Connective Leadership Research Articles

Output Performance of Collaborative Governance: Examining Collaborative Conditions for Achieving Output Performance of the Dutch Flood Protection Program

Despite abundant research on collaborative governance, relatively little attention has been paid to explaining its performance. When are collaborations performing and what conditions are required to achieve high performance? This study fills this gap by building on the performance matrix for assessing collaborative governance regimes by Emerson and Nabatchi. Drawing on survey data, we use a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to explore the performance of 26 collaborative flood risk governance projects in the Netherlands. We analyze how conditions of engagement, shared motivation, external expertise, connective leadership and resource availability shape the output performance of these collaboratives. The results reveal four “success” configurations. Success stems, in particular, from “connective leadership” and resources for collaboration working in tandem, or with one of these conditions combined with respectively “external expertise” and “shared motivation.” Failure, in contrast, stems from the absence of multiple conditions. Consequently, we draw lessons about the spectrum of different concrete recipes of collaboration fostering output performance.

Women’s Leadership and COVID-19 Pandemic: Navigating Crises through the Application of Connective Leadership

International and national crises often highlight behavioral patterns in the labor market that illustrate women’s courage and adaptability in challenging times. The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting changes in the workplace due to social distancing, remote work, and tele-communications protocols showcased women’s power of authenticity and accessibility (interpersonal and personalized experiences) to engage with their constituents effectively. The catalyzed this research was our desire to underscore the importance of studying the impact of COVID-19 on women leaders. The COVID-19 pandemic brought to light specific challenges and disparities women faced in the workplace. It has been asserted that women leaders substantially benefit businesses and organizations and we wanted to test this out through the practices of our research participants. Decades of research reveal that women leaders enhance productivity, foster collaboration, inspire dedication, and promote fairness in the workplace. This article introduces the feminist Connective Leadership Model (CL) an integrative leadership model and one informed by early feminist theory for understanding women’s leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic. A mixed-method study of select US women leaders before and during the COVID-19 pandemic revealed the CL model and its efficacy for adaptive, inclusive leadership in various contexts. First, this article highlights the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women’s leadership and behavioral response to the crisis through the lens of the CL model. Second, this article delves into challenges the women leaders faced, including adaptive challenges, isolation, team management, increased caregiving responsibilities, and gender-related disparities. Third, this article reframes women’s voices articulated through a crisis management leadership framework coupled with an understanding and application of the behaviors defined through complexity theory which are aligned with the CL model. Finally, the article discusses the four ‘As’ of crisis leadership: authenticity, alignment, awareness, and adaptability. The application of the CL model provides an effective framework for determining the most appropriate leadership behaviors within the complex challenges of a crisis; it enables the leader to focus on personal, employee, and organizational well-being.

Defending “Canadian Energy”: Connective Leadership and Extractive Populism on Canadian Facebook

ABSTRACT This paper provides a content and discourse analysis of the Facebook activity of pro-fossil fuel advocates in Canada, including industry-funded and independent groups. It explores how the fossil fuel industry and its allies have reacted to growing public demand for climate action by adopting a “subsidised public strategy,” in which elites provide stakeholders with resources to participate in an organized campaign. We argue that pro-oil advocacy groups utilize their Facebook pages to exercise “connective leadership,” in which key social media accounts strategically shape internet-enabled social movements by promoting mobilization opportunities, connecting supporters with diverse content, and reframing that content to communicate a coherent “extractive populist” storyline positioning “Canadian Energy” as a national public good under attack by foreigners and elites. We thereby provide insight into how industry and its allies leverage platform affordances to promote populist politics on Facebook to defend industry in the face of the climate crisis.

The Bridge Builder: Nadia Lopez

Often unrecognized for their accomplishments, women of color in educational leadership positions are change agents whose practices must be analyzed in order to transform education at all levels. Dr. Nadia Lopez is the founding principal of Mott Hall Bridges Academy (MHBA) Middle School in Brownsville, New York City—one of the poorest congressional districts in the United States. Due to Dr. Lopez’s leadership, MHBA has a 98% graduation rate and students gain admittance to some of the most academically competitive high schools in New York City. This article examines the leadership role and work of Dr. Lopez, and how she operationalized Lipman-Blumen’s Connective Leadership model to overcome poverty, low academic expectations, and racial stereotypes. As evidenced by the data, Dr. Lopez presents as a connective leader by monitoring and reacting to situational cues while determining the appropriate combinations of behaviors/achieving styles to address unique sets of circumstances.

