Collective leadership as institutional work: interpreting evidence from Mound Bayou

Abstract

In this article, we refine and extend the conceptualization of collective leadership by examining how institutional work can play a central role in the emergence of collective leadership success or failure through conflict. Specifically, based on historical traces collected from the first African American town in Mississippi, Mound Bayou, which was founded and led by a group of ex-slaves, we conceptualize collective leadership as a compilational process and elucidate the development of collective leadership amid the relational and inspirational aspects of conflict that arose among this cadre of historical collective leaders. We selected the case of Mound Bayou because the specifics of the case allowed us to explore how collective leadership emerged, and over time, led to conflict engendered by issues that arose within the institutional processes of formation, maintenance, and transformation of the town. We used interpretivist epistemology into which we incorporated and utilized historiometric methodology to code and interpret salient archival data. Based on this analysis, we inductively theorize the process by which the leaders of Mound Bayou collectively forged and led, in both cooperative and conflicting manner, the first African American community in the Mississippi Delta.

Dynamic properties of successful plural leadership configuration: An exploratory process-study

“…Collective leadership is also used in connection with organisational learning (Denis et al, 2012), strategic change (Denis et al, 2001), or co-actions and -practices (Sklaveniti, 2020). Novicevic et al (2017) investigate how institutional work plays a central role in the emergence of collaborative leadership success or failure through conflict, and Kramer and Crespy (2011) explain collaboration as a group process. Due to this Leadership 19(3) ambiguity, we understand the concepts of collective and collaborative as interchangeable elements of plural leadership.…”

“…It is created and recreated as a process in which individuals participate (Denis et al, 2012; Gronn, 2015; Wood, 2005). Plural leadership can emerge in an organisation or community also without a formal position (Acton et al, 2018; Denis et al, 2012; DeRue et al, 2015; Novicevic et al, 2017; Quick, 2017; Yammarino and Dansereau, 2011). According to our idea of successful plural leadership configuration, it designs desirable organisational functions and endeavours, and outlines the future.…”

Why is collective leadership so elusive?

“…Whilst there is evidence that collective forms of leadership go back much further (see Edwards, 2015), it is since the turn of the millennium that notions of ‘collective’ (e.g. Mattanini and Holtschneider, 2017; Novicevic et al, 2017; Raelin, 2018), ‘plural’ (e.g. Denis et al, 2012), ‘dispersed’ (e.g.…”