Empson & Alvehus: Collective leadership dynamics among professional peers: Co-constructing an unstable equilibrium Flashcards
What is this article about?
Professional service firms (PSFs) are characterised by contingent and contested power relations among an extended group of professional peers. Studies of such firms can therefore
yield important insights for the literatures on collective leadership and leader–follower relations.
Method: interviews in 15 countries with senior professionals in the professional services industry
What did they find?
What are the dynamics through which professional
peers co-construct collective leadership? – we have identified three relational processes:
legitimising, negotiating, and manoeuvring. Legitimising expresses the relational process
whereby professionals develop leader identity. Negotiating and manoeuvring express how
professionals develop leader authority; the former is concerned with overt actions to enhance
formal authority and the latter is concerned with more covert political actions to enhance
informal influence. These express three different aspects of contested and contingent power
relations within PSFs. Taken together they explain how collective leadership is co-constructed
among professional peers.
n answering our second research question – How do changes in underlying power relations
among professional peers serve to stabilise and destabilise collective leadership dynamics
over time? – we have demonstrated how the collective leadership dynamics constitute an
unstable equilibrium, as a result of the instability in the relational processes and power
relations that underlie them. At any moment, each relational process encompasses a
potentially destabilising tension between how a professional in a leadership position acts, and
how their peers experience, interpret and react to these actions, and this can potentially trigger
a shift in power relations. Over time, the destabilisation of one relational process potentially
destabilises the collective leadership dynamics as a whole. The co-construction of leadership
in PSFs is, therefore, unstable both at a moment in time and over time.
