Business Commons^™

The Role Of Leadership In Emergent, Self-Organization, Donde Ashmos Plowman, Stephanie Solansky, Tammy E. Beck, Lakami Baker, Mukta Kulkarni, Deandra Villarreal Travis

Department of Management: Faculty Publications

As complex systems, organizations exist far from equilibrium where the ongoing interaction of system components leads to emergent and self-organizing behavior. What, then, is the role of leadership in systems where change often emerges in unexpected ways? In this paper, we build on the work of Marion and Uhl-Bien who suggest that in complex systems leaders enable rather than control the future. While traditional views of leadership focus on the leader’s responsibility for determining and directing the future through heavy reliance on control mechanisms, we offer empirical support for a different view of leadership based on a complexity perspective of …