Collectivistic Leadership Research Articles

The Role of Focal Leaders in Collective Leadership Behavior: A Historiometric Analysis of Socialized and Personalized Leaders

The increasing adoption of collectivistic leadership approaches in organizations has sparked a growing interest in understanding factors influencing their emergence and effectiveness. In their collective leadership framework, Friedrich and colleagues (2009) underscore the pivotal role of focal leaders in sharing aspects of the leadership role and facilitating conditions for the emergence of informal leadership. Despite the imperative of power sharing in this process, no study to date has explored the relationship between power orientation and collective leadership behaviors. To address this gap, we conducted a historiometric leader analysis to compare collective leadership behavior between focal leaders with socialized and personalized orientations. Furthermore, there is a pressing need for additional empirical work investigating the relationships between collective leadership behaviors and outcomes, especially among leaders with different power orientations. Consequently, we conducted a series of correlations for each leader type to gain insight into these relationships. Our results indicate that personalized leaders exhibit less engagement in collective leadership behaviors compared to socialized leaders, and these behaviors successfully discriminate between the two power orientations. Additionally, we observed that personalized leaders who demonstrated greater engagement in collective leadership behaviors achieved more positive and fewer negative outcomes. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Liderando juntos y revueltos: A collectivistic leadership approach to address Latinx immigrant health and psychological needs.

Psychologists are positioned to help address societal and public health crises in beneficial ways, including collectively working with public sectors to serve marginalized communities. This article highlights the relevance of helping to address societal and public health crises with collectivistic psychological leadership approaches and uses Latinx psychology leaders for addressing the current immigrant needs among Latinx communities. We draw attention to the domains needed for collectivistic psychological leadership that are culturally nuanced and equity, diversity, and inclusion-focused to advance the well-being of historically marginalized immigrant communities. Finally, the article highlights how our collectivistic approach operates in the public sector by describing the creation of the Latinx Immigrant Health Alliance (LIHA) and targeted outcomes. Briefly, the LIHA informally started in 2017 and was founded in 2020 to fill a gap in Latinx immigrant health at the heart of systemic inequalities during the global pandemic, explicit anti-immigrant rhetoric, and anti-Latinx policies. The LIHA aims to collectively work with community organizations to promote Latinx immigration health research, policy, education, training, and effective interventions. We include future directions and opportunities for collectivistic psychological leadership to address today's complex social issues. In particular, we call for the translation of psychological methods and other skills (e.g., research, clinical skills, policy, quantitative and qualitative methodology) into public action for better wellness of our communities, as well as the advancement of social justice, health equity, and inclusion for historically marginalized communities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Informal Leadership: An Integrative View and Future Research

This article presents an integrative view of informal leadership (IL), leadership action and influence without a designated power position, through a systematic literature review. IL contributes to the new ways of organizing work, and it has received increasing interdisciplinary research attention in the last two decades along with the rise of a multi-level approach to leadership research. The integrative view displays IL being entwined around knowledge, change-orientation, action, communication, group, and influence. Findings suggest that IL is beneficial, for example, to group efficacy, productivity, and social relations. Cross-cutting meta-themes are proposed, i.e. shared meaning, volunteering, granted by others, and organizational (in)visibility. Issues related to formal leadership and power seem to have a significant and understudied impact on informal leadership. Considering the interplay between formal, informal, and collectivistic leadership, the power shift is an elemental feature to be explored. Several suggestions for future research are made, for example on the processuality, temporality, and impact of IL. Informal leadership is demonstrated to be a key element in resolving the knots of leadership in the transformation of work. Informal leadership and collectivistic forms of leadership can contribute significantly to seeking solutions in renewing leadership in organizations and guiding them towards responsibility.

A Text Mining-Based Review of Literature on Collective Forms of Leadership

Collectivistic leadership approaches have become important to derive a new leadership approach by involving multiple individuals in the leadership process. This paper uses an advanced text mining technique to conduct a comprehensive analysis of 1,353 articles published in various academic disciplines on the diverse subject of collectivistic approaches to leadership. In Study 1, we analyzed seven most frequently used labels of collectivistic leadership (i.e., team leadership, shared leadership, distributed leadership, collaborative leadership, collective leadership, complexity leadership, relational leadership) by extracting frequently occurring terms and their correlation through text mining. The results show that the different leadership labels in the extant literature share similar keywords. In Study 2, we identified latent topics on the collectivistic leadership literature by conducting correlated topic modeling. As a result, we found the most prominent topics discussed on the subject, such as “Network and relations”, “Education and school”, “Team and performance”, “Non-quantitative design and setting”, “Collaboration in healthcare”, “Innovation and complexity” and “Organizational learning”.

A systematic review exploring the impact of focal leader behaviours on health care team performance.