Organizing an “organizationless” protest campaign in the WeChatsphere

The introduction of digital technologies in collective actions seems to have transformed the dynamics of movement organizing and enabled divergent forms of protest organizing. While some studies emphasize “organizationless” organizing in which traditional organizational forms—social movements organizations and formal-bureaucratic structures—have been pushed into the margins, other studies showcase how traditional forms have assumed alternative features, for example, connective leadership and organizations with fluid boundaries. While existing research correctly points out the evolving organizing dynamics and forms in digital activism, few studies have accounted for why digitally enabled protests take certain organizing forms over others among multiple modes of interaction between protesters and digital technologies. Using a case study of a protest campaign organized by Chinese American immigrants, this study illustrates why immigrant activists struggled to keep the campaign “organizationless” on WeChat, a China-based digital platform that afforded other forms of organizing over such an organizing mode. Building on the mechanism-based approach in social movement studies, the findings show that immigrant activists’ emotional–cognitive responses to the changing digital environments became the driving force behind the relational choices to maintain the protest “organizationless.” The study, therefore, may not only inform future studies to explore why certain structures of protest networks emerge and develop but also contribute to the mechanism-based approach by foregrounding emotional–cognitive mechanisms, which mediate environmental and relational mechanisms.

Revisiting leadership in information and communication technology (ICT)-enabled activism: A study of Egypt’s grassroots human rights groups

Scholars argue that contemporary movements in the age of social media are leaderless and self-organised. However, the concept of connective leadership has been put forward to highlight the need for movements to have figures who connect entities together. This study conducts a qualitative research of 30 interviews of human rights groups in the 2011 Egyptian revolution to address the question of how leadership is performed in information and communication technology–enabled activism. The article reconceptualises connective leadership as decentred, emergent and collectively performed, and provides a broader and richer account of leaders’ roles, characteristics and challenges.

Commitment in the cloud? Social media participation in the sunflower movement

ABSTRACTSocial media participants in digitally enabled protests have long been criticized for their lack of commitment. Many bypassed this issue and argued that social media’s positive impact on protests does not require high commitment. We empirically test the lack of commitment claim in the case of the 2014 Sunflower Movement in Taiwan. Using survey data from a sample of 801 participants, we find a group of highly active social media participants – what we described as the ‘cloud activists’ – who operated exclusively online during the movement. We find that the commitment of the ‘cloud activists’, in terms of both identification and sense of efficacy, is at least in par with, if not always necessarily higher than, most offline participants. Furthermore, contrasting previous findings on the positive linear relationship between social media use and offline participation, we find the effect of social media can be either positive or negative, depending on the level of social media activity. We suggest that production in virtual space of contentious politics may consist of different processes – peer production by the online crowd and connective leadership by the ‘cloud activists’ who shoulder extra responsibilities. Identifying ‘cloud activists’ may help us achieve a better understanding of these two interrelated processes as well as the way in which digitally enabled protests persist and transform over time.

The Belt and Road Initiative in China's Emerging Grand Strategy of Connective Leadership

AbstractAs Chinese leaders endeavor to maintain the international environment aligned with their strategic aim of realizing the “dream of national rejuvenation,” the remarkable increase in China's capabilities, coupled with uncertainty in the global economy and the ambivalent attitude of the USA toward the international order, poses fresh challenges to Beijing's foreign policy. The present paper argues that a lexicographic preference for the mitigation of the risk of pushback against China's core interests underpins the Belt and Road Initiative. Pursuing a strategy of credible reassurance commensurate to the shift in the distribution of power in China's neighborhood and globally, President Xi Jinping's administration has been cultivating a form of connective leadership that commits China to the encapsulation of the Belt and Road Initiative for transregional connectivity into its own national development strategy, generating an octroyé, non‐hegemonic, type of international social capital, and integrating the existing order without corroborating the position of its founder.

Connective Leadership in an Interdependent and Diverse World

Expressing strong agreement with Robert Sternberg’s rationale for changing our methods for identifying intelligence, this analysis emphasizes connections with leadership failures. In recognition that a changing world requires connective ethical leadership, it discusses the nine-factor behavioral model portraying achieving styles that can facilitate effective leadership in a changing world. Leaders operating along these lines can identify high-potential initiatives and artfully adjust their behaviors to achieve the best outcomes.

Challenging Our Assumptions About Male and Female Preferences for Competition

The current article challenges the cultural stereotypes surrounding the behaviors men and women use to accomplish their goals, with a specific emphasis on competitive behavior. Using the Connective Leadership Model, we offer an in-depth look at both how men and women differ in competitive leadership behaviors both across generations and time. The paper analyzed data gathered from the 1980-2015, utilizing the L-BL Achieving Styles Inventory (ASI). Examining over 10,000 responses from U.S. upper- and middle-level managers and first-line supervisors, across industries, the results provide valuable insights into recent gender patterns. Our findings suggest that men appear to be responding to the social expansion of their behavioral choices by placing competitive behavior increasingly lower than other options and lower than they have in the past. Yet, men still engage in more competitive behavior than women. Curiously, Millennials of both sexes reported a counter-intuitive uptick in competitive behavior. The current study offers important insights not only for leadership scholars, but for present and future leaders seeking to understand the influence of gender on the changing face of competitive leadership behavior.

