Russ Marion Clemson University

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Complexity v. Transformation
The New Leadership Revisited

• Russ MarionClemson University
• Mary Uhl-Bien
• Univ. of Central Florida

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The Key Question

• What is leadership?
• Answer
• It depends upon your premise.

Is your premise related to control? Tasks? Human
relations? Growth? Innovation? Fitness?
Productivity?
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Three Definitions of Leadership

• Management of Influence
• Management of Meaning
• Management of Emergence

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Management of Influence
The act of influencing others toward a common
purpose or the process (act) of influencing the
activities of an organized group in its efforts
toward goal setting and goal achieving
(Stogdill, 1950, p. 3).
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Management of Meaning-The New Leadership

• The act of shaping organizational cultures and
  the meaning that workers ascribe to their work
  roles. The defining characteristic of true
  leadership is the active promotion of values
  which provide shared meanings about the nature of
  the organization (Bryman, 1996, p. 277).

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Management of Emergence-New, New Leadership

• Complexity the study of how self-reinforcing
  interdependent interaction create evolution,
  fitness, and surprise.
• Complex leaders foster conditions that enable
  productive, but largely unspecified, futures.
  They encourage bottom-up dynamics. They
  manipulate the conditions of fitness and
  innovation more than its results.

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Complexity Theory

• Views organizing as a bottom-up dynamic that is
  generated through interactive bonding among
  interdependent, need-seeking individuals, each of
  which are driven by their local (bounded)
  assessments of social and organizational events.
  This interactive process is recursive.

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The Challenge

• Complex recursive systems are difficult to
  control but are desirable for their ability to
  foster growth and innovation
• They may be influenced, however, by leaders who
  influence the nature of, or enable, the emergence
  of complex networks

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Complex Leaders

• Complex leaders are unifying symbols of a
  movement, they articulate its goals and embody
  its meaning.
• Complex leaders foster a general mission for the
  organization but treat that mission as a
  changing, organic entity and avoid using it to
  limit innovation. Moreover, they dont allow
  their authority to be a limiting force.

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Complex Leaders

• Foster conditions that enable productive, but
  largely unspecified, future states
• Feed the natural bottom-up dynamics of emergence,
  innovation, and fitness
• Think in terms of systems, nonlinear effects, and
  of network forces
• Manipulate the situations of complexity more than
  its results

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Micro-Level Leadership

• Facilitates the process of correlation,
  aggregation and emergence
• Correlation interacting and interdependent units
  compromise a measure of their individualistic
  need-preferences to the needs of others
• Correlation is a bottom up process
• Micro-level Complex Leadership behaviors involve
  negotiating conflicting constraints

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Macro-Level Leadership

• About structures and behaviors that emerge
  unbidden out of an interactive network of
  ensembles, through the process of aggregation.
• Aggregation the structuring of agents into forms
  and ideas it is the result of recursive
  interaction, correlation, and catalysis.

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Macro-Level Behavior

• Structure and behavior at the macro-level emerge
  from the uncertainty, unpredictability, and
  nonlinearity that characterize micro-dynamics
  thus these dynamics also elude control and
  prediction

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Macro-level Complex Leadership

• Creates conditions that enable the interactions
  through which the behaviors and direction of
  organizational systems emerge
• Does not determine/direct rather seeks to
  influence organizational behavior through
  managing networks and interactions

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Direct v Indirect Leadership Behaviors

• Direct deliberate efforts to influence controls
  behaviors of workers
• Indirect fosters innovation and fitness by
  stimulating conditions that simultaneously create
  conflicting constraints and enable their
  resolution, and by providing unifying symbolic
  meaning that sparks bottom-up activity.

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Direct Leadership

• Impacts local activities and creates conflicting
  constraints at a higher level of interaction,
  leading to a macro-level mesh of conflicting
  constraints
• Higher-order resolution requires indirect,
  macro-level leadership behaviors

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Indirect Leadership Behavior

• Fosters network structures that present complexly
  interactive challenges
• Create atmospheres that empower workers to deal
  with constraints
• Enable network relationships that work through
  constraints and use them as springboards for
  creativity.

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Catalysts and Tags

• Catalysts enable and speed emergent events
• Tags are emergent catalytic things as opposed
  to events
• Tags provide symbolic meaning, identity, and
  cohesion
• Tags perform leadership functions by sparking
  bottom-up activity

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Traditional Leadership v Complex Leadership

• Leaders are products of interactive dynamic
• Not hierarchical bureaucracy and leadership is
  not embedded in managerial roles
• Considers indirect leadership
• Direct behaviors at micro level negotiate
  conflicting constraints and create linkages

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Traditional Leadership v Complex Leadership

• Tempers control preferences and instead fosters
  connectivity among diverse agents
• Enables effective coupling of structures, ideas,
  and innovations to ensure they are neither too
  loose nor too tightly interdependent
• Stimulates systems toward emergent surprises

