Collective and Leadership

Abstract

The chapter argues that leadership is an inseparable feature of the collective. The central concepts presented in the chapter are collective, collective intentionality, and collective action. The chapter calls for a discussion of the following questions: What is the connection between collective intentionality and collective action? How are courses of action developed, and how are the actions of collective members combined and aligned? How do ideas, symbols and narratives come together to form shared meanings in the collective? Which obstacles need to be removed in order for the collective to be capable of coherent and integrated action? What is the role of leadership in all this? The chapter also aims to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the similarities and differences between the concepts of leadership and management.

Collective, Collective Intentionally and Collective Action

Individuals are defined by collectivity. The perception and understanding of one’s environment, self-definition, and types of behaviour depend on culture, language and collective heritage, on interactions with others, and on the awareness and understanding of one’s position in the society.

People belong to more than one social group at the same time, connecting with others to meet their needs and to realise their own and common interests, and assuming different roles and duties. They are influenced by different ideologies and social settings and conceptions, and their identities reflect collective and individual experiences, developing on the basis of a weaker or stronger perception of membership in a group.

Symbolically speaking, an individual is a cross-section of the sum of collectivities he belongs to, with a more or less robust link to each one, coexisting in them and fulfilling himself as a social entity. The importance of a group depends on the space it occupies in the individual’s cognitive landscape, the individual’s existential connection with the collectivity, the intensity of his forced or voluntary involvement, and the extent to which the individual identifies with the group and recognises himself as its member.

It is human nature to belong to a group and pursue not only individual achievements, but also achievements shared directly or indirectly with others. Collectiveness is a prerequisite for our existence, as much as it results in a measure of depersonalisation. Individuals are fragments of the social unit that defines them, as described by Aristotle’s notion of “koinonia” (κοινωνία in ancient Greek), which refers to unity as an essential component of people’s actions and lives.¹ Rare individuals who have been torn out of the collective, whether voluntarily or by excommunication, are seen as deviations that give our inherent sociality a mirrored meaning.

The collective is a fulfilment of the human need and aspiration for unity. It refers to a social group as a sum of individuals united by common values, interests, goals and expectations, mentality, customs, tradition, etc.

It comes in many different forms, from dyads (groups of two) to countries and international organisations, from loosely tied groups to tight-knit ones, from loose reference groups to fully integrated ones. Collectives can be shaped by strong authority, or they can be devoid of authority altogether. They can be designed for a specific purpose, or form spontaneously. They can have a complex or simple structure, they can be temporary or lasting, and so on.

Examples of a collective include an art troupe, a football team and a supporter group; a political party and a shipbuilding project team; an international company and a small local bakery; a well-organised army, but also a civil movement, or a group of friends spending leisure time together. Collectives can be characterized by discipline, or unrestrained behaviour; a lower degree of member identification and indoctrination, or a higher one; very distinct symbols and convincing narratives, or weak and unanchored elements of collective identity.

Unlike crowds and undefined mobs, groups brought together by chance, or casual meetings without a particular goal, collectives are characterised by collective intentionality.

Collective intentionality could be defined as the power of minds to be jointly directed at objects, matters of fact, states of affairs, goals, or values (Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, 2013).² It involves the fusion of multiple individua into a collective in itself (“we as a collective”). We recognise it when multiple people in a group share the same intentions, collective attention and similar beliefs, when they accept language and roles, and express collective emotions.

The collective develops a group reason of its own in pursuit of the reason for its formation. It defines collectivity conditions for the members, and encourages the development of collective commitment to the collective’s mission and aspirations (Tuomela, 2013).

Its important features include codes of conduct (collective norms) and the subjective interpretations of the collective norms by its members (perceived norms), which guide their actions (Lapinski & Rimal, 2005). Expectations of desirable behaviours are developed, and mechanisms are built to bind the members even more firmly together so that the collective would function as an integrated social entity.

