Abstract
In to-day's dynamic business world, a trend is towards more flexible organisations with enhanced autonomy and self-leadership of employees and teams. This study introduces the concepts of self-leadership and empowering leadership in the Western Balkans. The study measures employed professionals' views of self-leadership and experienced empowering leadership. Special attention is given to possible differences in views by gender and by professionals with / without a leadership role. Two instruments are applied, the Revised Self-Leadership Questionnaire and the Empowering Leadership Survey (n=265). Subsequently interviews were conducted with 10 company directors to generate their viewpoints and experiences of self-leadership and empowering leadership. Results show correlations between self-leadership and empowering leadership and show differences between men's and women's reports. The study also notes that better understanding the potential of empowering leadership leading to more self-leadership demands another type of research. A discussion of the study and suggestions for future research conclude the article.Keywords: self-leadership, empowering leadership, self-management, Western Balkans, AlbaniaJEL Classifications: M12, M19, M54DOI: https://doi.org/10.32479/irmm.10893
Highlights
Globalisation, ICT developments, changing political forces and other factors, have led to a new context for organisations
This study investigates perceptions on self-leadership and empowering leadership in the Western Balkan region though an indepth study in Albania among higher educated professionals who are expected to enjoy a degree of autonomy in their job
Modern and traditional organizations co-exist (Nientied and Shutina, 2017) in the Western Balkans and professionals who have a higher degree of self-leadership and want to have adequate autonomy are likely to aim at jobs in modern organisations, and other professionals may go for other reasons to more conventional organisations
Summary
Globalisation, ICT developments, changing political forces and other factors, have led to a new context for organisations This ever-changing business environment has been referred to as a VUCA world; volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous (Lawrence, 2013). Leadership for modern organisations in a VUCA environment is different from conventional transactional leadership; amongst many others, Furr and Dyer (2015) suggest that leadership needs to be more entrepreneurial. One of their roles is enabling adaptive processes, by creating space for ideas advanced by entrepreneurial leaders to engage in tension with the operational system and generate innovations that scale into the system to meet the adaptive needs of the organization and its environment (Uhl-Bien and Arena, 2018). Relevant is the COVID-19 aftermath, that is expected to
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