Leadership Articles Summary
Putting emergence back in leadership emergence: a dynamic, multilevel, process-oriented framework
(Acton et al., 2019)
Consistent with the growing emphasis on short-lived, self-managed groups in which leadership is not
ascribed but rather emerges informally, the authors focus on leadership emergence = the process by
which individuals become influential in the perceptions of others.
Traditional leadership emergence research paradigm: leadership resides in a person (trait).
- Members interact while carrying out a task and the a leader emerges from the group at the
end of the discussion period.
- Does not follow from the current view of leadership as a mutual social influence process.
Authors develop a process oriented perspective of leadership emergence.
- Leadership emergence is more than a trait, an exchange, or a symbol. Leadership emerges
through dynamic interactions at multiple levels.
Early work by Bales (1953) captured three crucial components of emergence:
1. Emergence is multilevel = composed of individual unites (i.e., group members) who together
form larger collectives (i.e., small groups).
2. It includes the mechanisms that underlie the dynamic interactions of the process (i.e.,
sharing information).
3. It captures temporal dynamics, or the notion that emergence takes time to move through
problem phases.
EMERGENCE THEORY
Emergence has been defined in many different ways, but recently Goldstein (1999) identified six
properties of emergent phenomena across disciplines:
1. Qualitative novelty = features not previously observed at the micro level
2. Coherence = integrated wholes that maintain identity over time
3. Global/macro level = locus of the phenomena at a higher level
4. Dynamic = new attractors arise over time
5. Ostensive = recognisable phenomena
6. Supervenience = the asymmetrical relation between two levels
From an emergence perspective, leadership emergence is defined as the multilevel interactional
process driven by deep level cognitive and perceptual processes of group members that form a
collective patterning of leader and follower interactions over time.
- Collective emergence = group behaviour is constituted by individual action, yet cannot be
reduced to the individual level.
- Individualist emergence = the emergent outcome can always be reduced to individuals and
their relationships.
The notion of levels is central to understanding the emergent phenomena.
- The goal is to understand the process of emergence through system dynamics across
multiple levels simultaneously.
- Wiley’s notion of four levels of subjectivity to bridge the micro to the macro level.
Allow for better understanding and appreciation of the fundamentally interactive nature
of leadership emergence through emphasis on the importance of interaction, structure,
and context.
,Level 1: Intra-subjective (individual) = concerned with the constantly emerging nature of the self.
- Characteristics of the individual are expected to vary systematically within a person, across
events, or over time, as in the development of a leadership identity.
Level 2: intersubjective (interactive) = concerns the relation and impact of one individual to another.
- Is emergent upon the interchange and synthesis of two, or more, communicating selves.
- The process and substance of leadership sense-making is shaped during interactions.
Level 3: generic subjective (social) = focuses on the demands, constraints, and objectives placed on
the individual as a function of the immediate social setting.
Level 4: extra-subjective (macro culture) = focus shifts from the subjective experiences of individuals
to pure meaning, which is an abstract idealised reality.
- Most abstract level.
Authors identify three emergence principles based on above-mentioned theory
1. Elemental properties of the emergent process
- Elements can represent everything from neurons and cognitions to attitudes, behaviours,
information, and events.
- Are critical to understanding an emergent process because they serve as the micro-level
building blocks to a higher-level outcome.
- Intra-subjective level of Wiley’s theory of levels.
2. Mechanisms involved in the emergence process
- The elemental properties provide lower-level “ingredients” to the emergence process, but do
not capture the how and why these elements function together to form the higher-level
emergence outcome.
- Therefore, we also need to define the processes by which they are coordinated.
- Similar to Wiley’s intersubjective level, the elements are transformed through interaction.
- The “rules” that determine how the leadership emergence process unfolds.
3. Form/function of the emergence outcome
- Any emergence process cannot be adequately understood without defining the appropriate
form/function of the eventual outcome.
- It describes the dynamics of the phenomenon after it has emerged.
- Although emergent phenomena like leadership emergence are often treated as stable once
they emerge, they may in fact demonstrate “within-team variability over time, growth
trajectories, and/or other types of trajectories”.
Consistent with Wiley’s notion that emergence does not just happen once and then stops
The elements (principle 1), the interactions (principle 2), and the dynamics of the emergent
outcome (principle 3) are all necessary to gain a complete understanding of any emergent
property.
INTEGRATIVE FRAMEWORK OF LEADERSHIP EMERGENCE
Three levels of leadership emergence are incorporated into the theoretical framework: Individual,
Relational, and Collective.
Fundamental mechanisms
The emergence process mechanisms (principle 2) can be labelled as self-structures and enacted
structures.