Furthermore, the collective is characterised by a sense of purpose (or an illusion of one) that justifies its existence. A distinctive intent that is more than just a sum of individual intents is another attribute of the collective: it is impossible to unequivocally divide the collective’s efforts into the aspirations and wishes of its members. The collective is a social entity whose mostly unquestionable individuality stems from the dynamic of the members’ internal and external interactions, the collective identity, and the structural determinatives and behavioural norms.

The collective becomes a compact social group when the members strongly identify with it, and when they use similar self-assessment and self-determination devices, and the same behaviour patterns in dealing with persons outside the collective (Miles, 2012: 289). In this case, in Fayol’s words, the collective is graced by an esprit de corps, or a “spirit of togetherness,” interpretable as a well-developed sense of pride in affiliation, identification, mutual loyalty and commitment in the members.³

Particularly important are the collectives formed as organisations: purposeful entities and social institutions in which people are interconnected by unity of management, structure and processes in the intent to perform a task. The development stage when a collective becomes an organisation, and the features differentiating the former from the latter, are not entirely clear. Mintzberg, however, offers an interesting (1979: 2) definition of an organisation as an entity based on two primary activities: a clear division of the work into tasks to be performed, and a coordination that has been put in place to allow efficient performance of the tasks.

In short, the existence of collective intentionality is the defining feature of all collectives. Loosely knit groups and crowds lack this essential feature of integration and therefore cannot be considered collectives.

Collective intentionality is the prerequisite for meaningful group action, alignment of individual efforts and aspirations, and development of unity. It is a potentiality of sorts that can be realised through collective action.

In the simplest terms, collective action means acting as a group to achieve common objectives. It can be understood as the action taken by a group (either directly or on its behalf through an organization) in pursuit of members’ perceived shared interests (Marshall, 1998) (Fig. 2.1).

Fig. 2.1

The collective, collective intentionality, and collective action

Some collective actions are short-lived and may or may not be repetitive, while others last longer, with centuries or decades of efforts focused on accomplishing a mission (like a church, pyramid construction and so on). Collective actions can be very simple, such as several friends planning to go to a game together, or very complex, such as the mission to send man to the Moon.

Some of the relevant questions are: What is the connection between collective intentionality and collective action? How are courses of action developed, and how are the actions of collective members combined and aligned? How do ideas, symbols and narratives come together to form shared meanings in the collective? Which obstacles need to be removed in order for the collective to be capable of coherent and integrated action? And what is the role of leadership in all this?

In particular, American economist Mancur Olson called attention to problems arising in collective action, noting that groups of individuals, in addition to efficient organisation, needed appropriate mechanisms and selective incentives (reward, punishment) to act in common interest (Olson, 1971/1965).

Differences in individuals’ interests can lead to conflict and to behaviours that will not yield the best possible outcome for the group as a whole. In our opinion, this problem can be addressed, apart from incentive instruments, by consolidating intergroup relations, and building a homogenous collective.⁴

A strong collective can outgrow the individuals and their interests and become an entity in itself, with its own goals, desirable outcomes and results of its activities. Unity then becomes a substance that cannot be reduced to a collection of individualities, and collectiveness is perceived as more important than individual efforts.

Collective action can take two generic forms: cooperation and coordination.

Cooperation is usually manifested as a more or less spontaneous adaptation of group members to each other, whereas coordination is manifested as the establishment of a structure of governing and leading based on formal or informal authority.⁵

Cooperation and coordination are needed in a wide range of activities, from neighbours helping each other with gardening, student excursions, humanitarian campaign organisation, and smaller entrepreneurial ventures involving several partners, to running a hospital or a big global company, or governing a country. However, their role is not the same in all possible situations.

The needs for organisation, standardisation of behaviour, and leadership increase as the collective and collective action become increasingly complex.

Mutual adaptation of individuals is not an adequate alternative to the coordination of the more complex jobs and tasks needed for the achievement of multiple objectives, and a priori standardisation of the behaviour of group members is not sufficient, except when they operate in a very predictable and simple environment.

Larger organisations need a complex internal structure covering the relations between members, their interconnecting elements, and the key features of the organisation. In addition to dividing the work and defining roles and positions, it is also important to institutionalize the coordination systems by establishing a formal chain of authority and responsibility.

