BOSSES WITHOUT BORDERS: A SYSTEMIC FRAMEWORK FOR CONSIDERING CURRENT LEADERSHIP MODELS AND THEIR ALIGNMENT TO ORGANIZATIONAL NEEDS IN THE KNOWLEDGE ERA ECONOMY

摘要

Leadership theory and research remains predominantly role-based, revolving around the leader-manager 'person' and the follower-managed 'persons.' But is it possible that complex teams solving wicked problems require a leadership model more robust than the top-down, bureaucratic paradigm? Today's organization needs new ways to lead teams, decoupled from hierarchy, fostering robust inquiry and innovation; even enabling constructive resistance. The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review of current leadership literature and to subject each of the main perspectives on leadership to the scrutiny of a systems thinking lens. This paper explores the alignment of the dominant leadership models to the hyper-turbulent context that is the knowledge era economy. This paper questions whether reductionist approaches to modeling leadership have reached their limits and posits that holistic, constructionist models of leadership show the most promise for continued scholarly inquiry.