, 1. Self-structures = cognitions related to how individuals produce, process, and understand
information about the self (e.g., self-identity, self-concept).
2. Enacted structures = the behaviours, expressions, and communications that are performed
to support an ongoing social construction process between leaders and followers.
Sensemaking = the process by which individuals perceive and ultimately organise complex
information into a coherent narrative, and the narrative they construct often reflects their personal
identity-work.
Sense giving = the process by which a constructed meaning is conveyed (transported) to others.
- Becomes particularly important within a collective leadership context where each individual
has enacted a unique understanding of leadership and followership.
- Concerns how individuals influence others into adapting their definition of organisational
reality.
Both are seen as social activities, in that individuals use action to construct both self-
understandings (sensemaking), as well as shape the understanding of others (sense-giving).
They inform both self-structures and enacted structures and thus occur within the
processes related to enacted structures.
1. Individual level
Self-structure (self-views, self-schema, and self-identity)
According to these perspectives, how individuals proceed to act as both leaders and followers within
a collective is largely a function of how they view themselves as a leader within a given domain.
- Individuals specifically rely on self-schemas, which are cognitive structures that shape the
affective, cognitive, and behavioural responses of individuals in each context.
Are domain specific (e.g., leadership domain), and they serve to help individuals retrieve
necessary information to adapt to changing goals within a given social context.
- Self-schemas are activated by specific situational cues and primes (context).
Depending on particular social context, people will shift between leader and follower
schemas.
E.g., if a person is working with someone of higher social status, they may activate a
follower self-schema, while they may activate a leader self-schema when interacting with
someone of lower status.
Leadership self-schemas are likely to be activated as a function of both the task
environment and the other individuals within the collective.
E.g., race of others, gender, task requirements.
- There is also between-person variability in the strength of self-schema within a given domain
depending on the prior experience of individuals.
Strength of a self-schema depends on the extent to which individuals can:
(a) process information about the self in the given domain with relative ease,
(b) retrieve behavioural evidence from the domain,
(c) predict their own future behaviour in the domain, and
(d) resist counter schematic information about themselves.
Therefore, individuals with a more developed leadership self-schema related to a given
context will be more likely to enact a leadership role early in the leadership emergence
process.
, - Identity development involves a deeper structure than leadership claims and social grants of
leadership. Constructing situated identities in any area, including leadership, is a complex
self-regulatory process that engages many self-motives, involves affect and cognitive
processes, and involves crafting a self-narrative that will be socially accepted (these are
motivational states).
Proposition 1: The activation of a leadership self-schema at a particular point in time will depend on
context at that time, prior experience in similar contexts, and motivational states.
Proposition 2: The activation of a followership self-schema at a particular point in time will depend
on context at that time, prior experience in similar contexts, and motivational states.
- Activation of follower self-schema depends on factors similar to those in proposition 1.
Enacted structure
The primary process mechanism underlying enacted processes is the contribution towards the group
task.
- Group context signals what needs to be considered to deduce appropriate sense-giving
behaviours, which provide direction and foster integration that enables group effectiveness.
- At an early state in the emergence process, individuals are performing actions based on their
prior experiences within that context, not the social confirmation or denial of others.
Thus, initially the amount and type of leadership acts performed by individuals are
expected to be largely a function of their leadership self-schema.
The probability of a leader behaviour by a particular person at one time depends on both
leader and follower self-schemas.
Proposition 3: The probability that an individual will perform a leadership behaviour at a specific time
will be based on whether the activation of their leader self-schema is greater than their follower self-
schema at that time.
2. Relational level
Self-structure
The critical change that occurs in moving from the individual to the relational level is that an
individual’s leader self-identity has an increasingly important social component.
- The individual’s “claim” of leadership is “granted” by others within a collective is critical to
determining whether they will maintain a leader identity.
- Different individuals may hold different leadership prototypes, creating ambiguity in how
they interpret and respond to group activities.
Authors argue that this process of social confirmation is driven in part by the self-schemas of
followers.
- If the actions of a leader activate a follower self-schema in others, then the leader identity of
the prospective leader is socially confirmed.
- Importance of followers’ Implicit Leadership Theory = an individual is more likely to perceive
someone else as leader when the prospective leader’s behaviours coincide with the
follower’s expectations for leadership.
If there is a match between the characteristics and behaviours of the prospective leader
and the leadership prototype of perceivers, then they will apply the category “leader” to
the social target depending on the goodness of fit to their ILT.
Proposition 4: Leadership perception for a specific individual at a specific time will be based on the
match between the perceiver’s ILT and the prospective leader’s perceived characteristics.