Moreover, the connectedness between members and the collective needs to be reinforced, their dedication and motivation in performing tasks needs to be boosted, and an appropriate environment needs to be built to strengthen the collective identity and improve the organisation’s climate. Leadership plays an indispensable role in this.

Leadership vs. Management

The need for leadership occurs naturally with the emergence and development of collectives. To paraphrase physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach, the collective is needed to understand leadership, just as leadership is needed to understand the collective.

Leadership is a persistent feature of the collective: it is the contribution of one or more members to the collective, but also the result of interactions and processes between the members of the collective (Boal & Hooijberg, 2000; Day et al., 2006). Rarely is it possible to effectively achieve goals of common activities without leadership.

Leadership springs from collective intentionality and is materialized in collective action: it requires the establishment of clear guidelines and the creating of an image of a desirable future, the development of a purpose, or the set of meaning needed to interpret the course of collective action, efficient division and coordination of labour, as well as recruitment, mobilisation and motivation of members so they would selflessly make a sufficient contribution to the accomplishment of the collective’s goals.

Planning, leadership, and management are interwoven, interconnected and complementary in tasks, and together form the foothold triangle of an organisation (Ohmae, 1982). Planning is a management function and the basis for successful leadership, but leadership is not synonymous with management, and management cannot be equated with leadership in every situation.

Leading (not leadership) is usually identified as one of the functions of management, with an emphasis on its “human side”: the influence the managers exert on the behaviour and value systems of their subordinates and co-workers to make them enthusiastically pursue the objectives of the organisation, or its constituent part. It is often argued that the art of mobilising people is the most difficult and complex task in management, since people are the source of most of the problems in any organisation. Efficient managers, according to typical opinions, have to be good leaders as well.

On the other hand, the phenomenon of leadership cannot be reduced to a mere ingredient, or segment, of management. Leadership presents challenges and overcomes tensions between two components of collective action: bringing people together, motivating and steering them; and the complexity of the task at hand.

The thesis that successful leaders also have to be good managers is simply not valid. Managers may or may not have leader traits in addition to their manager function. Management and leadership are two fundamentally different phenomena.

Management optimises the existing systems, procedures and processes within the existing paradigm of the organisation (Hinterhuber & Friedrich, 2002). It is defined as the process of accomplishing the organisation’s objectives through effective and efficient use of limited resources. Management is based on the functions of planning, budgeting, organizing, staffing, controlling, and problem solving.

Hierarchy is the backbone of management and the source of formal power. Managers are members of the collective at different levels of hierarchy to whom the responsibility of managing a unit within the organisation, or the organisation as a whole, has been delegated.

Management is a phenomenon of the Industrial Age: its importance became particularly pronounced with the separation of the ownership role from the resource administration role, and with the establishment and expansion of modern corporations, whose top management was given the position of corporate control,⁶ and which the distinguished economic historian Alfred Chandler (1990: 7) identifies as possibly the most important social innovation of the last century. The modern corporation bred management as the central institutional mechanism.

What are the similarities and differences between leadership and management?

Both systems rest on building a belief in the existence of a common goal (Barnard, 1938/1950). Both include activities such as making decisions about tasks to be performed, ways to perform them, and people to perform them with, in order to effectively attain the objectives that have been defined beforehand.

Unlike management, which is based on facing complexity and establishing order and consistency in the organisation’s existence, leadership is primarily a phenomenon of facing changes (Kotter, 1990), based on shaping a vision and on connecting people, inspiring and encouraging them to act together.

Instead of the division of labour, rational utilisation of scarce resources, planning and supervisory mechanisms, and making and implementation of decisions, which are the characteristics of management, leadership rests on discovering a purpose, building a desirable future, and coordinating the collective. Management can thus be viewed as set of functions to be assumed in a position of formal authority, whereas leadership can be viewed as a phenomenon of relationship, bringing members of the collective together, and giving a purpose to collective action.

