These close task and relationship-oriented interactions (Gronn, 1999) provide the leader and his followers their cognitive structure for personal identity with the group and the temporal stability for social satisfaction to arise from the relationships and task activities at the workplace (Brown & Hosking, 1986). These make being in groups meaningful for them, which in turn keeps the groups intact; much like in a marriage (Gronn, 1999).
Conventional Wisdom of Leadership and Organisation
We identify the leader from his followers by observing the frequency a group member engages the acts of leadership (Gibb, 1968). These acts could be discerned from the process in which the individual exercises influence over others and steers them towards the direction of the goals faced by the group (Bryman, 1996).
The study of the leader could be traced back to the 1940's when researchers believe that leaders are borne and the variations in personal traits between individuals could explain why an effective leader is different from those who are not. However, the inconsistent conclusions arising from these studies have been problematic in empirically placing this notion as a possibility for leadership (Gibb, 1968).
The efforts to define the leader continue into the 60's. The focus of these later studies is on the behaviours and styles of the leader. By describing and naming the various leadership styles, organisations are able to select and hire their leaders base on how best their behaviours and styles fit the socio-technological circumstances of the hiring organisations. These definitions also introduce the notion that people, who may not display the traits of leaders, could be trained and developed to a way where their behaviours and styles could be modified to 'pass-off' as leaders.
However, there has been one nagging problem in this new formulation of leadership. Leadership styles are unable to explain why on some occasions the acts of leadership do not usually produce positive organisational performance and outcomes. Contingency studies in the 80's are introduced in an attempt to address the situational variables that may interfere with leadership. Researchers argue that leaders, who gain access to positional power, and are capable of ‘instrumenting’ task-structures and maintaining positive leader-member relationships, are said to be in ‘situation control’ and more able to function as effective leaders.
After the 80's, leaders are seen as ‘manager’ of meanings (Bryman, 1996), and vision is pivotal in the process of leadership. This notion views leaders as trying to make sense for others, developing social consensus around the resulting meaning and purpose, identifying what is important, and organising and directing their followers from vision to reality.
Distributed Leadership as a Substitute for Conventional Leadership
For much of the past six decades, leadership has been examined from many different facets, but there is a long standing tradition linking most of these studies, that is, the leader is a solo, stand alone, individualistic heroic person, who holds positional power at the highest echelon of the organisation, and capable of engaging his subordinates through task or relationship based interactions (Gibb, 1968; Krantz, 1989; Stewart 1991; Doyle & Myers, 1999; Gronn, 1999; Spillane, Halverson & Diamond, 2000).
Some researchers criticise these leadership studies for analysing the strength of the connections between the superior and his subordinates and not the forms of connection members in the group enjoy, exploring the mind of an entity and not the mind as an activity, and conceptualising the group mind and not the collective mind which arises from the patterns of interrelated activities of many people (Weick & Roberts, 1993).
Also, by focusing these studies on individual or focused leadership (Gibb, 1968), the academia has ignored the possibility of other key sources of social and organisational power (Denis, Langley & Lemothe, 2001), other forms of leadership, and the possibilities of substitutes to task and relationship based leadership, such as substitutes that are defined by the characteristics inherited in the task, or based on personal attributes of the subordinates, or driven by the processes used in the organisation, (Gronn 1999, 2002). The newer studies of 'superleadership', ‘real team’, 'liberating individuals to leading themselves' and 'leadership as a practice' (Bryman, 1996) signal the growing inclination to respond to these criticisms.
Gronn (1999) suggests that substitutes could cause task and relationship oriented leadership impossible to make a difference, thereby rendering leadership unnecessary in the organisation. However, substitutes could also augment the relationship between leadership and organisational outcomes or contribute to the efforts of the subordinate's performance without cancelling out or augmenting the leader's direct effects on the outcomes.
One such substitute that enhances leadership is distributed leadership. The idea is not new as Gibb (1968) suspects that when we are witnessing the practice of focused leadership in groups, there is a possibility that we may also be observing distributed leadership in action.