The aim of this study is to understand how the behaviour of focal leaders impacts health care team performance and effectiveness. Despite recent shifts towards more collectivistic leadership approaches, hierarchical structures that emphasize the role of an individual focal leader (i.e., the formal appointed leader) are still the norm in health care. Our understanding of the effect of focal leader behaviours on health care team performance remains unclear. A systematic review was conducted. Five electronic databases were searched using key terms. One thousand forty-seven records were retrieved. Data extraction, quality appraisal and narrative synthesis were conducted in line with Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. Fifty papers met the criteria for inclusion, were reviewed and synthesized under the following categories: task-focused leadership, directive leadership, empowering leadership and relational focused leadership. Categories are discussed in relation to team performance outcomes, safety specific outcomes, individual-level outcomes and outcomes related to interpersonal dynamics. Emerging themes are explored to examine and reflect on how leadership is enacted in health care, to catalogue best practices and to cascade these leadership practices broadly. Empowering and relational leadership styles were associated with positive outcomes for nursing team performance. This underscores the importance of training and encouraging nursing leaders to engage in more collaborative leadership behaviours.

Collectivistic Leadership in Context: An Examination of How and When Collective Charismatic Leadership Relates to Unit Functioning

This research explores the nature of collective leadership by examining the boundary conditions of how and when it relates to unit functioning. Building from a contingency perspective that considers the impact of contextual factors, we propose that collective charismatic leadership will be associated with lowered unit conflict, and this relationship will be strengthened by the contingency elements of individual charismatic leadership, task complexity, and social inclusion. Furthermore, we propose that the interactions of collective charismatic leadership with these contextual factors will relate to performance and satisfaction through conflict. We examine our hypotheses across two unit-level field studies, and the results illustrated that high levels of these contextual factors enhanced the negative relationship between collective charismatic leadership and conflict, which generally mediated the relationships between these interactive effects and performance and satisfaction. The results also highlight the detrimental aspects of collective leadership and how it can relate to reduced unit functioning when it is not aligned with an appropriate context. Overall, these findings begin to provide a more complete picture of collective leadership from a contingency perspective through a greater understanding of when and how it is related to unit functioning.

Interventions to develop collectivistic leadership in healthcare settings: a systematic review

BackgroundCollective or shared leadership approaches have been associated with team performance outcomes in several sectors. Based on this evidence, there have been calls for more inclusive approaches to leadership in healthcare settings, but guidance on how to achieve collective leadership is lacking. This study synthesised knowledge of interventions to introduce collectivistic leadership in healthcare settings.MethodsThe databases of PubMed, PsychInfo, ABI Inform, Cochrane and CINAHL and three grey literature databases were searched. Studies from any country were included if they reported on the development and evaluation and/or implementation of training/interventions to develop collectivistic leadership and reported individual and/or team-level outcomes. Results were synthesised using a narrative approach.ResultsThe searches yielded 4448 records of which 21 met the eligibility criteria and were reviewed. Studies used a variety of interventions; eleven employed a team training approach, four described co-leadership, three explored service improvement, two detailed co-design approaches and one described an individual team development intervention. Most demonstrated moderate to good success in enabling collectivistic leadership, with benefits reported in staff engagement, satisfaction, and team performance.ConclusionsWhilst collectivistic leadership interventions have demonstrated positive outcomes, there is a need for more rigor and consistency in the evaluation of interventions aimed at developing collectivistic leadership approaches in health settings.

We can do it! Inclusive leader language promotes voice behavior in multi-professional teams

Although it is known that leaders can have a strong impact on whether employees voice work-related ideas or concerns, no research has investigated the impact of leader language on voice—particularly in professionally diverse contexts. Based on a social identity approach as well as on collectivistic leadership theories, we distinguish between implicit (i.e., First-Person Plural pronouns) and explicit (i.e., invitations and appreciations) inclusive leader language and test its effects on voice in multi-professional teams. We hypothesized that implicit inclusive leader language promotes voice especially among team members sharing the same professional group membership as the leader (in-group team members) while explicit inclusive leader language promotes voice especially among team members belonging to a different professional group (out-group team members). These hypotheses were tested in a field setting in which 126 health care professionals (i.e., nurses, resident and attending physicians), organized in 26 teams, managed medical emergencies. Behavioral coding and leader language analyses supported our hypotheses: Leaders' “WE”-references were more strongly related to residents' (in-group) and explicit invitations related more strongly to nurses' (out-group) voice behavior. We discuss how inclusive leader language promotes employee voice and explain why group membership functions as an important moderator in professionally diverse teams.

Collective decision making, leadership, and collective intelligence: Tests with agent-based simulations and a Field study

This multi-level (individual and collective) study examines collective decision making as it relates to the performance metric of collective decision quality. A collectivistic leadership approach is used, as leaderless collectives engaged in decision making are inherently involved in collective leadership. A multi-level conceptual model for collective decision making is introduced, which incorporates leadership and collective intelligence. Using agent-based simulations and content-coded field study data, results from both methods suggest that there is a positive relationship between individual and collective intelligence, as well as a positive relationship between collective intelligence and collective decision quality. The implications of these and related findings for future collective level research bridging the fields of decision making, leadership, and collective intelligence are discussed.

