Collective Leadership Paper

A leader is the key element that affects the overall group’s success by inspiring members to collaborate to achieve a common goal. The approach that the leader takes to lead a group (i.e., leadership style) plays a significant role in group decision-making process and decision quality. Effective leadership encourages members’ participation in decision-making process, and promotes cooperation and motivation among group members. On the other hand, ineffective leadership, which lacks impartiality, can be a great risk factor for groupthink; a phenomenon refers to poor decision process and decision quality (Chapman, 2006). Groupthink is undesirable for groups because it is detrimental to group development. In order to demonstrate

Friedrich, T. L., Vessey, W. B., Schuelke, M. J., Ruark, G. A., & Mumford, M. D. (2009). A framework for understanding collective leadership: The selective utilization of leader and team expertise within networks. The Leadership Quarterly, 20(6), 933-958. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2009.09.008

Joseph Raelin (2016), a Northeastern University professor of management and organization development, recently published the article “Rethinking Leadership.” He said, “Leadership is really not about the leaders themselves. It’s about the collective practice among people who work together— accomplishing the choices we make together in our mutual work” (Raelin,

Every person has some kind of good and evil traits within their personality, but what really defines good and evil? People from different cultures could consider different traits to be “good” or “evil” or even a little of both. There are times in life where a person has to make certain choices that could be interoperated both ways. In this paper, I will be analyzing different characters in the story “The Good Women of Suzutan” and what type of role each personality plays within the story in order to give the audience a chance to come up with their own ending.

Vishwas Chavan once said, ““I have always believed in the power of collaboration... I realized that you can't develop all the competencies you need fast enough on your own. Furthermore, if you don't collaborate, your ideas will be limited to your own abilities. As a result, you will not be able to serve your clientele and thus can't achieve the anticipated impact.” This means that working and learning together helps create more ideas, and therefore, more problems can be solved. One can actually limit one’s ability to lead by insisting that one rule alone. Throughout history, collaborative leadership has yielded more positive results than authoritarian leadership. Authoritative leadership is less effective than collaborative leadership

Every person has a different definition of what makes a leader. Some feel a leader is inspirational, while others regard leadership as someone who can give criticism and make the tough decisions. Each definition is unique, and each is vague. This is why the definitions of leadership people use aren’t always accurate. Bolman and Deal, however, do an excellent job of presenting four frames of leadership people use to successfully—or unsuccessfully—support and lead a group of people. The four frames presented by the authors are: human resource, symbolic, structural, and political. The human resource frame is used by leaders to empathize with their followers, the symbolic frame is used to inspire and unite followers around a vision, the structural frame is used to emphasize the importance of a process, and the political frame establishes competition and focuses on creating allies.

Two Methods for Handling Difficult Team Members and Method used in my Decision making Process.

group effort and, therefore, leadership and followership” (p. 13). We must know how to follow before we can be effective leaders.

Leadership theory, or the scientific approach to understanding leadership, is a vast group of theories that try to explain what makes, or constitutes a great leader. There are many schools of thought on this subject and many pull from existing psychological theories, like Behavioral Theory, Developmental Theory, Personality Theory and Learning theory (Myers, 2014). There are three main leadership theories: trait theory, which suggests that some are born with certain traits that make them an effective leader, while behavioral theory focuses on how leader behave, while contingency theory addresses how the situation influences leadership.

The purpose of this memo is to provide an overview of the work our team will perform in order to study collective leadership practices of three social change organizations. The arena of social change we are exploring is the empowerment of marginalized people through skill and capacity building and other self-sufficiency strategies. We chose this area of inquiry because, at its core, it aims to build self-efficacy, which is the foundation to true social change.

Northouse, P. G. (2013). Leadership: Theory and practice (6th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.

This collectivistic phenomenon of leadership, as some are calling it, involves multiple individuals divesting in leadership roles over time both formal and informal relationships, thus creating a paradigm shift (Cullen-Lester & Yammarino, 2016). With this change, theories emerge recognizing collectives as complex relational systems. Theories of shared leadership, collective decision making, complexity theory, flock leadership, the social construction of leadership, sensemaking, and social exchange and entrainment are examples of the diverse collective leadership concepts emerging for success. Cullen-Lester and Yammarino (2016) state that collective leadership is a required capability in facing increasing complex workplaces, business challenges, and social problems; for which, collective and networking leadership are changing academia and practice.

For high performance team, shared leadership is important as a project moves through the phases of initiation, early phase, later phase and close. Wu and Cormican (2016) found that managers should focus on developing strong internal leadership patterns at the early stage to maximize team effectiveness, where shared leadership is prominent with team members interacting, cooperating and exchanging information. As the team advances into later phase, leadership would turn to focus on few individuals who might consistently demonstrate greater leadership competence. In addition, the leader would benefit from the effective use of the Hill model for team leadership (“A framework,” 2013), in making decision (to take action or to continue to monitor the situation) and assessing appropriate actions (internal relation-related, internal task-related, or external action).

Shared leadership is a team environment that consists of three dimensions: shared purpose, social support, and voice. Shared purpose exists when team members have similar understandings of their team’s main objectives and takes steps to ensure a focus on collective goals (Carson, 2007). Shared purpose is the whole reason why the team exists and what they are working towards. This is the fundamental factor that leaders are trying to motivate the individuals around them to achieve. Social support is the extent to which team members actively provide emotional and psychological strength to one another (Carson, 2007). Social support consists of feeling recognized and supported within the team in which they belong. Social support is a crucial shared leadership factor that can determine the level of commitment from the team members. Voice is the degree to which a team’s members have to input into how to team carries out its purpose (Carson, 2007). The voice dimension provides a common sense of direction and the support demanded within a team environment. Carson concludes that the three dimensions work together to create an internal team environment that is characterized by a shared understanding about purpose and goals, a sense of recognition and importance, and high levels of involvement, challenge, and cooperation (Carson,

Schultz (2011) writes favorable outcomes result from shared collective leadership as a result of mutual inspiration between leaders and followers. This change in mindset from a focus on an individual leader to an emphasis on leadership affords organizations an atmosphere of shared accountability and distributed workload (Schultz, 2011). Other benefits of shared leadership include a team environment, intrinsically motivated staff, decreased job related stress and resultant absenteeism, and retention of knowledgeable members (Hlupic, 2016). Ironically, by giving away control in a shared leadership situation, a leader actually garners greater power and enjoys the profits of increased worker productivity (Hlupic, 2016).