops a model of plural leadership dynamics, which emphasizes how leadership is fluid and unstable, changing and adapting as the relations between professionals change and adapt. Leadership dynamics in this context encompasses three microdynamics: ‘legitimizing’, ‘negotiating’, and ‘manoeuvring’. In other words, the model demonstrates how leadership in professional organizations is the result of a complex and highly nuanced set of interactions among peers, rather than a simpler, more transactional exchange between leaders and followers. In professional organizations, leadership represents an unstable equilibrium—it changes and adapts as relations between professionals change and adapt. The leaders who misjudge the subtleties of these interactions will quickly discover that nobody has to ‘follow’ them.

Leadership and Ambiguity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Empson
Keyword(s):  
Financial Crisis ◽  
Global Financial Crisis ◽  
Professional Organizations ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Conventional View ◽  
Organizational Crises ◽  
Leadership Group ◽  
The Global Financial Crisis ◽  
Plural Leadership ◽  
Global Law

This chapter examines in detail the leadership dynamics of the plural leadership group: who they are, who has the power to decide who they are, how they work together under normal circumstances, and how their dynamics change in response to a crisis. The conventional view is that organizational crises demand a clear and decisive response from ‘strong’ leaders. Yet this approach is hard to reconcile with the extensive autonomy and contingent authority which determines the distinctive power dynamics of professional organizations. The chapter examines a global law firm’s partner restructuring programme during the global financial crisis and asks: how, when authority is ambiguous, are leaders able to respond effectively in a crisis? The answer is that, under the cloak of ambiguity, leaders may be able to exercise considerable informal power by mobilizing and exploiting the organization’s hidden hierarchy. In the process, they move from an intuitive to a more deliberate form of mutual adjustment. This chapter explains exactly how it is done.

Leadership Constellation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Empson
Keyword(s):  
Deep Level ◽  
Organizational Characteristics ◽  
Professional Organizations ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Collective Phenomenon ◽  
Plural Leadership ◽  
Conceptual Foundations ◽  
Implicit Power ◽  
Insight Into

This chapter presents the book’s conceptual foundations. It identifies key concepts developed from the research and explains how they relate to each other. The peculiar challenges of leading professionals arise from two interrelated organizational characteristics, which coexist in constant dynamic tension within professional organizations: extensive autonomy and contingent authority. To manage this tension, leaders need to develop a deep level of insight into the implicit power dynamics and covert political processes that permeate professional organizations, and strike an appropriate balance between challenging and propitiating powerful prima donna professionals. Plural leadership is a relatively new and rapidly developing leadership theory which is particularly relevant to professional organizations. This approach examines leadership as a collective phenomenon that is distributed among multiple individuals. Building on research in this area, this chapter introduces the concept of the ‘leadership constellation’, developed to represent the informal power dynamics among leaders of professional organizations.

Distributed Leadership and Its Applications in Health Care Settings

2016 ◽  
pp. 821-841
Author(s):  
Vida Farzipour
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Distributed Leadership ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Health Care Context ◽  
Distribution Of Power ◽  
Plural Leadership

In this chapter, I go through distributed leadership which is one of the mainstreams of plural leadership from social media perspective. In addition, the attributes and variants of distributed leadership are covered in this chapter. The role of social media to help the distribution of power and increasing engagement to enhance the quality of care and patient safety is also addressed in the health care context. It is concluded that Understanding distributed leadership and its application in the health care setting is largely related to the appreciation of the political and social power that currently exists.

scholarly journals Leading innovation through employees’ participation: Plural leadership in employee-driven innovation practices

Leadership ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 174271502098792
Author(s):  
Nicole Flocco ◽  
Filomena Canterino ◽  
Raffaella Cagliano
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Empirical Analysis ◽  
Leadership Roles ◽  
Exploration And Exploitation ◽  
Informal Leaders ◽  
Multiple Case ◽  
Multiple Case Studies ◽  
Innovation Practices ◽  
Plural Leadership ◽  
The Relationship

Plural leadership has gained a lot of attention, challenging traditional individualistic leadership models and moving the focus to the dynamic and collective nature of leadership. This leadership paradigm seems particularly relevant in situations where plurality is involved to cope with complexity and uncertainty: a valid example is the context of innovation. In this study, we explore how plural leadership works in the context of employee-driven innovation (EDI), since these initiatives can provide interesting insights about the interactions between formal and informal leaders. Our empirical analysis supports the idea that EDI involves plural leadership. We identified some similarities with two of the streams theorized by Denis, Langley and Sergi (2012) in “Leadership in the Plural”, namely “sharing leadership in teams” and “producing leadership through interaction.” Through multiple case studies, it was possible to extend those streams and to deepen our understanding of the relationship between formal and informal leaders. We conceptualized two leadership roles (i.e., process leadership and content leadership), which enable plural leadership to meet the competing demand of exploration and exploitation, and we revealed elements that help explain why and when leadership is shared between multiple individuals.

scholarly journals Plural Leadership During Organisational Transformation Initiatives (Vertical & Horizontal)

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nawaf AlGhanem ◽  
Ashley Braganza ◽  
Tillal Eldabi
Keyword(s):  
Transformational Leadership ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Transactional Leadership ◽  
Organizational Transformation ◽  
Efficient Performance ◽  
Key Word ◽  
Review Protocol ◽  
Vertical Leadership ◽  
Plural Leadership ◽  
Transformation Leadership

Organizational transformation and change scholars and researchers published many articles linking and studying the effect of vertical (transactional) leadership and horizontal (transformational) leadership on organizations during transformation. As much attention has been given in the last two decades to transformational leadership as being one of the trendiest leadership styles that focuses on the relation between followers and leaders to achieve better performance during organizational transformation, transactional leadership is still of benefit. This paper bridges organizational transformation and leadership literature and show the importance of transformational (horizontal) leadership alongside transactional (vertical) leadership in achieving efficient performance and optimal results during organizational transformation. Methodology: A literature review will be conducted based on literature related to certain key word and through a systematic literature review protocol. Keywords: organizational transformation, leadership, transactional leadership, transformational leadership

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