Occurrences and Benefits of Distributed Leadership
The literature informs that when leadership is collective and there is ambiguity in the distribution of authority amongst members in the group (Denis, Langley, & Cazale, 1996), distributed leadership is the preferred form of task organisation and labour division at the workplace. According to Elmore (2000), in a knowledge intensive enterprise, where knowledge and skills are in the hands of those delivering the outcomes and not with those who manage them or when the knowledge and skills possessed by these individuals are not equal to the problem they try to solve, distributed leadership is helpful in these occasions. Weick & Roberts (1993) suggest that when an enterprise needs to response to the complexity of its environment and these responses have to result in fewer errors, distributed leadership gives the enterprise its access to its smart systems to manage these challenges.
The literature also informs that while distributed leadership does not safe time since it is needed for discussions and co-ordinating collaborative responses from the conjoint leaders, the introduction of this form of leadership has it benefits. It improves decision making, provides models for co-operative endeavours for the staff, allows for sharing of responsibilities, and enables stand-ins of one during the absence of the other (Doyle & Myers, 1999).
Characteristics of Distributed Leadership
Distributed leadership is not collaborative leadership where leaders share responsibilities with a single leader holding ultimate power. The acts of leadership is shared and is more like what Doyle & Myers (1999) describe as co-principalship, where two leaders are in some kind of structural arrangement that is supported and legitimised by values, beliefs and ideas (Denis, Langley & Cazale, 1996). This allows for a degree of temporal stability (Brown & Hosking, 1986) for the emergence and evolvement of a constellation of leadership roles (Denis, Langley & Cazale, 1996) in the team of leaders.
This constellation involves the ‘division of emotional labour’ (Stuart, 1991) through a process of specialisation, differentiation and complementarity (Denis, Langley & Cazale, 1996). In specialisation, group members adopt roles that require relatively narrow areas of expertise and could be easily mastered by these individuals. To avoid overlaps in the activities members have to carry out, these roles are differentiated across all activity domains but they stay interlocked and well complemented so that the group behaves in an integrated and concerted way (Hodgson, 1965).
To appreciate the workings of the 'team' phenomenon of distributed leadership (Denis, Langley, & Cazale, 1996), we have to understand the actual mechanics of work practices in organisations. Division of labour describes a form of organisation where the total tasks of a job and technological capacity for completing them are divided among workers in the organisation (Gronn, 2002). The leader and his followers could be seen as a manifestation of a form of division of labour but its actual work practices are far from this clear cut and are much more dynamic and complex.
There are two dimensions in the division of labour. Changes in the division begin when additional new tasks and new task requirements are introduced into the organisation. These technical side activities kick-start a wave of change at the social side of the labour division as well. Based on their values and interests, individuals and their groups will negotiate (Brown & Hosking, 1986) and decide on their preferred task arrangements and configurations. With time, tasks get proliferated, get quantitatively changed, and some will become redundant, and the technical side starts the process of task specialisation to differentiate itself. The pace and form of these technical changes will be influenced by the psychologically and sociologically based decisions (Brown & Hosking, 1986) made by members in the group about the appropriate and desired ways of reorganising and reconfiguring the tasks that are found in the job, and a new social order comes into being in the organisation.
Besides additional new tasks and new task requirements, the adoption of new technology also causes change to both dimensions of the labour division (Hutchins, 1990). Technology has always been seen as an intelligent device that is involved in the performance of the task and as a capability and capacity multiplier for processing information. Rarely has it been seen as an enabler for co-operative work. When new technology is adopted, the group's ability to transform what is normally a difficult cognitive task is extended. What is used to be difficult has become easier (Hutchins, 1990). With this extension, the current organisation and configuration of work in the group become less efficient and reliable (Weick & Roberts, 1993) in delivering performance and outcomes. The social arrangements in the group will be forced to change to enable it to tap into the advantages offered in using the existing tools in a new way or new tools that provide better techniques to co-ordinate work activities and to process and distribute information gathered by the system for enhancing the collective mind of the group and in keeping the system robust enough to avoid individual component failures. Therefore, technology should not be noticed for its inner workings but as a device capable of rendering an important problem easy to solve (Hutchins, 1990). This need for task reorganisation and then reintegration of labour is the source for an emerging form of interdependency and co-ordination, which leads to the distributed patterns of leadership (Gronn, 2002).