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Transformational Theory

• Transactional leaders manage the commerce of
  exchange (Systemsworlds)
• Transformational leaders seek to empower workers
  around a core vision. The transforming leader
  is one who raises the aspirations of followers
  such that the leaders and followers aspirations
  are fused. (Lifeworld)

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Transformational Strategies

• Top-down approach to leadership influence
• Controls with emphasis on vision and getting
  people to buy into the vision
• Macro-level leaders are managers of meaning,
  providing a strong link between the leaders
  behavior and organizational culture
• Micro-level emphasis on emotional reactions to
  leaders vision

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Three Primary Goals

• Heighten followers awareness about the
  importance and value of goals and the means to
  achieve them
• Induce followers to transcend their
  self-interests for the good of the collective and
  its goals
• Stimulate and meet followers higher order needs

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Four Macro Behaviors

• Charisma, or idealized influence
• Inspiration
• Intellectual stimulation
• Individualized consideration
• The communication of high expectations is a
  central activity of the leader, and aims to
  empower and to promote high task accomplishment.

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The Differences (1) Control

• Complex leadership control resides in bottom-up
  interactive dynamics
• Transformational leadership purports to do so but
  the impetus for control still lies with the
  leaders top-down vision

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Control and Critical Theory

• Transformational behaviors advance leaders
  control agendas by empowering workers around
  leaders vision
• Subtly control workers minds/actions by
  structuring in ways that forces them to act out
  on the elites goals
• Manipulate language, structure, and goals of
  commerce workers deluded into thinking they have
  freely bought-in to the company line

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• Organizations need defenses against their
  charismatic leaders. Otherwise such individuals
  can too readily bully or seduce others into
  supporting their vainglorious illusions.
• --Holman Jenkins
• (Column in Business World, Aug. 19,
  1998, p. A19)

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Complex Leadership and Control

• Leaders are sensitive to control agendas and to
  the subtle influence of their authority
• Recognize that fitness, emergence, and innovation
  are limited when controlled by a central
  personality
• Control focused on resolving conflicting
  constraints, collecting resources, building
  networks, discouraging power fiefdoms

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The Differences (2) Transformation

• Transformational leadership induces followers to
  transcend self-interests for the good of the
  collective and its goals
• Complexity Theory emergent commitment to
  innovation and bottom-up productivity from
  diverse goals and skills

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The Differences (2) Transformation

• Transformational Leaders generate a common
  purpose and a sense of unity based on leaders
  vision
• Complex Leaders also generate a common purpose,
  but focus on interdependence of diversity rather
  than unity of vision--a neural network of
  diverse, adapting agents

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The Differences (2) Transformation

• Transformational leaders convert people into
  replicas of themselves
• Complex Leaders (e.g., tags) convert people into
  diverse but interdependent Complex Adaptive
  Agents

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The Differences (3) Causality

• Transformational Leadership structural or
  process perspectives
• Complex Leadership recursion perspective.

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The Differences (4) Managers of Emergence

• Transformational leaders manage meaning Complex
  Leaders manage emergence, a term which is
  inclusive of meaning
• Complex Leaders manage networks, diversity,
  interdependency within unity (meaning),
  correlation, conflicting constraints, complex
  transformation, autocatalysis, and recursion
• Manage does not mean control better defined as
  enable.

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The Differences(5) Leadership Specificity

• Transformational theory fails to specify how
  leadership helps organizations adapt to
  environment and acquire resources
• Complex Leadership explains leaders role in the
  Complexity processes of emergence, innovation,
  and fitness

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The Differences(6) Influence Flow

• Transformational leadership suggests that
  influence flows from leader to follower
• Complex Leadership suggests a more shared
  perspective of leadership and recursive chains of
  influence

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Tags Lessons from transformational Leadership

• Charismatic leadership, through its emphasis on
  inspiring and motivating leadership behavior, may
  help Complexity theorists understand how the role
  of tags work in complex systems, and how they
  relate to Complex Leadership

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Conclusions

• Transformational leadership top-down,
  leader-controlled model leaders identify a
  vision and mobilize followers
• Complex Leadership bottom-up model of emergence,
  with Complex leaders bonding (direct) and
  enabling (indirect) interactive dynamics that
  lead to creativity and fitness

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Conclusions

• Transformational leadership stifles
  creativity/emergence with leader control
• Complex leadership enables creativity and
  emergence with dynamic networks, diversity of
  purpose and skill, and bottom-up creativity

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Conclusions

• Transformational leadership may fit within a
  broader theory of Complex Leadership.
• Transformational leadership, with its emphasis on
  leader and lack of attention to organizational
  processes, could benefit from integration with a
  recursive-oriented model
• The leaders transformational role would be that
  of a tag, not hierarchical and authoritative but
  catalytic and nurturing