Case Scenario:
Based on the webinar and article (provided below) covering complexity theory and leadership, answer the given questions.
1. From your perspective, what are 3 major components of Complexity Theory. Explain each.
2. Identfy 3 differences between a complexity perspective of leadership and traditional perspectives of leadership?
Use the following section headings: Major Components of Complexty Theory; Complexity Theory vs. Traditional Perspectives of Leadership
The role of leadership in emergent, self-organization:
Abstract:
As complex systems, organizations exist far from equilibrium where the ongoing interaction of system components leads to emergent and self-organizing behavior. What, then, is the role of leadership in systems where change often emerges in unexpected ways? In this paper, we build on the work of Marion and Uhl-Bien who suggest that in complex systems leaders enable rather than control the future. While traditional views of leadership focus on the leader's responsibility for determining and directing the future through heavy reliance on control mechanisms, we offer empirical support for a different view of leadership based on a complexity perspective of organizations. Our findings show that as enablers, leaders disrupt existing patterns of behavior, encourage novelty, and make sense of emerging events for others. The results of our qualitative study include a set of research propositions as well as a discussion of the implications for managers and researchers.
© 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Leadership; Complexity theory; Emergence; Self-organization
I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity Gilda Radner although many would agree that life is ambiguous, the study of leadership in organizations has often been approached as if leaders should know what is going to happen next, as if effective leaders can eliminate the ambiguity that characterizes much of organizational life. Traditional views of leadership grow out of the long-held view of organizations as equilibrium-seeking systems whose futures are knowable and arrived at by leaders who plan interventions and control behaviors (Stacey, 1992; Wheatley, 1999). However, in recent years complexity theory has made its way into organizational science, challenging this linear, mechanistic view of organizations with analogies from the physical sciences of systems whose future states are unpredictable and full of surprise (Anderson, 1999; McKelvey, 1999; Richardson & Cilliers, 2001). A central principal of complexity theory is emergent self-organization, whereby systems achieve order because multiple local agents interact and those interactions produce unintended outcomes without the intervention of a central controller (Chiles, Meyer, & Hench, 2004). Thus, organizations take on properties and structures that are unexpected (McKelvey & Lichtenstein, in press) because people and groups interact and the results of those interactions produce perpetual novelty. What, then, is the role of leadership in complex organizations? If leaders cannot predict and control the organization's future, what do leaders do? In this paper, we present a theoretical framework for re-conceptualizing leadership in complex adaptive organizations based on the work of McKelvey (1999), Maguire & McKelvey (1999), Marion & Uhl-Bien (2001), McKelvey & Lichtenstein (in press), and others. We base our framework on: (1) characteristics of complex adaptive systems, whose central feature is emergence, and (2) observations from a qualitative case study of a dying organization that underwent a major unintended radical change, which ultimately proved successful in reversing the decline (Plowman, Baker, Beck, Kulkarni, Solansky, & Travis, 2007). The case study on emergent radical change provided us the unique opportunity to re-visit our data and observe closely what it was that the leaders, who did not initiate the radical change, actually did as the organization's future was emerging. The research question driving this study was how do leaders enable emergent, self-organization?
We begin with an overview of complex adaptive systems, with particular focus on emergent, self-organization. A review of existing leadership literature, however, confirms that most approaches to the study of leadership emphasize the role of leaders in directing organizations towards seemingly knowable and controllable futures. In this study we rely on a qualitative theory development approach (Miles & Huberman, 1994; Yin, 2003) and find support for Marion & Uhl-Bien's (2001) notion that complex leaders enable rather than control desirable futures. Further, we identify three mechanisms that the leaders used and seven specific actions they took as enablers of productive futures. Our findings allow us to offer theoretical propositions for use in further research on leadership in complex adaptive systems.
1. Literature review:
The topic of leadership remains popular in spite of years of criticism from organizational scholars. For example, in their highly cited paper, Kerr & Jermier (1978) minimized the significance of leadership by identifying “substitutes” for leadership. Yet, twenty-seven years later, publications like Harvard Business Review and others continue to devote considerable space to articles on leadership, such as a recent paper by Quinn (2005) who identified the qualities that enable one to enter the “fundamental state of leadership.” More than twenty years ago Meindl, Ehrlich & Dukerich (1985) argued that people romanticize leadership and often attribute to leadership otherwise ambiguous organizational events. However, 16 years later, authors such as Collins (2001) argue that organizational greatness is due to one fundamental ingredient: leadership; and in book after book, Kotter (1985, 1990, 1996) argues it is leaders who make organizational transformation happen by directing the change. While organizational scholars continue to debate how important leadership is, the emerging view of organizations as complex adaptive systems challenges the fundamental premise of what leadership is. Before comparing the assumptions of traditional theories of leadership with those of a complexity theory view of leadership, we offer a brief summary of complex adaptive systems and its central organizing principal: emergent, self-organization.
1.1. Complex adaptive systems: An overview
Complexity theory originally developed in the physical sciences where scientists were attempting to understand the complexity of nature, and increasingly found linear models to be ineffective in capturing the complex and emergent nature of phenomenon (Ashby, 1962; Holland, 1995; Kauffman, 1995; Prigogine, 1997). Observing that emergence and perpetual novelty exist throughout nature gave rise to the identification of common characteristics of complex adaptive systems because “in our world we discover fluctuations, bifurcations, and instabilities at all levels” (Prigogine,1997, p. 55). Some of the characteristics of complex adaptive systems include: (1) they are made up of many agents who act and interact with each other in unpredictable ways, (2) they are sensitive to changes in initial conditions, (3) they adjust their behavior in the aggregate to their environment in unpredictable ways, (4) they oscillate between stability and instability, and (5) they produce emergent actions when approaching disequilibrium. Additionally, complex systems are dynamic and non-linear, and rarely explained by simple cause–effect relationships. Organizational theorists have begun to conceptualize organizations as complex adaptive systems (Anderson, 1999; McKelvey, 2001; Stacey, 1992; Wheatley, 1999) and increasingly reject the more traditional, mechanistic view of organizations because the simple models of classic science it is based on are unworkable (Marion & Uhl-Bien, 2001).
Rather, organizations exist in conditions of instability, and as organizations move further away from equilibrium towards instability, they are capable of highly complex behavior.