Given the increasingly acknowledged insight that people do not act as self-contained individuals but in relation to others and embedded in context, relational social constructionist leadership (RSCL) has recently gained exciting momentum. Unfortunately, this development has not been accompanied by sufficient efforts at clarification. This systematic concept-centric review, which consists of 47 empirical RSCL studies, contributes to a better understanding of RSCL as part of the relationality movement in leadership. The results help to clear up some misunderstandings on relational leadership and suggest a more analytical and critical treatment of RSCL approaches to advance the development of RSCL. As a major contribution for dealing appropriately with RSCL, the authors propose a three-component RSCL model, composed of: (1) social construction (i.e. processes of intersubjectively creating social realities through ongoing interpretation and interaction), representing the leadership mechanism, (2) high-quality relating and communicating (i.e. all the visible and invisible threads that connect people) representing the leadership content; and (3) influence (emerging at the interpersonal interaction level or the collective level), representing the leadership manifestation. This model permits: first, clearer boundaries to be drawn between RSCL and other relational leadership forms and general relationship forms; second, power and influence in RSCL to be addressed adequately; and third, potential 'dark sides of RSCL' to be considered in full. The authors believe that this model may help to reduce the risk of diluting the distinctiveness of RSCL, and to balance potential tendencies towards developing overly idealistic or implicit ideological leadership approaches within the promising field of RSCL.

This paper develops an understanding of how shared leadership emerges in social network interactions. On the basis of a qualitative research design (grounded theory methodology – GTM) our study in two interorganizational networks offers insights into the interplay between structures, individuals, and the collective for the emergence of shared network leadership (SNL). The network-specific Gestalt of SNL appears as a pattern of collective and individual leadership activities unified under the roof of a highly developed learning conversation. More importantly, our findings support the idea that individual network leadership would not emerge without embeddedness in certain high-quality collective processes of relating and dialogue. Both theoretical and practical implications of this original network leadership perspective are discussed.

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Despite the increasing significance of collaborative interorganizational networks, understanding of leadership phenomena in these contexts is still scarce. How, and in what form will leadership emerge in such (a priori) non-hierarchical contexts with peerlike work settings, if at all? Through an interpretive grounded theory study conducted in collaborative interorganizational networks, we found that the networks either remained at the stage of leaderless cooperation (leadership void) or developed shared leadership. We then sought to understand the underlying mechanism of collaboration that might explain the different (non)leadership phenomena. Our study's main result is the empirically grounded identification of two distinct forms of network participation with specific network identities as its core, which are related to the distinct leadership-related phenomena in our networks. (1) Task-based network identity, which includes an individualistic network identity, a single achievement motivation, and a largely instrumentalist orientation towards network participation, is related to a leadership void (non-leadership emergence, i.e. a form of leaderless cooperation). (2) Joint-motivational network identity, which includes a collectivistic network identity, joint network motivation, and a largely value-laden attitude towards network participation, is related to shared leadership. Our findings shed new light on collaboration and leadership phenomena in interorganizational networks, concurrently providing progress on conceptualizing Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (

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