15.sept-leadership

Leader(ship) in Relation to Power

What is a leader?

• Raven (1976) defines a leader as someone who occupies a position in a group, influences others according to the expectations of that position, and coordinates and directs the group so that it can maintain itself and reach its goals.

• In this traditional definition, leadership is closely connected to position and authority. A person becomes a leader because they occupy a recognized role in the organization, such as manager, director, or team leader. Their position gives them some power to influence what other people do.

What is leadership?

• Avery (1990) defines leadership as a process of influence between a leader and followers that helps a group, organization, or society reach its goals.

• The important difference is that a leader is a person or position, while leadership is a process. This difference becomes important later because newer theories question whether leadership has to come from one formally appointed person.

• Leadership can also happen through relationships and interactions between people. This means that when we study leadership, we should not only ask “Who is the leader?” but also “How does leadership happen?”

Leadership & Management

• Management is usually more about planning, organizing, coordinating, maintaining systems, and making sure that everyday work gets done. Leadership is often more connected to direction, change, vision, influence, and challenging existing ways of doing things.

• Warren Bennis describes this difference by saying that “the manager accepts the status quo; the leader challenges it.” This does not mean that managers are always about stability and leaders are always about change. Organizations need both.

• Management without leadership can become too focused on keeping things the same. Leadership without management can become disconnected from the practical work and structures needed to achieve goals.

• The lecture also points out that leadership is sometimes glorified. We often tell stories about organizations as if one great leader was responsible for everything that happened. This can hide the importance of employees, relationships, organizational structures, and the wider environment.

• This becomes especially important in complexity approaches because leadership is seen as something that can come from the whole system, rather than only from one heroic person.

The Great Man Theory

• The Great Man Theory is one of the older ways of thinking about leadership. It focuses strongly on the individual leader and assumes that some people naturally have the qualities needed to become leaders.

• The theory suggests that leaders are mostly born rather than created. Leaders are believed to have special traits, skills, or personal qualities that make them different from other people.

• The idea of studying leadership traits means looking at people's usual patterns of behaviour, thinking, and emotions. The assumption is that if we can find the traits of successful leaders, we can understand what makes someone a good leader.

• Historically, this theory also strongly connected leadership with masculinity. The “great leader” was often imagined as a strong, confident, powerful, white man. This is important because ideas about who is seen as a natural leader are also connected to gender and power.

• The Great Man approach therefore sees leadership mainly as something that exists inside a special individual. Later theories challenge this by asking whether leadership might instead depend on behaviour, situations, relationships, or the wider organizational system.

Perspectives after the Great Man Theory

Three important developments are:

1. Leadership styles

2. Contingency approaches

3. New leadership approaches

• These approaches gradually move away from the idea that leadership is simply about having the right personality or traits.

• There is also a growing argument that alternative views of leadership are needed, especially because traditional theories can focus too much on individual leaders and power at the top.

1. Leadership Styles

• Kurt Lewin helped develop the idea that leadership is not simply something people are born with. People can have different leadership styles and these styles affect how they work with others.

Autocratic leadership

• In autocratic leadership, the leader keeps most of the decision-making power. The leader decides what should happen and expects other people to follow their instructions. This gives the leader a high level of control, but employees have less opportunity to participate in decisions.

Democratic leadership

• Democratic leadership gives group members more opportunity to participate in decision-making. The leader still has an important role, but ideas and decisions are more openly shared. This style puts more focus on participation, communication, and cooperation.

Laissez-faire leadership

• Laissez-faire leadership gives employees a high level of freedom. The leader gives relatively little direct guidance and allows people to decide for themselves how to do their work. This can encourage independence, but it can also create problems if people need more direction or coordination.

The important change from the Great Man Theory is that leadership can be understood as different ways of behaving, rather than simply the result of having special qualities.

2. Contingency Approach

• The contingency approach, also called the situational approach, argues that there is no single leadership style that works best in every situation.

• Different organizations face different environments, problems, employees, and levels of uncertainty. Because of this, the best way to lead depends on the particular situation.

• A leader should therefore not always use exactly the same style. One situation may require more direction, while another may require more support or freedom.

• This is an important development because leadership is now understood as something that also depends on context.

