Distributed Leadership

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.

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Participative decision making in schools in individualist and collectivist cultures: The micro-politics behind distributed leadership

Educational Management Administration & Leadership ◽

10.1177/17411432211001364 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 174114322110013

Author(s):

Mor Hodaya Or ◽

Izhak Berkovich

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Distributed Leadership ◽

Multiple Case Study ◽

Extreme Case ◽

Public High Schools ◽

Case Study Method ◽

Case Selection ◽

Multiple Case ◽

Shed Light

Despite the popularity of distributed leadership theory, the investigation of the micro-political aspects of such models have scarcely been explored, and insights on the cultural variety of distributed practices in schools are limited. The present study aimed to explore what micro-political aspects emerge in participative decision making in collectivist and individualist cultures. To this end, a multiple case study method was adopted, focusing on four Israeli public high schools. Schools were chosen to represent an ‘extreme’ case selection rationale: two non-religious urban schools representing individualist cases, and two communal schools in religious kibbutzim representing communal schools. The analysis shed light on three micro-political points of comparison between the prototypes of participative decision making in collectivist and individualist cultures related to control, actors, and stage crafting. The findings and implications are discussed.

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How Artefacts Do Leadership: A Ventriloquial Analysis

Management Communication Quarterly ◽

10.1177/0893318921998078 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 089331892199807

Author(s):

Jonathan Clifton ◽

Fernando Fachin ◽

François Cooren

Keyword(s):

Organizational Communication ◽

Recent Work ◽

Distributed Leadership ◽

Network Theory ◽

Actor Network Theory ◽

Fine Grained ◽

Naturally Occurring ◽

Human Actors

To date there has been little work that uses fine-grained interactional analyses of the in situ doing of leadership to make visible the role of non-human as well as human actants in this process. Using transcripts of naturally-occurring interaction as data, this study seeks to show how leadership is co-achieved by artefacts as an in-situ accomplishment. To do this we situate this study within recent work on distributed leadership and argue that it is not only distributed across human actors, but also across networks that include both human and non-human actors. Taking a discursive approach to leadership, we draw on Actor Network Theory and adopt a ventriloquial approach to sociomateriality as inspired by the Montreal School of organizational communication. Findings indicate that artefacts “do” leadership when a hybrid presence is made relevant to the interaction and when this presence provides authoritative grounds for influencing others to achieve the group’s goals.

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Empowerment through distributed leadership in reconciliating tensions and dilemmas in teacher professional development

Teacher Development ◽

10.1080/13664530.2021.1939133 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-22

Author(s):

Lee Yong Tay ◽

Kalaivani Ramachandran ◽

Woei Ling Monica Ong ◽

Phillip Alexander Towndrow

Keyword(s):

Professional Development ◽

Teacher Professional Development ◽

Distributed Leadership ◽

Teacher Professional

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