The Value of Connective Leadership: Benefiting from Women's Approach to Leadership While Contending with Traditional Views

The Value of Connective Leadership: Benefiting from Women's Approach to Leadership While Contending with Traditional Views

Impact of connective leadership on employees’ goal commitment during M & A integration

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of connective leadership in the promotion of employee goal commitment, and to determine whether conflict can mediate the relationship between connective leadership and goal commitment during the integration of mergers and acquisitions (M & A).Design/methodology/approach– The study draws on survey data (n=255) from Chinese employees who work for 12 native M & A enterprises. Structural equation modeling and regression analysis are applied to analyze the data.Findings– The results show that connective leadership is positively related to employee goal commitment (p< 0.01). In addition, relationship conflict partially mediates the relationship between connective leadership and employee goal commitment. Task conflict fully mediates the relationship between connective leadership and employee goal commitment.Originality/value– This study introduces connective leadership into M & A and may contribute to the literature related to connective leadership and M & A integration as well as the literature focussed on goal commitment, especially antecedents of goal commitment.

Connecting Leadership and Learning: Do Versatile Learners make Connective Leaders?

<p align="center"><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p>Recent failures in leadership, suggest that creating better-quality leadership development programs is critical. In moving from theory to practice, this paper examined the relationship between learning style and leadership style which may enable us to move away from one-size-fits-all leadership development programs. Utilizing Kolb’s Experiential Learning Model and Connective Leadership theory, approximately 3600 college students were analyzed to discover whether versatility in learning styles translates into versatility in leadership styles. One group of versatile learners reported using a wider range of leadership styles suggesting that learning flexibility may transfer to leadership flexibility. Surprisingly, learners of all types reported utilizing Power and Intrinsic styles of leadership above all others. Implications for leadership development include considering individual differences when crafting leadership programs, matching learning styles to leader training, and the need to move beyond one set of leadership behaviors to increase flexibility in dealing with complex situations. Using a large sample rarely seen in management studies, this paper makes key contributions to the literature. </p>

Leadership within regional climate change adaptation networks: the case of climate adaptation officers in Northern Hesse, Germany

In the climate adaptation literature, leadership tends to be an understudied factor, although it may be crucial for regional adaptation governance. This article shows how leadership can be usefully conceptualized and operationalized within regional governance networks dealing with climate adaptation. It applies an integrative framework inspired by complexity leadership theory, distinguishing several leadership functions to enhance the adaptive capacity of regional networks. We focus on one specific institutional innovation, appointed climate adaptation officers, who seek to connect science and governance practice, and to mainstream climate adaptation. Our question is twofold: What is the potential of climate adaptation officers to advance the adaptation agenda and to what extent did their establishment and working practice mirror the various leadership functions needed to raise the adaptive capacity of the regional network they operated in? The integrative leadership framework structures the analysis of climate adaptation officers forming part of a government-funded project seeking to enhance adaptation to climate variability in the central German region of Northern Hesse. The data consist of interviews with scientists and regional authority employees and project documentation including an evaluation. We find that climate adaptation officers raised awareness for climate adaptation and helped to shape and implement a number of projects within the overall KLIMZUG programme, highlighting impeding and enabling factors. The process of setting up this institutional innovation involved all forms of leadership functions and is an example of vertical mainstreaming. Its operation involved most clearly enabling and connective leadership functions and is an example of horizontal mainstreaming.

Remixing the Spring!: Connective leadership and read‐write practices in the 2011 Arab uprisings

AbstractThis article discusses the connections between the unfolding of the 2011 Arab uprisings and the “culture of the net.” Being far from overestimating the role that Internet has played in the uprisings, we propose to look at it not as an ensemble of tools, applications and technologies; but as a specific set of values, behaviors, skills and strategies that define the cultural dimension of the web. The article shows how linking, sharing and remixing have been among the core cultural practices behind the social movements that were successful in confronting Egypt and Tunisia's regimes. We also discuss how, despite the fact that the Syrian uprising has not achieved its political goal, yet it shares a similar cultural framework based on participation, peer-production, remix practices.

Community leadership development

This paper presents a model for community leadership capacity building. This model for individual and organizational development is being used with the Resource and Development Foundation (RDF) in Stellenbosch, South Africa. RDF is a non-governmental organization with the aim of providing resource-based training and capacity-building services to the socially excluded and disadvantaged youth, women and rural people of the Western Cape. Here we examine the process of capacity building, theoretically and practically, with the intention of discovering lessons to inform management education in relation to leadership and change. The paper explores the issues related to developing empowerment: the capacity of a system to engage in enterprising dialogue where power is unequally distributed. It proposes a community leadership development framework that comprises three components: leading change through dialogue, collective empowerment and connective leadership.