This need for interdependency and co-ordination calls for the practice of collective actions amongst members in the group. In distributed leadership, there are three such forms of actions. These are the collaborative modes of engagement, intuitive understanding arising from close working relationships, and variety of structural relations and institutionalised arrangements which constitute attempts to regularise distributed action (Gronn, 2002).
These actions create conjoint agency relationships that are sustained by the understanding that one has to co-operate when he cannot do the task himself or one needs someone else to help him become more effective at work. In other words, the exercise of authority needs the reciprocity of accountability and availability of resource capacity to delivery the outcomes (Gronn 2002). The co-operation and learning will arise not from authority but from the differences in expertise (Elmore 2000). This notion runs dead against the conventional wisdom of what we typically think of as the labour division of leaders and followers since conjoint agents synchronise their actions with each other by having regard to their own plans, those of their peers, and their sense of their unit membership. This is similar to the proposition make by Weick & Roberts, (1993), who state that when each group member's conduct and behaviour is produced with the mindfulness of interpreting the feelings of others and predisposed for heedful actions, which are characterised by attentiveness, alertness and care, the group is said to be operating an aggregate mental process and the group has a collective mind. These are the signs of a smart system (Weick & Roberts, 1993).
This makes the conception of the leader as an individualistic person operating from the highest echelons of the organisation doubtful as an actual work practice. It also suggests that the dualistic view of leadership and followership, whose roles and functions are mutually exclusive though they are related by power, maybe an inaccurate depiction of leadership. Leadership should not be role based but recognised as distributed (Elmore, 2000).
In such a distribution, different individuals contribute on the bases of their diverse functions, roles, and duties (Elmore 2000) to manage relationships and mobilise support at the workplace (Denis, Langley & Lemothe, 2001). Their experience and learning grew not from differences in formal authority but out from differences in expertise (Elmore, 2000). Therefore, they focus their efforts on tactics and organisational actions instead of being fixated on those powers arising out of special personality, cognitive and demographics.
Comparing Distributed Leadership with Traditional Notion of Leadership
Unlike the traditional stand-alone leaders, distributed leaders work in collective teams and they are regularly challenged by a collection of elements that works in tandem to destroy their constellations and their effectiveness as leaders to create and sustain change in their organisations. The very ingredients that make distributed leadership possible in organisations are the same stuffs that cause its demise. According to Denis, Langley & Lemothe (2001), there are three instances where the distributed leadership team can fragment. There are occasions where competing 'internal organisational aspirations' can present unresolved disagreements and conflicts between members in the team and these challenges can upset the team's internal harmony. In other situations, a member performing key roles in the constellation is involved in a political turnover and the team becomes detached from its power bases and loses the support of its key organisational members for the change. Also, the team can face difficulties in obtaining consensus and agreement from its external stakeholders, who may hold views that are diverse from those held by leadership team. This forces the team to detach itself from its environment, and the resultant poor performance provides these external stakeholders their opportunities to impose political turnovers in the leadership team to dispose the leader and constraint the constellation.
When the leadership constellation is persistently endangered by differing organisational aspirations, competing preferences of the incumbent leaders, and politically driven environmental pressures, the nature of change in the organisation of collective leadership is more likely to be cyclical than constant. These opposing forces can become intensive enough to dismantle the constellation and change will not take place under such circumstances until the same forces reconcile sequentially to unify the collective leadership to provide it the conditions for working harmoniously again. When this happens, the members in the team are able to play out their distinctive roles effectively to afford the pluralistic organisation its major substantive change.
