Collaborative Leadership in an Organizational Context: A Research Agenda

Abstract

Organizations not only exist to make a profit and be financially sustainable but also to make a difference and have a meaningful legacy using specific business models adopted. To achieve that outcome organizations must establish effective authority relationships to work together efficiently. This is what entails collaborative relationships and leadership. The literature on collaborative leadership despite having significant developments over the last two decades has been faulted. There have been vast perspectives from scholars with minimal consensus on what constitutes acceptable dimensions of collaborative leadership and how that fits in an organizational context. These misalignments have resulted in challenges to the full realization of the benefits of collaborative leadership as a result of its skewed implementation and application in an organizational context. The result is a lack of appreciation and belief by business practitioners and organization leaders on the implications of collaborative leadership application on their organization’s financial sustainability. This effect goes deeper in that organization leaders are not very clear on the impact of their organization's business model and their role in facilitating successful collaborative leadership. This conceptual paper aimed to bridge that gap by reviewing and integrating extant conceptual, theoretical, and empirical literature on collaborative leadership and present a case for the development of a new theoretical model suitable for the expansion of the current understanding of deployment of collaborative leadership in an organizational context. The paper reviewed 397 articles from various journals, which were searched through the google search engine. 132 articles were finally used in the development of this paper sieved by the year of publication from 2001-2021. The findings lead to the development of a proposed and integrated conceptual framework model linking collaborative leadership to financial sustainability as an organizational outcome while acknowledging the significance of the role played by the organization’s business model and top echelon support in the relationship. Several propositions are presented for consideration and validation through empirical work. The study calls on future research to consider the adoption of the proposed model in extending research on leadership to new frontiers. Keywords: Collaborative Leadership, Organizational Commitment, Business Model, Financial Sustainability, Authentic Relationships, Collaborative Context, Leader’s Behavior