Hersey and Blanchard: Situational Leadership

• Hersey and Blanchard developed a situational approach where leaders change their style depending on the needs and level of development of the people they are working with.

• Directing

  • The leader gives clear instructions and closely guides the employee. This is useful when someone needs a lot of direction.

• Coaching

  • The leader still gives direction but also explains, supports, encourages and helps the employee develop.

• Supporting

  • The employee has more ability to work independently, so the leader gives more support and less direct instruction.

• Delegating

  • The employee has a high level of independence and responsibility. The leader gives them more freedom to make decisions and carry out the work themselves.

The main idea is that good leadership requires flexibility. A leader should be able to move between different styles instead of believing that one style will always work.

3. New Leadership Approaches

• “New leadership approaches” is an umbrella term for approaches that move away from seeing leadership simply as one powerful person at the top.

• They put more attention on relationships, motivation, followers and meaning

Transactional leadership

• Transactional leadership is based on an exchange between leaders and followers.

• The leader sets goals and expectations, while employees perform tasks in return for rewards, recognition or other benefits. Leaders can also use punishments or negative consequences when expectations are not met.

• Transactional leadership is therefore strongly focused on goals, performance and existing organizational expectations.

• It is often described as more reactive because the leader works within existing goals and responds to whether people are meeting them.

• “If you achieve this target, you will receive this reward.”

Transformational leadership

• Transformational leadership focuses more on vision, inspiration, motivation, and change.

• Instead of simply asking employees to complete existing tasks, transformational leaders try to inspire people to work toward a larger vision.

• They may use enthusiasm, inspiration, and charisma to motivate people and encourage them to think differently.

• Transformational leadership is therefore generally more proactive because it tries to create change rather than simply manage existing performance.

Servant leadership

• Servant leadership turns the traditional idea of leadership around.

• Instead of thinking that followers exist to serve the leader, the leader's role is to serve and support the followers.

• Servant leaders prioritize the growth, development, needs, and well-being of other people.

• This connects with Lao Tzu's idea that a leader does not always need to be highly visible or receive all the credit. The leader can create conditions in which other people are able to develop and succeed.

Distributed / Relational Leadership

• New leadership approaches also question whether leadership has to belong to the person with the formal leadership title.

• Distributed leadership argues that leadership can be spread across different people in an organization.

• Leadership can therefore happen beyond those who have official leadership roles. Employees can provide knowledge, ideas, direction, and solutions even when they are not formally called leaders.

• This means that leadership can be understood as something that is shared and distributed through relationships and interactions.

Three important ideas Distributed leadership

1. Leadership happens beyond formal roles

Someone does not need to have the official title of “leader” to perform leadership.

2. Leadership is relational and systemic

Leadership is produced through interactions between people rather than existing completely inside one individual.

3. Leadership is situated

Leadership depends on the particular situation in which people are interacting. What works as leadership in one situation may not work in another.

Do New Leadership Approaches Really Take Power into Account?

• This is where a critical perspective becomes important.

• New leadership approaches often sound positive because they emphasize participation, empowerment, care, collaboration, autonomy, and shared responsibility. But critical scholars ask whether these approaches actually change power relations.

• For example, distributed leadership may give employees more responsibility while also making them more responsible for meeting organizational demands.

• Lumby (2013) argues that distributed leadership can sometimes be used to encourage employees to willingly take on more work and accept more surveillance. In this situation, leadership is “shared,” but the underlying power relations may not have disappeared.

• This means that simply saying “everyone is a leader” does not automatically mean that everyone has equal power.

• A leader can be caring and supportive while the organization can still have deeper problems such as burnout, gender inequality, surveillance, exploitation, or shareholder pressure.

• Therefore, a critical approach asks us to look beyond the personal qualities of a leader and examine the power relations around leadership.

The Return of the Great Man?

• There is a concern that “heroic” and strongly authoritarian forms of leadership can become attractive again.

• The concern is that during periods of uncertainty, anxiety, or crisis, people may become attracted to leaders who promise strong control and clear answers.

• This can be understood as a reaction against ideas such as feminism, diversity, participation, and shared leadership. It can also be connected to struggles over economic power and inequality.

• The important point is that the return of heroic leadership does not necessarily mean that organizations have no leaders. Instead, there can be a crisis in leadership because powerful leaders may be unwilling to step aside or give up control.