In a separate but earlier study, Denis, Langley & Cazale (1996) found that besides the positive relationship between the fragility of the constellation of leadership roles and the 'See-Saw theory of collective leadership', the lack of a certain structural levers essential only to collective leaders can also reinforce this 'start-stop' nature of change in organisations. Denis, Langley & Lemothe (2001) elaborate these levers as slack resources, internal social embeddings, and the opportunistic nature of the constellation members. When leaders have access to organisational capacity and resources that help them build credibility and respect internally in the organisation, or the leaders acquire tacit knowledge about how things are done through their involvement in the organisation's richly interconnected social networks, or the constellation members are able to identify environmental pressures that can be reframed as opportunities and find a plausible means to connect these opportunities to the variety of organisational aspirations and capability, the leadership team can increase the chance for change to gain sufficient momentum to survive in the organisation even when the constellation collapses and is finding its new equilibrium.
Denis, Langley & Cazale (1996) also inform that the change tactics executed by the collective leadership is the other 'motor that drives' the cyclical nature of change in the organisation. Because these tactics change the perception of the power bases of the leaders' credibility and respect, the 'mood' these power bases can affect the pace of the change in the organisation. There are times where the leaders' tactics endear their organisational bases to the leadership team and widen its scope for action in the organisation. However, there are occasions where the tactics are questionable and unpopular with the organisational masses and they alienate the team from their power bases and threaten the formal position of the members in the collective leadership. Similar to the solo executive and his latitude of managerial action (Hambrick & Finkelstein, 1987) but different in degree, this process of 'credibility enhancing' and 'credibility draining' effectively causes their 'roles to be constructed and reconstructed over time' which can enhance or undermine the leader's political position, threaten the leadership role constellation, and slow the momentum for change.
Brown & Hosking (1986) suggest that distributed leaders will need several key skills to build the social order described in the earlier part of this essay. Effective leaders are adept at building relationships collusively. They use such social interactions to exchange information to prevent the order from 'been conned' or 'getting into difficulty' or mislead by 'misinterpretation' of information. In doing so, they influence the thoughts and choices of others, and the process shapes the interactions and social structures in the organisation. These assist the leaders in facilitating the integration of capabilities of his dependents with the demands of the task.
Distributed leaders are capable of helping others who they are interdependent to deal with the demands and challenges of mining for and interpreting information. For these leaders, they understand the networks give them an access to the world where they can make sense and identify the opportunities and threats that may exist in the environment and explore them for the good of the organisation.
A further skill of distributed leaders is their abilities in handling dilemmas. They seem to be able to maintain a sufficient degree of stability in the social order to provide it the foundation for action and not letting its values overwhelm itself at the same time. They are aware that when the order operates in a self-serving mode, it is likely that opportunities and threats will be passed unrecognised and new resources are prevented from being created. The leaders fully comprehend that the social order has its own built in mechanisms for self-preservation and are able to protect itself and pursuit values and interests that seems to be at stake. However, they are sensitive to the potential disintegration of the entity when it becomes too ordered, too overly self-consuming and too rigid in its structures, which alienate its members (Brown & Hosking, 1986).
Implications of Distributed Leadership on Traditional Notions of Leadership
To see what could be the implications of distributed leadership on the traditional sense of leadership, we need to recall how the literature defines leaders. The leader is largely described as being a solo, stand alone, individualistic heroic person, who holds positional power at the highest echelon of the organisation, and capable of engaging his subordinates through task or relationship based interactions.
However, this does not seem to be an appropriate conception for leaders and leadership found in the field of distributed leadership. Neither does it describe the way how leadership practices are actually carried out at the workplace (Spillane, Halverson & Diamond, 2000). Here, distributed leaders are seen as builders of social orders in organisations, and the success of the order depends on the 'skilled performance' of not a single leader but a team of leaders which effectively links the demands of the tasks to the capabilities found in the organisation, and understands the opportunities and threats that confront its system of values and relationships. By recognising and acting accurately on key dilemmas associated with the achievement and maintenance of the values and interests of the order (Brown & Hosking, 1986), these leaders are able to protect and avoid the dissolution of the order and the demise of the organisation.
