Balanced Leadership

Abstract

This chapter addresses a new perspective towards leadership, that of balanced leadership in organizational project management. The chapter starts with an overview of existing theoretical perspectives of leadership and leaders, where we introduce the distinction between leadership intent as an intra-personal process and practiced leadership as an inter-personal process of influencing. We discuss some of the popular theories in light of this distinction. Then we address the need for balanced leadership, which we propose as the temporary adjustment of leadership exercised by the project manager (vertical leadership) with leadership by one or several team members (horizontal leadership), and the situational particularities that emphasize the appropriateness of one approach over the other. We subsequently develop a four-step process of selecting, enabling, exercising, and controlling for balanced leadership and outline the intra and inter-personal activities for vertical and horizontal leaders in each of these steps. This provides an in-depth overview of the type and scope of inter and intra-personal leadership activities and their synchronization needs for coordinated balanced leadership to happen. Readers learn to look at leadership in and across projects as a combination of horizontal and vertical approaches, distributed in a coordinated way between vertical and horizontal leaders in organizational project management.

Leadership Styles in Projects: Current Trends and Future Opportunities

“…Authentic leadership is collectively viewed in three diverse conducts: intrapersonal, developmental, and interpersonal [13,16]. This leadership style centres around trust, and is motivated by the well-being of the followers [18].…”

“…Shared leadership is closely connected to horizontal leadership, and complementary to vertical leadership in balanced leadership [18]. The difference between shared and horizontal leadership is summarised in Table 2.…”

“…Although the leadership responsibility rests formally with the project manager, it is regularly delegated to specialists to lead temporarily in order to solve a technical or other issue, and then handed back to the project manager. A contemporary stream of literature defines this action as 'balanced leadership' [5,18].…”

Balancing vertical and horizontal leadership in projects

“…Another important result of this research is that we acknowledge scenarios that connect vertical leadership styles and the nature of decisions delegated to horizontal leaders. Few research works relate the vertical leadership style to its horizontal delegation through the lens of the nature of decisions (Müller, Packendorff & Sankaran, 2017). For instance, an autocratic leader may delegate decisions because of a lack of time to handle a problem directly or a laissez-faire leader may delegate to avoid a potential blame (Bass, 1990) but these studies do not tie leadership to the nature of decisions.…”

“…S/he must rely on team members and their specific expertise for appropriate and timely decisions in a competitive market. This is complemented by shortcomings in existing leadership theory, which takes a rather static perspective by either theorizing the leadership of a vertical leader or the leadership in a team, but not both in parallel However, project reality shows that both types of leadership prevail in projects, but little academic work has been found on this phenomenon from the literature reviewed (Müller, Packendorff & Sankaran, 2017).…”