• They may want to remain in command, keep their authority, avoid giving power to others, protect their own reputation, and continue using older ideas about leadership.

The New Spirit of Capitalism

• The New Spirit of Capitalism helps explain why ideas such as autonomy, flexibility, creativity, and personal development became so important in organizations.

• During the 1960s and 1970s, there was strong criticism of traditional work and organizations.

• Social critique

  • The social critique focused on problems such as inequality, poverty, exploitation, selfishness, and the loss of solidarity.

  • People questioned a system where some people benefited greatly from work while others experienced poor conditions and little power.

• Artistic critique

  • There was also an artistic critique of work. People wanted work to provide more freedom, meaning, creativity, and authenticity.

• Capitalism partly responded to these criticisms by changing how organizations were structured and how workers were encouraged to think about their work.

• Traditional hierarchy became less dominant, while organizations increasingly emphasized networks, projects, teams, flexibility, flatter structures, and personal engagement.

• Workers were encouraged to be mobile, adaptable, connected, and continuously employable.

• Autonomy can become individual responsibility. When workers are given more freedom, they may also become more responsible for their own success or failure.

• Authenticity can become self-realization through work. Work becomes something through which people are expected to express who they are and develop themselves.

• Liberation can become precariousness. Flexible work can provide freedom while also creating less security, unstable employment, and greater uncertainty.

• The important point is that capitalism can take some of the ideas that originally criticized it and turn them into new ways of organizing work.

• Ideas such as freedom, creativity, autonomy, and authenticity can become ways of motivating workers and making them more responsible for managing themselves.

The Entrepreneurial Self

• The entrepreneurial self is connected to this new spirit of capitalism.

• People are encouraged to think of themselves as if they are their own small business.

• People are encouraged to see themselves as their own source of value and income.

• Skills become a portfolio, relationships become a network, and a career becomes a series of investments.

• For example, instead of simply seeing education as something you do to learn, you can start seeing every course, skill, internship, friendship, and experience as something that increases your future value.

Bröckling — “real fiction”

• Ulrich Bröckling calls the entrepreneurial self a “real fiction.” It is a fiction because nobody can completely become this ideal entrepreneurial person. At the same time, it is real because the idea still affects how people behave.

• People are constantly encouraged to improve themselves, gain skills, build networks, become employable, manage their careers, and stay flexible.

• This is also a form of power.

• Instead of someone directly telling you what to do, power can shape the choices you see as desirable or necessary.

• You may feel that you are freely choosing to work harder, improve yourself, build your network, or become more employable. But these choices are also influenced by wider organizational and economic expectations.

A Complexity Approach to Leadership

• Complexity theory offers a major change in how we understand leadership.

• Traditional approaches usually begin by asking who is the leader. A complexity approach instead asks “What is happening in the whole system and how does leadership emerge through interactions?”

• Leadership is therefore not understood simply as something that one person does to followers.

• It can emerge through interactions between employees, managers, teams, stakeholders, information, organizational structures, and the wider environment.

• This is one of the main arguments in Uhl-Bien (2007) Complexity Leadership Theory. They argue that older top-down leadership models were developed for an industrial economy based heavily on physical production, while knowledge-based organizations need more learning, creativity, innovation, and adaptation.

Complexity Theory

Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS)

• A Complex Adaptive System (CAS) is a system made up of many connected and interdependent people or “agents” who constantly interact with each other.

• In an organization, these can include employees, managers, teams, departments, customers, and other stakeholders.

• Because these people constantly interact, the organization cannot be completely predicted or controlled from the top.

• People respond to each other, learn from each other, change their behaviour, and create new patterns of action.

• This means that organizations can develop solutions and ways of working that nobody planned in advance.

• CAS can therefore learn and adapt to changing situations. Uhl-Bien et al. argue that this is especially important in knowledge-based organizations where creativity and innovation are important.

Complicated vs Complex and emergence

• A complicated system can have many parts, but the relationship between the parts can still be understood and predicted. An airplane, for example, is very complicated, but experts can understand how its different parts work together.

• A complex system is different because the parts interact and change each other.

• Human organizations are complex because people learn, react, change their behaviour, and respond to one another.