Community leadership development

This paper presents a model for community leadership capacity building. This model for individual and organizational development is being used with the Resource and Development Foundation (RDF) in Stellenbosch, South Africa. RDF is a non-governmental organization with the aim of providing resource-based training and capacity-building services to the socially excluded and disadvantaged youth, women and rural people of the Western Cape. Here we examine the process of capacity building, theoretically and practically, with the intention of discovering lessons to inform management education in relation to leadership and change. The paper explores the issues related to developing empowerment: the capacity of a system to engage in enterprising dialogue where power is unequally distributed. It proposes a community leadership development framework that comprises three components: leading change through dialogue, collective empowerment and connective leadership.

Leadership Behavior of Male and Female Managers, 1984–2002

Using data collected from 1984 to 2002 from 2,371 male and 1,768 female middle and senior managers in the United States, the authors of this article demonstrate not only that traditional gender role stereotypes do not hold up, but also that counterstereotypical patterns exist. Using the Connective Leadership Model, based on nine sets of achieving styles, the authors found that the traditional gender gap in competitiveness has decreased sharply, but for an unanticipated reason: Men's competitive scores have dropped, whereas women's have remained rather stable. Men's collaborative and contributory behaviors also have decreased significantly, whereas women's have increased.

The Connective Edge: Leading in an Interdependent World

Contents: A New Wind is Blowing. What Drove the Need for New Leaders? How Did We Get to Stage Three? For the New Stage Three World, New Connective Leaders. The Origins of Connective Leadership: The L-BL Achieving Styles Model. Early Connective Leaders in a Non-Connective World. Why Are We So Hooked on Leaders Anyway? (Or the Psychological and Existential Foundations of Leadership) The American MAnage e Trois: Individualism, Authoritarianism, and Cooperation. The Direct Routes to Success. The Instrumental Road Less Traveled: Do What We Do Worst, But Do It Better. The Relational Path to Leadership: From Collaborators to Mentors. Female Leadership: Does Gender Make a Difference? The Connective Leadership Ladder in Organizations: Achieving Styles on the Way Up and at the Top. The Situation Will Get You If You Don't Watch Out. Connective Leadership and the Serious Issues: Life, Death, and the Search for Meaning.

Table of Contents

Leader to LeaderVolume 2000, Issue 17 p. 1-56 Table of Contents First published: 05 January 2001 https://doi.org/10.1002/1531-5355(200022)2000:17<1::AID-LTL1>3.0.CO;2-EAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Abstract Hesselbein + Company FRANCES HESSELBEIN THE CAMPAIGN FOR LEADERSHIP Lessons for leadership in an election year, or any year. DEEPAK SETHI LEADING FROM THE MIDDLE Six skills for unlocking an overlooked source of innovation. DAN CIAMPA THE CHALLENGE OF NEW LEADERSHIP: WORKING WITH THE EXECUTIVE TEAM What a new chief executive can do to make an effective entrance. JACOB NEEDLEMAN THE NEW POVERTY When everyone is starved for time, time management is the wrong answer. Executive Forum JAMES CHAMPY THE RESIDUE OF LEADERSHIP: WHY AMBITION MATTERS Harnessing the power of purpose to achieve results. ANITA RODDICK LEADER AS SOCIAL ADVOCATE: BUILDING THE BUSINESS BY BUILDING COMMUNITY When you try to save the world, you can also reinvent an industry. RAM CHARAN HOW TO LOWER THE RISK IN CEO SUCCESSION Executive recruiting is too important to be left to the executive recruiters. KARL WEICK AND KATHLEEN SUTCLIFFE, WITH DAVID OBSTFELD HIGH RELIABILITY: THE POWER OF MINDFULNESS What it takes to survive the crises of everyday business. JEAN LIPMAN-BLUMEN THE AGE OF CONNECTIVE LEADERSHIP In a world that is both coming together and breaking apart, six skills can make a difference. From the Front Lines NEW PARADIGMS WHY MISSION MATTERS Organizational culture does influence performance. The greatest of those cultural influences is the power of mission. SURVIVAL SKILLS FOR MANAGERS FIVE KEYS TO EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP What the world's best developers of talent do to cultivate future leaders. THE NEW WORKPLACE AN OLD MODEL FOR THE NEW ECONOMY A knowledge-age business design draws from pre-industrial sources. EXECUTIVE CHALLENGES TELLING YOUR COMPANY'S STORY A study of shareholder letters reveals what every leader needs to know about effective communication. Volume2000, Issue17Summer 2000Pages 1-56 RelatedInformation