Some believe that the contrast between management and leadership is evident in the differences in the personalities and modes of operation of persons assuming one or the other role. According to such views, a leader is not an administrator, as compliance with rules and regulations is not an important part of their job description, whereas shaping new rules is. Unlike a manager, who maintains the system in order to attain objectives, a leader builds trust in order to accomplish a mission and change the organisation for the better. The leader aims to “do the right thing,” unlike the manager, who aims to “do things right” (Bennis, 2009).

Management underlines rationality and control: managers need analytic competences, persistence and consistency in their work, good problem-solving skills, and tolerance of others. In contrast, leaders are more open to possibilities, they create and accept new ideas, take a personal and active view of targets, and develop new approaches to old issues (e.g., Zeleznik, 1992).

The meanings of management and leadership collide and, in our view, it is a mistake to shape dichotomies describing antithetical traits of typical managers and leaders, placing them in separate, untouching categories. They are unquestionably separate phenomena or constructs, with different ways of materializing from the collective reality and different manifestations, narratives and symbolic spaces, yet they are often firmly interwoven and difficult to separate.

On the other hand, the inflation in the use of the word leadership and leader to refer to an ever-growing spectrum of roles, tasks and processes in organisations calls for caution. Leadership seems a better and more comprehensive response to most challenges and problems in an organisation than other constructs. Many members of the collective refer to themselves (or others refer to them) as leaders, thus increasing their confidence level and improving their social position in comparison with administrators, supervisors, foremen, bosses, managers, and the like. In most cases, however, their job roles lack the substance we have identified with leadership above: this is a semantic confusion that occurs because this term is more attractive than some others.

As Learmonth and Morrell (2020) have pointed out, “leader” is a positive and prestigious title in the modern world. It has the power to strengthen a person’s position and boost their influence in and outside of the collective, as well as to convincingly conceal the actual political interests and power relations in the organisation. This is true even though most “leaders” are not really leaders, as an analysis of their behaviour and job roles can confirm.

Extremes like Nelson Mandela’s and Mahatma Gandhi’s leadership in the influential collective actions that radically transformed the South African and Indian societies, and the managements of most commercial banks and other “machine bureaucracies,” are easier to recognise as archetypal examples of managerial consistency in assuming formal responsibility and in administrative coordination, with a high level of job standardisation.⁷ Between these two extremes, there is an impressively large area where leadership and management coexist, especially in organisations competing in the markets, or organisations facing substantial pressure from their environment or threats to their survival. Famous corporation founders and/or leaders like Apple’s Steve Jobs, Nike’s Phil Knight, Xerox’s Anne Mulcahy, SAP’s Henning Kaggerman, and many others, are examples of both successful leaders and excellent managers.

Succinctly, leadership encourages the formation of a new collective, or emerges in an existing collective to inspire, unite and steer its members in performing collective actions and accomplishing common goals.⁸

Depersonalized Leadership

In most cases, we personalize leadership, i.e., we associate it with leaders, their qualities and abilities, their position and the role in integration of the collective and creation of organizational future. Personalized leadership can be manifested in individual or collective leadership; it can be concentrated or dispersed; with a higher or lower level of decision-making discretion; with symmetrical or asymmetrical structure of power distributed within the organization.

Analysing leadership based on examples of behaviour of influential individuals is fairly common, both in practice and in popular literature.

Leadership can indeed be observed by correlating the success of an organisation with the traits and competencies of its upper echelons: they create and/or legitimise the strategic intent and make decisions of vital importance for the organization. In fact, many sociodemographic and psychological factors, as well as business experience and life experiences of those occupying the upper echelons certainly have a significant impact on the efficiency and performance of the organizations.

Nonetheless, one must not forget that the organization is a set of routines, processes and/or systems in which inputs are transformed into outputs. Its existence is affected by existing administrative mechanisms and structure, formally established rules of conduct and organizational settings, embedded culture and ideology, and non-formalized ways of acting and interacting with the surroundings.

Organizations relying predominantly on formalization of behaviour may end up bureaucratizing their governance processes, effectively reducing them to conduct that does not depend on any individual or group but on a well-established set of rules which are manifested through division of labour and adequate job specification, clear chain of command and communication, and standardization of different types of jobs. In some cases, this can lead to almost complete depersonalisation of strategic leadership.

