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HUMAN RELATIONS SPECIAL ISSUE CFP: COLLECTIVE DIMENSIONS OF LEADERSHIP

 

Dear Colleagues,

 

We want to let you know about the new Human Relations special issue call for papers (below and attached) and would be really grateful if you would spread the word among your colleagues:

 

Collective dimensions of leadership: The challenges of connecting theory and method

Guest Editors:
Sonia M Ospina (New York University, USA)
Erica Gabrielle Foldy (New York University, USA)
Gail T Fairhurst (University of Cincinnati, USA)
Brad Jackson (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)

Online call for papers: http://www.tavinstitute.org/humanrelations/special_issues/LeadershipCollectiveDimensions.html

Submission deadline: 15 June 2018 (submissions will not be considered before 15 May 2018)

 

 

Collective leadership represents an emerging theoretical umbrella that captures diverse scholarship on the shared, distributed, pooled, and relational aspects of leadership, its emergence and relation to hierarchical leadership, as well as its impact on work and performance (Bryman et al., 2011; Denis et al., 2012; Uhl-Bien and Ospina, 2012; Yammarino et al., 2012).

 

As collective leadership scholarship has blossomed, theory has outpaced empirics. In fact, defining, measuring and documenting collective leadership has proven quite challenging. It is not easy to translate the assumptions of a collective lens on leadership into sound research design decisions and practices, what some call indication of method (Dodge et al., 2005; Gaskell and Bauer, 2000).¹ Traditional methodologies are often less appropriate once the assumptions of a collective lens on leadership are taken seriously. Those assumptions often require a process lens (Langley et al., 2013), detailing issues of time, i.e., the trajectory of a case, and timing, i.e., sequentialized moves (Fairhurst, 2017; Fairhurst and Uhl-Bien, 2012). Indeed a case has been made that multiple and considerably more sophisticated methods are required in order to conduct collective leadership research than have been traditionally deployed in leader-centered research (Kempster et al., 2016).

 

To this end, we believe those who have individually advanced the theoretical promise of their various brands of collective leadership now need to work collectively to do much more methodologically if we are to advance knowledge on collective leadership. This would include relational leadership theory (Uhl-Bien, 2006), the leadership-as-practice movement (Raelin, 2016), discursive/critical and process approaches to leadership (Alvesson and Spicer, 2012; Collinson, 2011; Fairhurst, 2007, 2017), dialectical views of leadership (Collinson, 2005, 2014; Zoller and Fairhurst, 2007), and collective and network leadership approaches (Cullen-Lester and Yammarino, 2016; Ospina and Foldy, 2015), among others.

 

Some of the most significant methodological concerns identified by leadership scholars at several international Collective Leadership Workshops (2014, 2015, 2016) include: 
1. Disentangling the tensions between leadership's individual and collective dimensions and its multi-level nature; 
2. The methodological implications of theory, such as lack of conceptual clarity, or matching ontological with analytical units of analysis; and 
3. How and what to measure when trying to capture the unobservable.²

That there are parallel and competing collective leadership research streams enriches, yet complicates, these challenges. Distinctive paradigms and perspectives of leadership guide choices around research goals, theoretical frameworks and design decisions. Lack of dialogue across perspectives with competing assumptions fosters misunderstandings, creates blind spots that reduce the chances of developing robust and actionable knowledge, and reduces opportunities for heuristic cross-pollination (Ospina and Uhl-Bien, 2012).

 

Addressing the theory–method link of collective leadership requires developing an intentional effort to match underlying assumptions and theoretical lenses to methodologies and to research design and implementation decisions, including choice of units of analysis and observation, and tools for data collection and analysis (Fairhurst and Antonakis, 2012). When scholars do this systematically, they enhance the internal consistency of independent research programs on collective leadership while deepening the quality of the dialogue across different research streams of collective leadership. Both outcomes help develop better knowledge for social action in organizations.