• This makes outcomes much harder to predict.

• The same action can therefore produce different outcomes depending on the people, relationships, and situation involved.

Emergence

• A central concept in complexity theory is emergence.

• Emergence means that something new develops through many interactions even though no single person planned the final result.

• For example, employees might start sharing information, trying different solutions, and developing a new way of working. The final solution may not have been designed by one manager.

• Leadership can work in a similar way.

• Leadership can emerge from interactions rather than simply being performed by the formally appointed leader.

But what if the situation gets out of hand?

• If leadership is distributed across a complex system, do we still need leaders?

• The answer is yes.

• Complexity theory does not mean that formal leadership, rules, or hierarchy should disappear.

• Organizations still need coordination, goals, responsibilities, resources, procedures, and some level of structure.

• Uhl-Bien et al. make this point clearly. Complexity Leadership Theory tries to support informal and emergent activity while still keeping formal structures that help coordinate the organization. The goal is therefore not to replace structure with complete freedom, but to combine structure with the ability to adapt and innovate.

• Organizations need enough structure to coordinate people, but also enough freedom for new ideas and adaptation to emerge.

• The answer is not necessarily to choose one side. Organizations need to find ways for both sides to exist together.

• So complexity leadership is a paradox

Complexity and Paradox

• Complexity means accepting that organizations contain tensions and contradictions that cannot always be completely solved.

• A leader may need to provide structure while also giving people freedom.

• They may need to maintain stability while also encouraging change.

• They may need to coordinate people while accepting that they cannot control every interaction.

• This means that leaders need to understand the wider system and their own position within it.

• They also need to recognize the limits of their own knowledge and control.

• This is one reason why complexity leadership requires a different mindset from traditional heroic leadership.

• The leader is not expected to have every answer.

• Instead, the leader needs to help create conditions where knowledge, ideas, and solutions can emerge from across the organization.

Complexity Leadership Theory - The Three Functions of Complexity Leadership Theory

• Uhl-Bien et al. describe Complexity Leadership Theory (CLT) as a way of understanding leadership in complex, knowledge-based organizations.

• The theory focuses on helping organizations develop their ability to learn, be creative, adapt, and innovate.

• It does not simply replace formal leadership with informal leadership. Instead, it connects formal organizational structures with the informal and emergent activities that happen inside complex systems.

CLT identifies three connected leadership functions:

1. Administrative leadership

2. Adaptive leadership

3. Enabling leadership

These three functions are entangled, meaning that they interact with and depend on one another instead of working as three completely separate types of leadership.

Administrative leadership provides structure and stability.
Adaptive leadership creates learning, change, and innovation.
Enabling leadership helps the two work together.

Administrative Leadership

• Administrative leadership is the formal and structured side of leadership.

• It includes activities such as planning, organizing, setting goals, creating rules and procedures, coordinating work, managing resources, and maintaining organizational stability.

• Administrative leadership is important because organizations cannot function completely through spontaneous interactions.

• There still needs to be some structure that gives people direction and helps coordinate their activities.

• Administrative leadership therefore provides structure, stability, and coordination.

Adaptive Leadership

• Adaptive leadership is the emergent side of leadership.

• It involves learning, creativity, innovation, experimentation, and responding to new problems or changing situations.

• Unlike traditional leadership, adaptive leadership does not necessarily come from a formal leader.

• It can emerge from interactions between people anywhere in the organization.

• For example, employees who notice a problem may start discussing it, sharing knowledge, trying different solutions, and developing a new way of working.

• The leadership comes from the interaction and activity, rather than simply from someone's formal position.

• Uhl-Bien et al. describe adaptive leadership as creative, learning, and adaptive actions that emerge from interactions within complex adaptive systems.

Enabling Leadership

• Enabling leadership connects administrative leadership and adaptive leadership.

• Its role is to create conditions where new ideas, learning, and adaptive behaviour can develop while still keeping these activities connected to the organization's goals.

• An enabling leader does not need to control every solution.

• Enabling leadership helps connect these new ideas back to the formal organization.

Bloomfield, Rigg & Vince (2024): The Research Puzzle

• This reading builds on the idea of distributed leadership.

