Purpose-driven Organizations by Carlos Rey & Miquel Bastons & Phil Sotok

Author:Carlos Rey & Miquel Bastons & Phil Sotok
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783030176747
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Challenging the Hierarchical Leadership

The traditional leadership models have a common characteristic: they are all hierarchical. These models understand leadership as a top-down process from those with more formal power (i.e., the managers) to those with less formal power (i.e., the employees). Through decades of development, employees have been granted a more proactive role in this process, evolving from mere subordinates, to followers, and finally, to collaborators. The results are clear: the more proactive employees can become, the better is the resulting performance.17 However, the dynamic is essentially the same: only the person in the highest position of the hierarchy can exercise leadership. Even in the case of empowering leaders, that is, leaders who share some aspects of the decision-making power, leadership is a privilege reserved only to the top position in the relationship.

In a business world characterized by accelerated transformation, the trend of leaders becoming less authoritarian and collaborators becoming more proactive is self-evident. The traditional idea of a leader at the top—or any position in the middle—is that of the one who knows best where and how to react to the changes in the market. This now, at the very least, is controversial. But the hierarchical model resists, and leaders remain attached to hierarchical power, even at the expense of losing leadership potential in the organization. Mainstream research keeps digging in the same direction: revisiting the benefits of empowerment, proactivity, and employee voice, without solving the structural problem that results from confining the leadership role to a single person in power.

However, the association between leadership and hierarchy is a self-imposed limitation on the essence of leadership as an influence relationship. Leadership can be exercised top-down, laterally, and/or bottom-up, as long as people involved in the relationship accept their role and responsibilities. Besides, sharing leadership does not necessarily damage the benefits of a hierarchical structure. Indeed, hierarchies have a managerial and controlling function that does not overlap with the leadership process. Hierarchies are in place wherever there is a need to exercise power. But leadership is not about power. In fact, power-based leadership only produces poor leadership results, such as in the case of transactional leadership. PDL, a deep relationship of mutual influence that creates a real sense of purpose, is based on trust. And trust does not require any particular position of power. Even those in a position of power need to exercise their power in a way that does not destroy trust because managers cannot force true commitment using their power, but only by engaging in trustworthy behaviors.18

The main problem is: how do we create co-leadership dynamics within an organizational structure? Although shared leadership processes have been studied for a long time, they usually operate in contexts that lack hierarchical structures, like in the case of self-managed teams.19 The results of these studies show some advantage to shared leadership as compared to hierarchical leadership in areas such as task satisfaction, but generally fail to deliver better performance results. As a result, shared leadership still remains largely in the

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