 

Finally, while leadership scholars may seem the obvious audience, this special issue will have resonance for those with other interests as well. In particular, there is increasing interest in taking apart phenomena that are often taken-for-granted (e.g. strategy, culture, authority; in general, taking a "process" approach [Langley et al., 2013; Langley and Tsoukas, 2017]). Rather than assuming their presence as a given, some scholars explore how things become commonplace, what purposes they serve, who benefits from them and how they are held in place. But the appropriate methods for such investigations are often not straightforward since they can involve slowing down and articulating the building blocks of a process of social construction. This is exactly what we are exploring in this special issue. Scholars interested in leadership in the plural have already made significant contributions by questioning the very basis of leadership and how it has been defined. But much more work is necessary to empirically understand the collective construction process, which is what we hope to explore in this special issue. The results of those explorations could be useful for other scholars hoping to break open construction processes related to other long-standing organizational topics, as mentioned above.

 

In sum, if collective leadership is a slippery, shape-shifting phenomenon, then how do we capture it methodologically while ensuring commensurability with theory? This is a critical question, as leadership theories shift attention from models focusing on the individual 'heroic leader' to the relational dynamics of leadership, and as new research programs on collective leadership are pursued by social scientists from various paradigms and disciplinary fields.

Objectives and scope

 

The special issue aims to deepen scholarly understandings of the social and relational dimensions of leadership in contemporary institutions through an in-depth exploration of ensuring the theory–methods connection when engaging in empirical research with a collective leadership lens.

 

The goals of this special issue are threefold:
1. To identify and to map diverse collective leadership streams in an integrative framework that helps guide theory–methods decisions when conducting or assessing collective leadership scholarship.
2. To promote consistency in theoretical and methodological choices in collective leadership scholarship, by documenting strategies and solutions to address the challenges of matching lens to method in empirical research.
3. To deepen the quality of the dialogue among organizational scholars with diverse collective leadership perspectives by requiring that theoretical and methodological choices, as well as the reasoning behind their consistency (including paradigmatic lens), be made explicit. 

 

The scope of the special issue would include both empirical and/or conceptual papers that explore the collective dimensions of leadership and explicitly take on the challenge of matching theory and method. The specific topics described below expand on the scope of the special issue.

Articles in any of the following categories are invited for the special issue:
1. Empirical papers reporting leadership research that captures its collective dimensions and in which the research is an example of how theory-method consistency is successfully addressed.
2. Empirical papers on leadership in the plural in which the research takes a specific collective leadership theoretical framework (e.g. complexity theory, leadership-as-practice, the direction-adaptation-commitment model, network theory, discursive leadership, distributed leadership, relational leadership, among others) and identifies solutions to methodological and measurement challenges associated with its empirical application.
3. Conceptual papers that take a specific collective leadership theoretical framework and propose ways to address methodological and measurement challenges associated with it.
4. Reflective papers in which authors review their previous work with a critical eye to explore lens-method inconsistency and thereby make a substantive contribution to the charge of matching lens and method.
5. Either empirical or conceptual papers that use lens-methods matching to unpack a particular methodological challenge associated with research on collective leadership such as disentangling individual and collective leadership processes that co-exist in a particular context; determining unit of analysis; capturing group processes; addressing time issues; among others.

 

Contributors should note:

·     This call is open and competitive, and the submitted papers will be double-blind reviewed by experienced scholars in the field.

·     Submitted papers must be based on original material not accepted by, or under consideration with, any other journal or outlet.

·     For empirical papers based on data sets from which multiple papers have been generated, authors must provide the Guest Editors with copies of all other papers based on the same data.

·     The guest editors will select a limited number of papers to be included in the special issue.  Other papers submitted to the special issue may be considered for publication in other issues of the journal at the discretion of the Editor-in-Chief.

·     To be considered for this special issue, submissions must fit with the Aims and Scope of Human Relations: http://www.tavinstitute.org/humanrelations/about_journal/aims.html as well as this call for papers. 

·     Papers should be submitted online in accordance with our submission guidelines: http://www.tavinstitute.org/humanrelations/submit_paper.html.

·     Papers should be submitted through the online system: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/hr.

·     Please indicate in your covering letter that the paper is intended for this Special issue.

 

Prospective contributors are welcome to consult the guest editors prior to submitting their work:

Sonia M Ospina                                 sonia.ospina@nyu.edu
Erica Gabrielle Foldy       erica.foldy@nyu.edu
Gail T Fairhurst                  gail.fairhurst@uc.edu
Brad Jackson                      brad.jackson@vuw.ac.nz

 

Please direct questions about the submission process, or any administrative matter, to the Editorial Office: humanrelationsjournal@tavinstitute.org.