Vertical flow of collectivistic leadership: An examination of the cascade of visionary leadership across levels

This study explores the connection between formal leaders and collective leadership in teams through the examination of how collective strategic vision flows downward in organizations and the function that formal leaders play in the resulting cascade of collective leadership. Building from a sensemaking framework, we propose that a supervisor's perceptions of the collective navigator role (the establishing and enacting of strategic vision among members of a team) in their immediate supervisor-level work group ultimately links to the collective leadership navigator role in the lower-level team he or she leads thereby illustrating the vertical flow of collective leadership across organizational levels. To understand how this cascading process operates, we propose that two key characteristics of supervisors, their job satisfaction and empowering leadership behaviors, mediate the linkage between collective strategic visions at these different levels. We find support for this connection in our study of teams within a large manufacturing company.

Collectivistic leadership and George C. Marshall: A historiometric analysis of career events

Many of the prevailing approaches to understanding leadership assume that leadership operates as an individual-level phenomenon, in which one person takes on the role of a leader. However, a number of recently developed leadership models now describe leadership as a shared process. These collectivistic theories present leadership as a dynamic process in which a leader may selectively utilize the skills of followers and distribute elements of the leadership role among these followers as the situation demands. In this study, we conduct an investigation into the viability of core elements of the collectivistic theories through a historiometric analysis of events from the career of a notable leader, George C. Marshall. One hundred and two events from Marshall's career were identified from historical biographies and were then content coded and analyzed with regard to the components of a collectivistic leadership model. The results of this historiometric analysis indicated that there are key antecedents to collectivistic leadership and that the use of this form of leadership can result in positive team outcomes.

Putting the “We” in Leadership: Continuing the Dialogue to Advance Our Science and Practice

This article addresses the insightful and diverse commentaries received regarding our focal article examining collectivistic leadership approaches from both a scientific and practical perspective. In our response, we attend to four emergent themes: the interdisciplinary and historic nature of collectivistic approaches to leadership, the need for studying the nature of collectivistic leadership as a unique phenomenon, the benefits and vulnerabilities associated with this leadership perspective, and the importance of understanding from a holistic perspective what influences collectivistic leadership and how to develop it. For each theme, we integrate feedback from the commentaries and provide our perspective in terms of how to continue the dialogue on collectivistic leadership for scientific and practical advancement.

Collectivistic Leadership Approaches: Putting the “We” in Leadership Science and Practice

We introduce the notion of “we” or collectivistic leadership. A general collectivistic approach to leadership is developed and contrasted with traditional and contemporary approaches to leadership. An overview of five collectivistic leadership approaches—team, network, shared, complexity, and collective leadership—is then presented. Key notions, constructs, and levels of analysis; the role of a focal leader; operationalizations and empirical results; and implications for leadership development, assessment, and practice of each approach are summarized. Common themes across, and our perspective on, the approaches and future directions for collectivistic leadership science and practice are discussed.

Collectivistic Leadership and Follower Resistance

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Collectivistic Leadership Requires a Collective Identity

Collectivistic Leadership Requires a Collective Identity

Networks: The Way Forward for Collectivistic Leadership Research

We applaud the move toward ‘‘we’’ approaches to leadership and agree that progress in this new area of inquiry may require new tools and techniques. Faster progress can come from taking a network analytic approach to collectivistic leadership research—but not necessarily the network approach described in the focal article. Yammarino, Salas, Serban, Shirreffs, and Shuffler (2012) offered too narrow a view into how ‘‘we’’ leadership research can draw from the social network field. The focal article presents one approach to leadership research that incorporates the network of social relationships a leader is embedded within: network leadership theory (Balkundi & Harrison, 2006; Balkundi & Kilduff, 2006). Although network leadership theory offers many valuable insights into the study of leadership, it is not collectivistic. Network leadership theory focuses on examining how a leader impacts and is impacted by the network he or she is embedded within. In other words, network leadership theory still focuses on single leaders, evaluating leaders in networks. In fact, leadership in a network is an evolutionary idea remnant held over from past views of leadership as formal and positional. To fully make the leap to ‘‘we’’ approaches and reap the benefits for theory and practice from doing so, we need to move from

Getting to “We”: Collective Leadership Development

We agree with Yammarino, Salas, Serban, Shirreffs, and Shuffler (2012) that embracing collectivistic leadership approaches requires broadening leadership development beyond an exclusive focus on individuals. Over the last decade the leadership development community at the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL)—of which we are members—has shifted its view of leadership. We now approach leadership as an accomplishment of collectives rather than as the actions of individuals identified as