• Bloomfield, Rigg, and Vince build on ideas of distributed leadership by asking a difficult question: What happens when leaders genuinely do not know what to do?

• Distributed leadership argues that leadership can exist throughout the organization rather than only at the top. But the authors point out that we still need to understand how leadership is actually distributed and what happens to hierarchy while this is happening.

• Their research focuses on unknowingness.

Unknowingness

• Unknowingness is not simply the same as being ignorant.

• It means being aware that you do not know something and also recognizing that you may be unable to know it in advance.

• This becomes especially important in complex situations where there are competing goals, uncertainty, and no obvious correct answer.

• The traditional image of a leader suggests that a leader should know what to do and give direction to everyone else.

• What if the situation is so complex that nobody can know which path is correct, even if they have more information?

• In these situations, pretending to know everything can actually make leadership worse.

• The authors therefore offer an alternative to the idea of the heroic, all-knowing leader.

The Forestry England Case

• Bloomfield et al. studied Forestry England, an organization dealing with a complex mission involving different priorities that could sometimes conflict.

• The organization created a Strategic Framework.

• The framework identified twelve areas that staff should work on and gave them a shared vision and mission. It also helped people understand how their own work fitted into the wider organization.

• The framework deliberately did not tell people exactly how to solve every conflict between these different priorities. It did not give a perfect ranking of the priorities or tell local teams exactly what to do whenever the goals came into conflict. This lack of detailed guidance was important.

• The organization was not simply failing to give instructions. Instead, the openness created room for people with local knowledge to decide what made sense in their particular situation. The “vacuum” therefore created space for leadership to become distributed.

The Three Parts of Unknowingness

Bloomfield et al. identify three connected parts:

1. Accepting

• The organization recognizes openly that there are things it does not know. Senior leaders do not have to pretend that they have all the answers. Not knowing becomes something that can be recognized and discussed rather than hidden.

2. Tolerating

• Accepting uncertainty does not mean that uncertainty feels comfortable. Leaders may still feel exposed, anxious, or uncomfortable when they do not know what the correct answer is. They have to learn to live with the discomfort of not knowing instead of immediately trying to remove it.

3. Distributing

• Unknowingness can then be distributed through the organization. Instead of senior leaders trying to make every decision themselves, people who are closer to the situation can use their own knowledge and experience to make decisions. Importantly, hierarchy does not disappear. Senior leaders still have authority and responsibility, but they recognize that useful knowledge may exist elsewhere in the organization.

• Bloomfield et al. therefore show how unknowingness and distributed leadership support each other. Not knowing can create space for leadership to move toward people who have useful local knowledge, while distributed leadership helps organizations deal with the uncertainty that comes with complex situations.

1) Why do some scholars suggest that a radically different perspective on leadership is required?

Some scholars argue that traditional ideas about leadership do not work well enough for today's organisations. Traditional leadership often sees the leader as someone at the top who makes decisions, gives instructions and controls employees. This worked better in the Industrial Age, when organisations were more stable and focused on efficiency and producing goods. However, modern organisations depend much more on knowledge, creativity, innovation and adapting to change. They are also more connected and unpredictable. Because knowledge is spread across many people, one leader cannot know everything or control everything. A different view of leadership is therefore needed, where leadership can also emerge through the interactions between people.

2) How does the concept of complex adaptive systems (CAD) help to view leadership differently?

It sees an organisation as a group of many connected people who constantly interact and respond to changes around them. Instead of seeing the organisation as something that can be fully controlled from the top, CAS shows that new ideas and behaviours can develop through people's interactions.

This changes how we think about leadership because leadership does not have to come only from a person with a formal leadership position. Someone can influence others and create change through their ideas and actions, even if they are not a manager. Leadership can therefore emerge from the system itself, rather than always being planned by someone at the top.

3) According to complexity science, why should organizations increase their own complexity? What is the difference between a complicated and a complex system?

Complexity science suggests that organisations need enough complexity to deal with a complex and changing environment. If an organisation is too simple and controlled, it may struggle to respond when new problems appear. Having more connections, different ideas and ways of working can help the organisation learn, adapt and find new solutions.

A complicated system can have many parts, but the parts usually work in a predictable way. For example, an airplane is very complicated because it has thousands of parts, but if you understand the parts and how they fit together, you can understand how the whole system works.

