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Department of Management: Faculty Publications

Self-organization

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Full-Text Articles in Business

Dynamic Creation: Extending The Radical Austrian Approach To Entrepreneurship, Todd H. Chiles, Chris S. Tuggle, Jeffery S. Mcmullen, Leonard Bierman, Daniel W. Greening Jan 2010

Dynamic Creation: Extending The Radical Austrian Approach To Entrepreneurship, Todd H. Chiles, Chris S. Tuggle, Jeffery S. Mcmullen, Leonard Bierman, Daniel W. Greening

Department of Management: Faculty Publications

We develop a new perspective on entrepreneurship as a dynamic, complex, subjective process of creative organizing. Our approach, which we call ‘dynamic creation’, synthesizes core ideas from Austrian ‘radical subjectivism’ with complementary ideas from psychology (empathy), strategy and organization theory (modularity), and complexity theory (self-organization). We articulate conjectures at multiple levels about how such dynamic creative processes as empathizing, modularizing, and self-organizing help organize subjectively imagined novel ideas in entrepreneurs’ minds, heterogeneous resources in their firms, and disequilibrium markets in their environments. In our most provocative claim, we argue that entrepreneurs, by imagining divergent futures and (re)combining heterogeneous resources to …


The Leadership Of Emergence: A Complex Systems Leadership Theory Of Emergence At Successive Organizational Levels, Benyamin B. Lichtenstein, Donde Ashmos Plowman Aug 2009

The Leadership Of Emergence: A Complex Systems Leadership Theory Of Emergence At Successive Organizational Levels, Benyamin B. Lichtenstein, Donde Ashmos Plowman

Department of Management: Faculty Publications

Complexity science reframes leadership by focusing on the dynamic interactions between all individuals, explaining how those interactions can, under certain conditions, produce emergent outcomes. We develop a Leadership of Emergence using this approach, through an analysis of three empirical studies which document emergence in distinct contexts. Each of these studies identifies the same four “conditions” for emergence: the presence of a Dis-equilibrium state, Amplifying actions, Recombination/“Self-organization”, and Stabilizing feedback. From these studies we also show how these conditions can be generated through nine specific behaviors which leaders can enact, including: Disrupt existing patterns through embracing uncertainty and creating controversy, Encourage …


The Role Of Leadership In Emergent, Self-Organization, Donde Ashmos Plowman, Stephanie Solansky, Tammy E. Beck, Lakami Baker, Mukta Kulkarni, Deandra Villarreal Travis Aug 2007

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 …