Depersonalisation can also appear in a situation characterised by comprehensive decentralisation, where members of the collective act jointly in strategic processes, without any identifiable individual differences or clear hierarchical relations. This kind of strategic leadership, where the idea of individual contributions is lost as such, requires a high degree of indoctrination and homogenisation of the collective, strong agreement when it comes to direction of action, and developed decision-making mechanisms of direct democracy and participation.

Moreover, depersonalisation can also be observed in the forms of network leadership, especially those where there are no strong managerial nodes.

Depersonalisation of leadership can imply focus on the functions of leadership (and followership) rather than on the persons holding those functions. In this context, leadership is seen as a dynamic, highly-relational process emerging in diverse situations and aiming to acknowledge the non-existence or the mythological nature of leaders and followers as nouns or separate identities (Malakyan, 2015: 228). This kind of relational and process paradigm is, at first glance, distinct from the bureaucratic approach, but it actually shares with it a strong reliance on organisational (or group) settings and depersonalisation of leadership per se.

There is an actual duality of leadership in organisations.

Any leadership has its own depersonalised substance which is the result of specificities of bureaucratic structures and characteristics of the environment and the organisation, and which is reflected in the limitations and available decision-making discretion; however, it is also undisputed that prominent individuals, with their traits, knowledge and leadership styles, affect the way leadership is manifested.

The content and processes of leadership include in most cases personalisation and mechanisms of administration and management.

Duality of leadership can also be manifested in a completely different way: by distinguishing formal from emerging relationships within the organisation. This is where the contrast between the personal and the impersonal is manifested as a kind of structural paradox.

Incidentally, there is an interesting idea about the coexistence of two leadership structures, an idea developed within the complexity theory that postulates the existence of two connected but distinctly separate leadership phenomena. These are (1) leadership based on administrative structures and formal positions, and (2) adaptive leadership, which is based on the dynamics of relationships and complex interactions in social networks. Adaptive leadership, as underpinned by the advocates of that theory, plays a particularly important role in organisations where creation and dissemination of knowledge and information is a crucial determinant of their existence and development (Kriger & Zhovtobryukh, 2013; Uhl-Bien et al., 2007; Uhl-Bien & Marion, 2009).

Leadership as a Collective Attribute

A vast majority of theoretical and practical approaches to leadership belong to the discourse relying on the classic ontology. We can shed some light on what we think of as leadership by analysing certain determinants and relations in the categorical tripod “leader-follower-outcomes.” Whether it involves process aspects, relationships or characteristics of social actors and situations, the manifestation of leadership comes down to having and accepting authority, and to the influence that is supposed to result in desirable outcomes in the realisation of collective action.

The classic ontology is intuitively acceptable and, according to its advocates, helps us explain the different manifestations of leaderships, and discern recognisable behaviour patterns and typical relations that can help us build theoretical models with predictive potential, or find interpretations that provide an in-depth overview of the characteristics of the constituent elements of the categorical tripod and their interrelations in different situations. We believe, and we are not alone in this, that such ontic reality is not entirely satisfactory in providing a bigger and complete picture of leadership in the modern organisations of our time.⁹

Neo-Kantians like Dilthey, Ricker and Windelband maintain that “understanding,” or establishing connections between individual meaningful phenomena and a specific whole, is the basic principle of social sciences (unlike natural sciences, where the main principle is “explaining,” or establishing causally determined connections). The two differ by their treatment of phenomena: whereas the nature of phenomena in social sciences is individual and specific (they only occur once), their nature in social sciences is general, because they can be repeated ad infinitum (Supek, 1996: 79–80).

We are of the opinion that unclear definition boundaries mandate caution in the study of leadership: irrespective of the discourse we subscribe to, the important thing is to define the boundaries of the concept’s semantic space in order to adequately “understand” or “explain” what it is, what it can be, and how it relates to other phenomena.¹⁰ Peeling away the accumulated excess components of the definition seems an almost impossible task, as does implementing entirely new constitutive semantic formations. In doing so, we must accept the fact that nothing is immutable in the social environment: as a phenomenon, leadership can, and does, change over time, as do the meanings of leadership in the minds of everyone it concerns.

