Leadership narratives tend to be individual-centric, that is, exceptional team outcomes, whether negative or positive, are due to the actions of one person (Meindl, Ehrlich, & Dukerich, 1985; OâToole, Galbraith, & Lawler, 2003; Yukl, 1999; Zaccaro, Rittman, & Marks, 2001). Theories such as transformational, charismatic, servant, or authentic leadership theories largely incorporate this perspective into their research paradigms, although some disagree that it produces a necessary or desirable description of leadership (Burns, 1978; Kelley, 1992; Malakyan, 2015).
According to DeRue (2011), leadership and followership are reciprocal, interdependent actions (see also DeRue & Ashford, 2010; Marion & Uhl-Bien, 2001; Shamir, 2007; Uhl-Bien, Riggio, Lowe, & Carsten, 2014). The leader acts and the follower reacts; but it is the reaction that permits ascription of leadership. Furthermore, the followersâ reactions shape future leadership actions, a process known as a double interact. Over time, double interacts can define and support both individual and group-level identifications of leadership (and followership). Within this framework, four different leaderâfollower configurations emerge: centralized leadership, in which a single group member occupies the leader role most of the time; distributed leadership (DL), wherein different group members act as leaders over time but such roles change infrequently; shared leadership, which is similar to DL except there are frequent role changes; and a leadership void, which exists when members interact weakly, perhaps because tasks require pooled or sequential interdependence to complete (Thompson, 2003).
Any of the four leadership configurations could emerge but environmental, individual, ecological, and social factors are likely to play a role in determining the outcome (Collinson, 2006; DeRue, 2011; Hollander & Julian, 1969). For example, a group in which a single individual has a strong leadership identity may gravitate to centralized leadership, or a group requiring diverse skills may exhibit DL. The predominance of leadership hierarchies in organizationsâa form of leadership characterized by centralizationâsuggests that in humans there are powerful social, cultural, and/or biological influences on leadership structure emergence.
Forces that shape a leadership configuration may not produce an optimal outcome, however. Despite the prevalence of hierarchical, centralized leadership structures, Vanderslice (1988) contends that centralization creates passive, self-limiting followers who fail to maximize their efforts or potential. Moreover, many organizations operate suboptimally as a result. Carson, Tesluk, and Marrone (2007) contrasted distributed with centralized leadership and found that DL was superior in a study of MBA consulting teams. While consulting relies on collaborative, knowledge-based teams, a recent meta-analysis by DâInnocenzo, Mathieu, and Kukenberger (2016) also found a positive correlation between DL and team outcomes (distributed, in this case, did not distinguish between the shared or distributed categories of DeRue) moderated by task complexity. Since the meta-analysis was unable to include direct comparisons between distributed and other types of leadership, however, there is nothing that suggests distributed is more effective. Two other meta-analyses (Nicolaides et al., 2014; Wang, Waldman, & Zhang, 2014) did find that DL contributed additional variance over traditional, hierarchical leadership. Overall, though, determining which type of leadership is best and under what circumstances is unresolved.
Because research has typically assumed that leadership is centralized, it is also unknown which leadership configuration is most common.
This suggests three fundamental questions:
- Research Question 1. How common is shared/distributed leadership relative to either leaderless or centralized configurations?
- Research Question 2. What is the optimal leadership structure and under what conditions?
- Research Question 3. How is followership manifested in distributed leadership?
Defining Leadership
The purpose of this chapter is to test the first research question and shed some light on the second. A difficulty with both research questions is the lack of an agreed definition of leadership. In fact, many definitions have been proposed over the years, including leadership as a trait, an emergent property of a system, or a social construct. Yukl (2013), for example, offers the idea that leadership is âthe process of influencing others to understand and agree about what needs to be done and how to do it, and the process of facilitating individual and collective efforts to accomplish shared objectivesâ (p. 7). Definitions that rely on influence (Bass, 1985; Carson et al., 2007; Katz & Kahn, 1978; Yukl, 2013) assume that influence is unidirectional or, at the very least, has a dominant directionality. Others, however, disagree that influence is a useful description of leadership (e.g., Marion & Uhl-Bien, 2001) or that influence is measurable in most leadership theories (e.g., Yukl, 1999). In addition, if leadership is a process of claiming and granting (Chaleff, 2008; DeRue & Ashford, 2010) or a double interact, then influence flows in both directions (Follett, 1949; Oc & Bashshur, 2013; Shamir, 2007); as Hollander and Julian (1969) observed, âThe very sustenance of the relationship (between leaders and followers) depends upon some yielding to influence on both sidesâ (p. 390). There is no a priori reason to prefer claiming over granting, or leadership influence over followership influence, if the purpose of both is to move the group toward a collective goal.
For the purpose of this chapter, then, I adopt an alternative definition suggested by Hurwitz and Hurwitz (2015) that avoids the concept of influence: leadership is setting a framework that others adopt; followership is working within a framework created by another. This definition incorporates the idea of claiming and granting while being founded on measurable behaviors. For example, if someone models a behavior which a peer subsequently mimics, then the action was leadership, the person doing it a leader, the reaction followership, and the person doing it a follower (at least for that one moment). If no individual had reciprocated the initial action or engaged in a complementary action, then it would have been an unsuccessful leadership attempt. Standard leadership interventions, such as creating a vision and mission, setting goals, removing roadblocks, managing tasks, or encouraging teamwork, all comfortably fit within the category of building a framework for action and, inasmuch as others work within that framework, are acts of leadership.
Note that this definition is temporally limited. Leadership can shift as the person setting a framework or working within it changes. DL, then, describes situations where multiple individuals create frameworks within which their teammates work.
Why Animals?
It would be surprising if leadership in humans did not share characteristics with animals. Animals provide useful models of human social interactions in many other domains. Why, then, have there not been more direct experiments involving animals?
One reason is that leadership models preclude interpretation in animals. Transformational leadership, for example, posits four behaviors of effective leaders: idealized influence, inspirational motivation, individualized consideration, and intellectual stimulation. None of these categories of behavior is a meaningful description of leadership in dogs, or horses, or fish. The problem is that transformational leadership has a distinct human-only bias. A second reason is that tests of transformational leadership and other human-centric theories either ignore followership or use it as a dependent variable, i.e., leadership is agentic but not followership (see, however, Oc & Bashshur, 2013; Shamir, 2007). In the absence of research indicating that leadership is more valuable than followership, the most likely reason ...