MGMT 8405M Week 10 Alternative Account Example

Leadership as Something Organizations Do Together: An Alternative Account Built on Distributed and Shared Leadership Research, Retried on the Term's Failure Cases, With What It Costs in Precision and Accountability

Student Name

Walden University

MGMT 8405M: Challenging Conventional Leadership and Influence

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Leadership as Something Organizations Do Together: An Alternative Account Built on Distributed and Shared Leadership Research, Retried on the Term's Failure Cases, With What It Costs in Precision and Accountability

The Account That Broke and Where

The account contested this term holds that the person at the top explains a large share of how an organization performs. It broke in four places. Its main quantitative evidence, variance shares aligned with executive tenures, could not separate executives from chance or from the conditions under which they were hired. In the bakery route consolidation examined in Week 5, the solution that produced the recovery came from a route supervisor, while the credit went to the chief executive. In the payroll case from Week 6, a specialist with no authority reversed a signed decision. And in the cooperative dispute from Week 7, the decisive influence was exercised through the terms of reference that shaped the agenda, a place a leader-centered account rarely looks. A replacement has to explain these cases better.

The Replacement, as Propositions

Gronn (2002) argued that leadership research should take distributed leadership, rather than the individual leader, as its unit of analysis. In his account, leadership often appears as concertive action: patterns of joint work in which several people's contributions combine, through spontaneous collaboration, intuitive working relations or institutionalized arrangements, into influence that no one of them exercises alone. Building on that program and on research on shared leadership in teams, the alternative account makes four claims.

Proposition 1. Organizational outcomes reflect influence exercised by many people across levels, including people without formal authority, and the share contributed by the top executive varies widely across decisions and settings (Gronn, 2002).

Proposition 2. Influence is often exercised through arrangements, such as agendas, review formats and testing routines, as much as through individual acts, so the unit of analysis should be the pattern of joint activity around a decision.

Proposition 3. Where leadership is shared among members of a team, team effectiveness tends to be higher, particularly for complex work (Carson et al., 2007; Wang et al., 2014).

Proposition 4. Credit for outcomes is assigned through attribution processes that favor visible individuals, so attributed leadership will systematically overstate the contribution of formal leaders.

Each Failure Case, Retried

The bakery case fits Propositions 1 and 4 directly. The recovery came from an exchange: the chief executive set the problem and accepted revision, a supervisor designed and tested the solution and the operations director carried it upward. A distributed account treats that exchange as the leadership, and it predicts the misattribution the trade press produced. The payroll case fits Proposition 1: influence flowed from expertise and a parallel test, through a controller, to a committee. The cooperative case fits Proposition 2: the most consequential influence was exercised through the terms of reference, an arrangement rather than an act. And the variance-share problem looks different under this account. If performance reflects many people's contributions, the share attributable to one executive should be modest and should vary with how much of the joint activity the executive actually shapes, which is what the critique of decomposition estimates and the evidence on executive latitude together suggest.

The team-level evidence offers support beyond the term's cases. Carson et al. (2007), studying 59 consulting teams, found that shared leadership emerged where teams had shared purpose, social support and voice, together with external coaching, and that it predicted team performance as rated by clients. Wang et al. (2014), cumulating 42 samples, found that teams sharing leadership tended to be more effective overall, and more so when their members' work was complex.

What the Replacement Gives Up

The alternative is not free. First, it loses precision. A leader-centered account makes a simple prediction, that changing the leader changes results, and the hospitalization evidence shows that prediction is partly right. A distributed account predicts that results depend on patterns of joint activity, which are harder to measure and compare across firms. Second, it makes accountability harder to locate. Boards, investors and the public want someone to hold responsible. If leadership is distributed, so is responsibility, and the account must say how organizations should assign it without returning to a single heroic figure. Third, it struggles with established findings. The effect of CEO absence on profitability is hard to explain if no single person's contribution is large, and the account must concede that in some settings, such as young or family-controlled firms, the top executive's share of the joint activity is large. Fourth, much of its supporting evidence is at the team level, and moving from teams to whole organizations is a step the research has not fully taken.

A Study That Could Choose Between Them

The two accounts make different predictions about the same events. A study could compare the effects of absences at different levels: CEO hospitalizations, as in the existing work, alongside comparable absences of plant managers, product engineers and supervisors, measured at the unit level. The leader-centered account predicts that only the CEO's absence matters much for firm performance. The distributed account predicts that absences of people central to joint activity matter for the units they serve, and that the CEO's effect is largest where the CEO is most involved in that activity. Combined with network data on who works with whom on key decisions, such a study could estimate how concentrated influence actually is.

Closing

The replacement explains the term's failure cases better than the account it replaces, but it trades a simple story for a harder one, and the costs should be weighed rather than ignored.

References

Carson, J. B., Tesluk, P. E., & Marrone, J. A. (2007). Shared leadership in teams: An investigation of antecedent conditions and performance. Academy of Management Journal, 50(5), 1217-1234. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2007.20159921

Gronn, P. (2002). Distributed leadership as a unit of analysis. Leadership Quarterly, 13(4), 423-451. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1048-9843(02)00120-0

Wang, D., Waldman, D. A., & Zhang, Z. (2014). A meta-analysis of shared leadership and team effectiveness. Journal of Applied Psychology, 99(2), 181-198. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0034531