In this book, we elaborate on the dynamic process of leadership sharing in creative project networks by pointing out that the boundaries and relationships of the networks change over time. As the project requirements evolve, new leaders emerge, make their contribution, and move into support positions. This leadership sharing dynamic is a necessary condition for mature LMX and member-member exchange (MMX). This insight about the sharing of leadership within networks directs us to the process of microbehavior being transformed to meso-options and being converted to macrostrategies. This sequence of micro to macro directs us to a marriage of the formal with the informal organization. At this stage we are post Simon, March, and Weick. This book is about putting authentic people back into the social creations we call productive organizations—warts and all. The design of these organizations is as old as human civilization. It helped construct ancient Greece, Egypt, and China. It was improved in the West by the Romans and in the East by the Chinese. During more recent times it was improved by the British Empire whose command and control models gradually gave way to the knowledge models of today. This book is about how we can discover the alternative processes by which fallible humans use sense making to continuously improve organizations at the macrostrategy level.
Networking is essential to effective leadership in today's organizations. Leaders who are skilled networkers have access to people, information, and resources to help solve problems and create opportunities. Leaders who neglect their networks are missing out on a critical component of their role as leaders. This book will help leaders take a new view of networking and provide insight into how to enhance their networks and become effective at leadership networking.
Our leadership models are stuck in an Industrial Age, top-down mentality. But in our complex, data-drenched, 24/7 world, there is simply too much information coming from too many different directions too quickly for any one leader or group to stay on top of it. Hierarchy is breaking down everywhere—why should leadership be any different? Inspired by the peer-to-peer model of computing used in social networking and crowdsource technologies, Mila Baker shows a new way to lead. Organizations, she says, must become networks of "equipotent" nodes of power—peer leaders. The job of the leader is now to set the overall goals and direction and optimize the health of that network, not tell it what to do. In these organizations, leadership roles shift rapidly to fit the needs of any given situation. Information flows freely so those who need it can find it easily and act on it immediately. Feedback becomes an organic part of the workflow, enabling rapid course corrections. Baker shows how companies like Gore and Herman Miller have achieved long-term success practicing these principles and provides a structure that any organization can adapt to build flexibility, resiliency, and accountability.
Across organisations and communities there are leaders who manage to get things done through their ability to understand how a network of individuals connect, who to talk to and how to bring people together in the right constellation of effort. These are "network leaders". Network Leadership enables readers to identify and make the most of informal social and organisational networks in order to challenge the status quo effectively and facilitate greater engagement and productivity. Not only will the research in these chapters help you become a better leader and manager of your own team or department, it will also help make you a better network leader, effecting positive change across teams, and departmental and organisational boundaries. Leaders who facilitate action do so through four key practices: they understand the social systems in which they work; they have convening power, uncovering and connecting underlying movements and giving voice to something that is worth listening to; they lead beyond their formal authority; and they possess the power of restless persuasion and a capacity to thrive in complexity and crises. This book is invaluable reading for those who have mastered the basics of leadership but wish to take the next steps. It is particularly relevant to organisations and managers dealing with the geographic separation of business units, change, innovation, matrix management, project or portfolio management and other cross-departmental projects.
In this collection, the editors again bring together papers that either exemplify the crossing of disciplinary boundaries, or that allow us to do so in and through the conversations they create. The chapters were chosen based on their relevance to similar themes as were discussed in the first volume. By reviewing historical developments in the literature around gender and organization, and by drawing on recent scholarship that disrupts the traditional masculine imaginaries that plague leadership constructs, this book challenges us to radically revise our gendered thinking about leading in organizations. The authors included in this volume offer alternative, interdisciplinary perspectives on the gender constructs that inform the organizing that takes place in business and society. The book delves deeply into how ‘relationality’, as concept and practice, can help us frame a more inclusive approach to gender within contemporary organizations.
"Shared Leadership offers a much-needed shift in our thinking about how leadership happens in teams and organizations. Pearce and Conger have brought together a diverse group of authors who collectively offer a comprehensive view of developing, implementing, and studying shared leadership in organizations. This volume is sure to fulfill its goal of "jump-starting" our knowledge of the shared leadership phenomenon." --Cynthia D. McCauley, Ph.D., Vice President, Leadership Development, Center for Creative Leadership "How leadership is shared in teams and organizations is an important subject, but one that has received little attention in most of the leadership literature. This timely book provides a rich and varied perspective on the subject. The highly qualified collection of scholars provide a good theoretical foundation to guide the future study of shared leadership." --Gary Yukl, State University of New York at Albany "The time is as ripe as ever for a new paradigm of leadership that the authors simply call ′shared leadership.′ This timely volume effectively ′jumpstarts′ our knowledge of this emerging field by presenting a number of critical perspectives examining shared leadership using conceptual, empirical, and applied lenses." --Joe Raelin, Asa. S. Knowles Chair of Practice-Oriented Education, Northeastern University, and author of Creating Leaderful Organizations: How to Bring Out Leadership in Everyone "This volume redefines the essence of leadership. Pearce and Conger have assembled a cast of ′scholar-entrepreneurs′ whose pioneering work firmly establishes the theoretical foundations for the study of leadership now and well into the future. This book is a must read for anyone interested in leadership in the age of teamwork." --Henry P. Sims, University of Maryland In recent years, scholars have argued that leadership is an activity shared or distributed among members of a group or organization. This line of thinking is gaining attention among leadership scholars, yet our understanding of the dynamics and opportunities for shared leadership is still quite primitive. Given the infancy of the field, it is timely to introduce a volume on the subject that significantly enhances our knowledge.Shared Leadership: Reframing the Hows and Whys of Leadership brings together the foremost thinkers on the subject and is the first book of its kind to address the conceptual, methodological, and practical issues for shared leadership. Its aim is to advance understanding along many dimensions of the shared leadership phenomenon: its dynamics, moderators, appropriate settings, facilitating factors, contingencies, measurement, practice implications, and directions for the future. The volume provides a realistic and practical discussion of the benefits, as well as the risks and problems, associated with shared leadership. It will serve as an indispensable guide for researchers and practicing managers in identifying where and when shared leadership may be appropriate for organizations and teams. Edited by leading authorities Craig L. Pearce and Jay A. Conger, with contributions from the top experts in the field, Shared Leadership is an ideal text for management, education, and communication courses in leadership, teamwork, organizational behavior, and small groups. In addition, practicing consultants will find this an invaluable reference in their leadership and team development programs.
This book employs a network-centric approach to the new field of multinational leadership and network sharing. Networks go beyond teams but may include teams of various types from homogeneous project teams to multinational strategy teams and every type of team between. Conventional wisdom was that nothing larger than a relatively small team could be led effectively because the number of relationships between people is about one half of the square of the size of the team. For a team in which every member depends on every other member, the number of interdependent relationships becomes overwhelming with relatively small team sizes. Fortunately, recent technical advances in network analysis and multicultural cooperation have been developed to rescue us from mind boggling bombardments of everyone trying to communicate over all others at once. Merely thinking about such a Kafkaesque situation hurts our heads. Armed with these two breakthroughs fairly large networks, both national and multinational, can be led effectively with appropriate selection and training. This book furthers our attempts to make functional networks perform their promise of becoming “superteams.”
Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management is designed to promote theory and research on important substantive and methodological topics in the field of human resources management.
Evidence-based and engaging, with key takeaways for practitioners in every chapter, this book addresses the existing knowledge gap about how school leaders can effectively develop, support, and sustain networks within and across schools. It is crucial reading for school leaders, system leaders and education researchers working close-to-practice.
