Towards operationalizing complexity leadership: How generative, administrative and community-building leadership practices enact organizational outcomes

Abstract

Over five years ago, The Leadership Quarterly published a special issue on complexity to advance a new way of thinking about leadership. In shifting attention away from the individual to the organizing process itself, complexity added an important focus on process and context to leadership and management research. Yet, the complexity approach creates challenges for researchers who must combine or replace individual level constructs-like those built through surveys or factor analysis-with richer theories that investigate networked meso dynamics, multilevel phenomena, emergent processes, and organizational outcomes. To address this challenge, the present analysis draws on theoretical and empirical work over the last several years to identify five specific areas where complexity inspired research has led to new insights about the mechanisms that enable the organization to perform and adapt. It suggests propositions that describe how leadership and management, defined holistically, might activate complexity mechanisms to perform five essential organizing functions.

Leadership as an Emergent Feature in Social Organizations: Insights from A Laboratory Simulation Experiment

“…They did not attribute any of the complexity leadership behaviors being formally encouraged before each task. This result suggests that other functions might exist in the system, as it might be the case of a passive function [13]. Organizational literature identifies it as social loafing, which is the phenomenon that characterizes people who exert less effort to achieve a goal when they work in a group than when they work alone [24].…”

“…organizations; teams). Complexity leadership theory does not discard the existence of individual formal leaders [7], but it emphasizes a perspective where leadership is seen as an observable feature that emerges from simple rules of interaction between individuals [13]. Complexity leadership theory suggests that randomness prevents individual leaders from predicting, and closely controlling the future.…”

Leadership within regional climate change adaptation networks: the case of climate adaptation officers in Northern Hesse, Germany

“…To this end, specifying tasks is a way of operationalizing the functions, enabling researchers to trace them with a qualitative approach, applying content analysis to interview transcripts and documents, similarly to other applications of the integrative framework . This approach diverges from other work that seeks to operationalize CLT in applying it to processes within single organizations (Hazy and Uhl-Bien 2015). Climate adaptation officers and climate change adaptation in Northern Hesse…”

Celebrity Chief Executive Officers Influence on Firm Performance: A Review of Theory and Evidence

“…According to Hazy and Uhl-Bien [46] who had a different view, note that people should view leadership as an organizational practice and not a practice of the individuals. However, according to Mauri and Romeo [47] the role of strategic leadership is to create enabling organizational values and culture that is essential for the success of the organization.…”