Sending the Right Signals: A Theoretical Model to Understand How Interpretative Leadership Capacity Advances Cross-Sector Collaboration

Abstract

Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) are increasingly asked to facilitate cross-sector collaboration between state, private industry, and nonprofit actors and organizations. Growing evidence indicates certain contexts and conditions support cross-sector col-laboration more than others. However, there is still limited understanding of how, spe-cifically, process and practice produce leadership activity necessary to advance cross-sector collaboration. The purpose of this study is to examine illustrations of how the leadership practice of interpretative signaling emerges in facilitated committees work-ing to enable cross-sector collaboration. Relying on a Leadership-as-Practice (LAP) frame, this video ethnography of Collaborative Leadership Learning Group (CLLG) sessions establishes a theoretical model helpful to capturing how everyday dialogic, re-lational, and socio-material interactions emerge leadership between committee mem-bers attempting to enable cross-sector collaboration. Leadership practice was primarily connected to informal authority that was dispersed through networks of people and community systems. Four forms of interpretative signaling are illustrated as a general practice in the theoretical model.