Leadership serves as an invisible integrative mechanism of an organisation (Barnard, 1938/1950), tremendously important in building a common worldview that helps the organisation survive as a coherent entity. Rather than an appendage or decoration, leadership is a substantive element that is essential to the collective’s existence; its function, as Peter Senge et al. (2007) perceptively noted, is to define the reality of the organisation.

It is also a complex, multilevel phenomenon that does not yield itself to simple direct observation (Weick, 1978; Yukl, 2006). We also know that leadership emerges from the collective as its essential component, whether the collective in question is a dyad, triad, a small group or a large one, a tribe or a religious congregation, an enterprise or a non-profit association, a national or international organisation, and so on.

Collective intentionality constitutes the essence of the collective, and efficient implementation of collective action through cooperation and coordination mechanisms in order to accomplish common goals constitutes its purpose. Leadership is the key to the coordination of collective action, and much more than (just) an activity by which one actor influences others in order to control their behaviour. Leadership is a crucial characteristic of the collective that essentially defines it.

Such a view can go against our intuition, which tells us to look for leadership in designed constellations where we can always recognise visible structures of formal and informal authority, as well as the actors who assume leader and follower roles, and the descriptions of behaviours in the established interrelations are known beforehand. It also demolishes the constructed reality built on such a definition of leadership, which is widespread.

On the other hand, how do we interpret situations distinguished by symmetric distributions of roles, where roles in the relationship of leadership are not clearly differentiable, or where the interrelations between the actors are dynamic, with the leader and the followers often changing places? How do we explain the widespread phenomena of shared and distributed leadership in teams and complex organisations?¹¹ Does leadership as such even exist if everyone in the collective assumes the role of the “leader” together?

There is also the concept of self-leadership, which is a result of the encouragement of autonomy, and empowerment of individuals to act without supervisory mechanisms.¹² Leaders’ intrapersonal relationships are not a frequently discussed topic in reference works in the field of organisation and management, even though some authors argue that they constitute a leadership problem par excellence (Kirkeby, 2008: 16).

Moreover, how is leadership manifested in strategic alliances and other constellations comprising multiple entities? Social network leadership also has specific traits that are not identifiable with the classic concept of authority, hierarchical relations and explicit “leader-follower” relations, and yet it exists as “leadership.”

Besides, how do we interpret a type of leadership where influence, as a generic attribute, takes on the form of serving people, a group or an organisation, and/or something that can be understood as a higher collective purpose?

Changes in circumstances at a time when new forms of organisation and association appear further emphasise the need for an ontological “expansion” so that we could study how leadership emerges as a collective trait that helps align the common activities undertaken by its members. Leadership is irreplaceable in building group identity and shaping the way how members will be united and directed towards the accomplishment of common goals. This does not have to be, and often is not, the result of one leader’s influence over the followers in the collective. The semantic universe of leadership needs to be expanded.

Tuomela (2007) underlines that unity in a collective depends on the existence of constitutive structures and a group agent that unites the collective and helps define it. The group agent rests on three footholds: the definition of key issues of interest for the collective (realm of concern) and the creation of an intentional horizon, which comprises answers to formulated questions that have been coordinated and accepted by the group, and the existence of an ethos linking the first two elements, which is recognisable in the main goals and in the commitment to the collective (Tuomela, 2007: 15, as cited in Laitinen, 2014). In such a definition of the collective, leadership is the group agent, but it cannot be understood (just) as a trait of the actors concerned, a relationship, a simple process, or influence in itself.

Leadership can be understood as an interactive social process in which decisions are made on what needs to be done and how to do it… that involves many different people influencing one another (Yukl, 2008: 4). The understanding of leadership as a dispersed complex process comprising multiple influences accentuates, in particular, the importance of the collective in the concept.

From the relational perspective, development of leadership can be understood as an improvement of leader-member exchange (LMX theory, e.g. Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995) or as the strengthening of the collective’s ability to create direction, collectivity and commitment through interactions in network relationships (Van Velsor et al., 2010; Cullen-Lester et al., 2017). This is in line with strategic leadership being viewed as an organisational characteristic that emerges as a shared or collective process (e.g., Pearce & Conger, 2003).