 

Notes

¹ This refers to the researcher's aspiration that the methods chosen, are, indeed, the best indicated for the goals, theories and questions explored, in the same way that a medicine a physician chooses for a patient is the best indicated for his or her condition, carefully and deliberately diagnosed before prescribing it.

 

² From the document "Biggest methodological challenges today", Collective Leadership Research Workshop: Fruitful Intersections or Parallel Play? (New York, 2014) https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzzQh4lulcgobVlqSzVJWU1maDg/view?usp=sharing

 

 

References

 

Alvesson M and Spicer A (2012) Critical leadership studies: The case for critical performativity. Human Relations 65(3): 367–390.

Bryman AB, Collinson D, Grint K, Jackson B and Uhl-Bien M (eds) (2011) The SAGE Handbook of Handbook of Leadership. London: SAGE.

Collinson D (2005) Dialectics of leadership. Human Relations 58(11): 1419–42. 

Collinson D (2014) Dichotomies, dialectics and dilemmas: New directions for critical leadership studies? Leadership 10(1): 36–55.

Cullen-Lester KL and Yammarino FJ (2016) Collective and network approaches to leadership. Leadership Quarterly 27(2): 173–180. 

Denis JL, Langley A and Sergi V (2012) Leadership in the plural. Academy of Management Annals 6(1): 211–283. 

Dodge J, Ospina SM and Foldy EG (2005) Integrating rigor and relevance in public administration scholarship: The contribution of narrative inquiry. Public Administration Review 65(3): 286–300.

Fairhurst GT (2007) Discursive Leadership: In Conversation with Leadership Psychology. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

Fairhurst GT (2017) Leadership process. In Langley A, Tsoukas H (eds) The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies. London: SAGE, 497–512.

Fairhurst GT and Antonakis J (2012) A research agenda for relational leadership. In Uhl-Bien M, Ospina SM (eds) Advancing Relational Leadership Theory: A Dialogue among Perspectives. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 433–459.

Fairhurst GT and Uhl-Bien M (2012) Organizational discourse analysis (ODA): Examining leadership as a relational process. Leadership Quarterly 23(6): 1043–1062.

Gaskell G and Bauer MW (2000) Towards public accountability: Beyond sampling, reliability and validity. In Bauer MW, Gaskell G (eds) Qualitative Researching with Text, Image and Sound. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 336–350.

Kempster S, Parry K and Jackson B (2016) Methodologies to discover and challenge leadership-as-practice. In Raelin JA (eds) Leadership-as-Practice: A New Movement in Leadership. New York: Routledge, 242–261.

Langley A and Tsoukas H (eds) (2017) The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies. London: SAGE.

Langley A, Smallman C, Tsoukas H, Van de Ven AH (2013) Process studies of change in organization and management: Unveiling temporality, activity, and flow. Academy of Management Journal 56(1): 1–13.

Ospina SM and Foldy EG (2015) Enacting collective leadership in a shared-power world. In Perry JL, Christensen RK (eds) Handbook of Public Administration, 3rd edn. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 489–507.

Ospina SM and Uhl-Bien M (2012) Competing bases of scientific Legitimacy in contemporary leadership studies. In Uhl-Bien M, Ospina SM (eds) Advancing Relational Leadership Theory: A Dialogue among Perspectives. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 1–40.

Raelin JA (2016) Imagine there are no leaders: Reframing leadership as collaborative agency. Leadership 12(2): 131–58.

Uhl-Bien M (2006) Relational leadership theory: Exploring the social processes of leadership and organizing. Leadership Quarterly 17(6): 654–76. 

Uhl-Bien M and Ospina SM (eds) (2012) Advancing Relational Leadership Theory: A Dialogue among Perspectives. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

Yammarino FJ, Salas E, Serban A, Shirreffs K, and Shuffler ML (2012) Collectivistic leadership approaches: Putting the "we" in leadership science and practice. Industrial and Organizational Psychology 5(4): 382–402. 

Zoller HZ and Fairhurst GT (2007) Resistance leadership: The overlooked potential in critical organization and leadership studies. Human Relations 60(9): 1331–1360.

 

 

 

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