In addition, the idea of a single leader doing incredibly heroic deeds that create far-reaching change in the organisation may seem a bit far-fetched when we factor in the impact the coupling within the leadership team, between the team and its power bases, and the team with its external stakeholders (Denis, Langley & Lemothe, 2001) has on performance and organisational outcomes. These can derail his efforts. Their alignment with each other is equally important, much like planets aligning themselves to produce an astronomical phenomenon. In fact, according to Weick & Roberts (1993), when the system is in motion, it will have a mind of its own and no individual or group can undo it on their own. They will have to work with, for or against each other to change it. This observation introduces the view that no single leader is capable of heroically change the organisation. He has to depend on the constellation of leadership roles and the influences it exerts over its power bases to initiate and lead the change in the social order in order to kick-start and manage the change in the organisation (Hutchins, 1990).
However, this dependence on the members of the constellation for change invites the cyclical nature of change in the organisation. Members must trust each other to cope with the feeling of dependency and this can be the source for 'deep seated anxieties' (Krantz, 1989) amongst members. There are two outcomes in these, one is mutually stimulating, productive, creative, and evolving but the other can be mutually punishing, where members held out in rigid stalemates, manifesting into excessive conflicts, debilitating dependencies and numbing detachments. There are no guarantees that the collective leadership stays intact over a period of time and when it does not, the momentum for change is lost (Denis, Langley & Cazale, 1996) until the next alignment.
Moreover, the leader could not be seen operating alone when we begin examining the kind of expectations his power bases will have of him from the day he arrives at the job. There are two main responses from these bases when they lost a significant object and faced with an incoming replacement figure (Hodgson 1965). One response is the idealisation of the departed leader and focuses an inappropriate amount of hatred and aggression towards his successor while the other is the devaluation of the previous figure and focuses an excessive amount of love for, hope for the future and anticipation of positive change from the new leader. Both of these act as pressure points on the new-comer and drivers on the power bases to wanting to address their cognitive dissonance with their new leader by evaluated his trustworthiness and credibility constantly. This highlights how leaders are unable to unilaterally using task or relationship-based interactions and operate them from the highest level in the organisation.
All these call into question our current understanding of leaders and their roles in organisations, and their styles and skills sets, and leadership practices. There is a need to re-look at leadership selection, development, and succession in an environment where knowledge, skills, authority, power, and accountability are distributed.
A Gleam into the Leadership Theories and Practices of the Future
At this point, researchers are responding to the needs of the knowledge community by looking into several aspects of distributed leadership. These emerging studies may lead the way and provide us a gleam into how leadership theories and practices can evolve with time.
Researchers are starting to take distributed leadership as a unit of analysis (Gronn, 2002) and look directly at how leaders think and act to determine what constitutes leadership practices on a daily basis (Spillane, Halverson & Diamond, 2000). These studies have move away from examining leadership as a function to exploring how leaders interact with others in the process of leading in a collective manner. This is an attempt to peel out and look into the black box of what they do and the moves they make at the micro-level.
Other studies include the understanding the orientation and workings of pluralistic organisations (Denis, Langley & Lemothe, 2001). Researchers are beginning to comprehend the dynamics of dyads (Steward, 1991) and triads (Krantz, 1989), and uncovering how these forms of leadership create change in organisations, further adding to the growing body of knowledge on constellations of leadership roles (Gronn, 2002) and how they function to create and maintain social orders (Brown & Hosking, 1986) in organisations.
I think the study of distributed leadership will continue to yield surprises and new insights as more literature on the fragility of the collective leadership and the types of organisational levers that maybe effective in deferred the demise of the constellation become available. Another area we should keenly look out for is the exploration into the workings of the collective mind and the use of social networks to give organisations their access to their expert systems.
While I should not expect a unified theorem of distributed leadership any time soon, these fragments of knowledge will definitely work towards building a new science of a largely ignored but progressively important field of leadership study.
References
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This essay was first written on 2 Mar 2008.
Copyright 2008. Anthony Mok. All Rights Reserved.
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