A complex system is different because the parts interact and can change each other. The result cannot always be predicted by looking at the individual parts. An organisation is complex because people interact, learn, change their behaviour and respond to each other. This means that the whole organisation can develop in ways that were not planned by anyone.

4) Complex Leadership Theory (CLT) distinguishes between administrative, enabling and adaptive leadership. Briefly describe these different leadership functions. How do they interact/ relate to one another?

Administrative leadership is the most traditional type. It focuses on formal roles, rules, plans, goals and control. It gives the organisation structure and helps make sure that everyday work gets done.

Adaptive leadership is about change, learning, creativity and new ideas. It can come from anywhere in the organisation, not just from managers. It develops when people interact, share knowledge and find new ways of dealing with problems.

Enabling leadership connects administrative and adaptive leadership. It creates the conditions that allow new ideas and change to develop, while still keeping the organisation connected to its goals and structure. For example, an enabling leader might give employees space to experiment and share ideas instead of controlling every step.

The three types therefore work together rather than replacing each other. Administrative leadership provides stability, adaptive leadership creates change, and enabling leadership helps the two work together. The authors argue that organisations need both structure and flexibility: too much control can stop new ideas, but too little structure can create confusion.

1) Bloomfield et al. define unknowingness as "a state of awareness of both an absence of knowing and one's inability to know." How does this differ from ignorance, from ignoring, and from doubt?

Unknowingness means knowing that you do not know something and knowing that you cannot know it. This is different from ignorance, where you simply do not have the information yet but could find it. For example, if you do not know something but can easily look it up, that is ignorance.

It is also different from ignoring. Ignoring means that information may be available, but you choose not to pay attention to it. With unknowingness, the problem is that the information or answer cannot really be known.

Doubt means that you are unsure about something, but there may still be a correct answer that you can find. With unknowingness, you understand that there may not be one clear right answer. At Forestry England, managers had to make decisions about the future, but they could not know exactly what would happen or which choice would be best. So unknowingness is basically: “I don't know, and I know I cannot know.”

2) Discomfort in this case is concentrated among senior managers, not evenly spread. Why there, and what does that tell us about the relationship between accountability and not- knowing?

Senior managers feel the most discomfort because they are responsible for the organisation, but they cannot know everything that is happening. They are expected to make decisions, give direction and explain those decisions to others. At the same time, they cannot predict all the future results of their decisions.

This creates a problem: they are responsible for things they cannot fully know or control. Employees working closer to the forests often have more detailed knowledge about what is happening in their specific situation, while senior managers have to think about the organisation as a whole.

This means senior managers have to accept that they cannot have all the answers. They remain responsible for the organisation, but they need to trust other employees and give them space to make decisions. This is where unknowingness connects to distributed leadership.

3) What made "I don't know what's going on" a sayable sentence at Forestry England rather than an admission of failure? Could those conditions be created deliberately?

At Forestry England, not knowing was seen as a normal part of the work, because the organisation dealt with very complex problems and long-term decisions. Nobody could know exactly what would happen in the future or which decision would always be best.

Senior managers also gave general direction instead of detailed instructions for every situation. This allowed employees to use their own knowledge and judgement. Because of this, saying “I don't know what's going on” did not automatically mean that someone was bad at their job. It could simply mean that the situation was genuinely uncertain.

Some of these conditions can be created deliberately. Organisations can build trust, openness and a safe environment where people can admit that they do not know something. They can also give employees more freedom to make decisions. However, this only works if people really feel safe doing so. If admitting uncertainty is punished, people will simply hide it.

4) If unknowingness is a property of the system rather than of persons, what exactly should leadership development develop?

Leadership development should not just teach individual leaders to know more or always have the right answer. Some things simply cannot be known, no matter how experienced a leader is.

Instead, leaders should learn how to deal with uncertainty, accept the limits of their own knowledge and listen to other people. They should also learn how to share responsibility and give employees space to use their own knowledge and make decisions.

So, leadership development should help the whole organisation become better at working with uncertainty. The goal is not to remove uncertainty, but to help people work together and make decisions even when nobody has all the answers. This also supports distributed leadership because leadership can be shared across different people rather than staying only with senior managers.