DRAFT: Exploring leadership for collaboration
College of Social Sciences
Centre for Public Service Partnerships
Exploring leadership for collaboration
A Working Paper from the
Centre for Public Service Partnerships
Helen Sullivan, Paul Williams
and Stephen Jeffares
Centre for Public Service Partnerships
Park House
40 Edgbaston Park Road
Edgbaston
Birmingham B15 2RT
Tel. 0121 414 8972
Email:
Web: www.cpsp.bham.ac.uk
April 2009
DRAFT: Exploring leadership for collaboration
Draft
Please do not cite without permission of the authors
Professor Helen Sullivan and Dr Stephen Jeffares
Centre for Public Service Partnerships
University of Birmingham
Dr Paul Williams
Cardiff School of Management
University of Wales Institute, Cardiff
DRAFT: Exploring leadership for collaboration
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the contribution of the 34 health and local government managers and academics whose participation enabled us to undertake the pilot. We would also like to thank Wayne Jepson (NLIAH) for his help in facilitating the Q sort and Sian Harrop-Griffiths (NLIAH) for her ongoing support for our work researching collaboration in Wales.
Abstract
Collaboration is an essential element of 21st century governance and management. However it is also fraught with potential difficulty, requiring careful design, development and management. This paper attempts to provide new insights into the relationship between leadership and collaboration. It focuses on a simple question – What is leadership for collaboration? A review of existing literature is undertaken. This identifies some key issues including the role of context and the nature of a particular set of competencies for leadership for collaboration, and also highlights questions for further exploration. The literature review provides the basis for a pilot Q study of 34 health and local government managers and academics. The findings of this study suggest some consistencies and differences with the current literature, particularly in relation to context and competencies, though other issues such as process are identified. The implications of the pilot study for future work are presented and discussed.
Contents
Introduction 1
Review of the literature 2
The general leadership literature 2
Distributed and shared leadership 5
Collaborative leadership 6
Leadership in inter-organisational contexts 8
Key issues and themes in the literature 12
Q Method 14
What is leadership for collaboration? A pilot study 17
The four factors 18
Conclusions 22
The factors and the literature 22
Developing the Q set 23
References 25
Appendix 1:
Q-Set What is Leadership for Collaboration (LfC)? 30
Appendix 2:
Q set recording sheet 32
Appendix 3:
Leadership for Collaboration Q Group Discussion Questions 33
Appendix 4
Factor Q sort values 34
Appendix 5:
Factor loadings by respondents 36
Appendix 6:
Revised Q sort 37
DRAFT: Exploring leadership for collaboration
Introduction
Collaboration is now ubiquitous in discussions of public policy, governance and management (Agranoff and McGuire 2003; Crosby and Bryson 2005a; Rainey 2003). Political, economic and social changes, including globalization, Europeanization, urbanization, and changes to the composition, orientation and sophistication of citizens, have made a significant impact on how societies are governed (Denters and Rose 2005; Garcia 2006). Discourses of neo-liberalism (Jessop 2002) and co-governance (Newman 2005) have shaped these impacts in different (and competing) ways but both emphasise the interdependence of actors and institutions from the public, private, voluntary and community sectors in meeting contemporary public policy challenges.
Advocates of collaboration argue that its value to successful governing and managing is manifold and includes: making better use of resources and reducing transaction costs; combining diverse expertise and experience to enhance the service offered or product provided; evolving a more inclusive process that builds trust and social capital; generating collective ownership of solutions; promoting innovation, knowledge creation and transfer; and fostering the ability to deliver synergistic outcomes (Gray 1989). Balancing or prioritising these different potential values determines the shape and nature of collaboration in any given context. Who undertakes this balancing or prioritisation is an important question as in collaborative contexts the sources of power are diffuse and various, power relationships are contested and negotiated, and no one individual or organization has formal authority over all others. In addition, actors’ motivations, purposes, values and objectives may be multiple and divergent.
So while collaboration may be an essential element of 21st century governance, it is also fraught with potential difficulty, requiring careful design, development and management (Agranoff and McGuire 2001; Kickert et al 1997; O’Toole 1996). This paper explores one dimension of this - leadership. Leadership, like collaboration, has received considerable attention from academics and others in recent years and some writers have begun to explore the relationship between leadership and collaboration (e.g. Armistead et al 2007; Connelly 2007; Crosby and Bryson 2005b; and Peck and Dickinson 2008). However these explorations remain relatively undeveloped and fragmented. They also vary in their empirical bases.