Since organisations are dynamic processes simultaneously creating and destroying shared meanings (Gray, 1985), leadership can also be understood as a way to align collective intentionality with the symbolic representation of the illusion of the organisation’s reality.

Drath et al. have offered one of the more interesting approaches to identifying “an alternative ontology” of leadership. Rather than uncritically accept the ontology that seeks the definition of leadership in the relationship leader-followers, in their view, leadership should be conceptualised around the ontic triad “direction-alignment-commitment” (DAC) (Drath et al., 2008).

The alternative ontology considers leadership an inalienable feature of the collective as a whole. Leadership is manifested (and exists) wherever there is direction, alignment, and commitment building in a collective, regardless of the possible reference to the asymmetric relationship of influence between members that shapes some individuals into leaders, and others into followers.

Direction, the first element of such an ontology, refers to common effort and understanding in the collective of its purpose, task, course of action, and idea about the future. Direction usually includes mission, vision, main policies and goals. It can be imposed on the members of the collective through authority and influence, but it can also be the result of adaptation, coordination and agreement between the members. The more involved the members are in defining the courses of action, the greater is their common understanding and value.

Alignment, the second element, is related to the organisation and coordination of knowledge and labour in the collective. Drath et al. (2008: 647) argue that larger organisations conduct collective alignment through structure and management functions (planning, budgeting etc), whereas smaller groups conduct it through mutual adaptation. Alignment helps make the collective’s activities coherent.

Commitment, the third and final element, refers to the preparedness of the members to subject their efforts and their own well-being to the common interest of the collective. Commitment depends on loyalty, devotion and identification of the members, and is usually manifested in the energy, effort and time invested in the performance of common tasks and jobs in the collective.

Individual and collective convictions on how direction, alignment and commitment are formed in the collective, and how these convictions lead to “leadership practices,” or the realisation of the three elements in the collective reality, are the key components of the “leadership framework”.

The following analogy about the development of leadership potentials offers a good illustration of the relationship of the two ontologies. The classic ontology gives importance to the development of the leader (in some theoretical approaches) by reinforcing the leader’s abilities to efficiently fulfil the leading role, and take on important processes in the relations with their followers. The alternative DAC ontology draws attention to the expansion of a collective’s leadership capacity. The objective is to continuously create direction, alignment and commitment through mutual interactions (Van Velsor et al., 2010).

Such a definition of the constitutive elements of leadership is easier to associate with the relational processes occurring at multiple levels in and outside of the organisation (Cullen-Lester et al., 2017: 131), as well as in the conditions in which the actors’ roles are alternating, shared or not distinguishable enough.

The alternative DAC ontology is similar to our view of leadership, based on the essential connection between collective intentionality and collective action (Fig. 2.2).

Fig. 2.2

Collective and leadership

In conclusion, leadership emerges as a coordination mechanism in collective action-taking, regardless of the existing constellations of authority and the distribution of roles between the actors.

It arises as a collective phenomenon wherein the removal of individual organisational groups cannot explain its true substance. It arises as a response to an identified need, problem or opportunity with which the organisation is faced. It is identified as a sort of “property” of the collective, the kind that is created in dynamic processes of leadership role swapping; it is constituted and modified through formal and informal relationships within the organisation. Hence, it comprises relations and structural patterns that emerge as the result of interaction between mutually dependent actors (Yammarino et al., 2012; Cullen-Lester & Yammarino, 2016).

The challenges of leadership increase with the number and complexity of the actions to be taken, and the level of uncertainty and variability in the collective’s environment.

Leadership implants desirable values, develops a culture of mutual understanding, and reinforces cohesion. It creates the frameworks for understanding, purpose and meaning of collective action (Jacobs & Jaques, 1987) and delivers symbols and stories that help shape and reinforce the collective identity.

Leadership inspires commitment in members and strengthens connections, provides a purpose, and aligns unity in collective action.