This paper attempts to provide new insights into the relationship between leadership and collaboration. It focuses on a simple question – What is leadership for collaboration? - and brings together published and primary research to provide some initial answers. A review of existing literature is undertaken. This identifies some key issues and questions for further exploration. This review then provides the basis for a pilot Q study of health and local government managers and academics. The findings of this study and the implications for future work are presented and discussed.
Review of the Literature
Three particular streams or bodies of knowledge were identified in the literature review. The general literature on leadership is extensive and contested but comprises a number of coherent and distinct theoretical perspectives which may or may not be applied in collaborative settings. ‘Distributed’ or ‘shared leadership’ is one aspect of this general literature that has attracted attention from academics, policy makers and practitioners concerned with collaboration. Then there is a relatively recent stream of literature termed ‘collaborative leadership’ which may feature in inter and intra - organisational settings. Lastly, a number of researchers offer contributions on ‘leadership in inter-organisational contexts’ where the focus is on cross-sector and multi-organisational collaborations of various types.
The general leadership literature
We consider the general leadership literature through the key approaches that have dominated in the last half century (Parry and Bryman 2006; Palmer and Hardy 2002). Trait based leadership identifies the personal characteristics and qualities of leaders as opposed to those of non-leaders and assumes that leaders are ‘born rather than made’, but as Van Wart (2003:216) comments: “without situational specificity, the endless list of traits offers little prescriptive assistance and descriptively becomes little more than a laundry list”. Style based leadership (Blake and Moulton 1964) moves the focus from the personal characteristics of leaders to their observable leadership behaviours, and two underlying behavioural styles characterise this type of leadership - consideration for subordinates and initiating styles. Contingency theories (Hersey and Blanchard 1984; Fiedler 1967; Hughes et al 1996; Vroom and Yetton 1973) place situational factors at the centre of any understanding and try to determine the factors that might modify the effectiveness of different leadership approaches, such as the nature of the work undertaken, the characteristics of the followers, or the nature of the external environment.
‘New leadership’ theories include charismatic (Bryman 1992), transformational (Peters and Waterman 1982), transactional and visionary (Bass 1990; Avolio and Bass 1988; Kouzes and Posner 1997; Kotter 1988). Although there are significant differences between them, they share a view of leaders as managers of meaning, articulating organizational realities through visions, missions and core values, as opposed to being influencers of the process. Transactional and transformational leadership are sometimes viewed as a dichotomy (Burns 1978) with the former understood as an exchange relationship between leaders and followers, with leaders employing behaviours to incentivise high performance and minimise poor performance amongst followers. The transformational approach centres on a leader’s ability to inspire others to higher moral conduct through visioning, meaning making and trust building.
Charismatic leadership is influenced by leader traits and behaviour, the situational context and the needs of the followers. Charismatic leaders have high self confidence and a conviction in their own beliefs; articulate ideological goals for subordinates; appeal to the hopes and ideals of followers; communicate high expectations; and arouse motives related to an organisation’s mission. Charismatic leadership is dependent on the follower’s trust in the correctness of the leader’s beliefs and the similarity of the follower’s beliefs to the leader’s beliefs; and it relies on cementing an emotional involvement of followers to the mission of the organisation as a means of heightening performance.
Elements of the above resonate with the leadership demands of collaborative settings. For instance, Hambleton et al (2001) drew on style perspectives (based on observable behaviours) to develop a three-fold typology of leadership styles in partnerships – designed and focused, implied and fragmented, and emergent and formative. They argue that these styles are influenced primarily by the policy environment, partnership arrangements, personal characteristics and relationship with followers.
Similarly, contingency approaches offer a way to understand how the particular features of collaborative contexts may influence leadership possibilities and requirements. The relationship between leaders and followers seems to be particularly important where ‘followers’ may be situated in a number of different organizations subject to different operating rules and accountabilities, and the web of power relationships is distributed in subtle and complicated forms that are most certainly not hierarchical.
Finally, leadership approaches that focus on clarifying and negotiating shared meanings together with efforts to ‘transform’ autonomous and often uncoordinated actions into a more coherent, collective and collaborative process also have relevance for collaborative settings.
However the generic leadership literature is limited in its relevance to collaboration. This is partly because of the attention paid to particular kinds of individuals - ‘heroic’ leaders - who offer clear direction, purpose and answers to public policy problems. This evokes a leader–follower relationship with a clear demarcation between the respective groups of individuals and functions, something not always evident in collaborations where often there is ‘no-one-in-charge’ (Bryson and Crosby 2006). In addition these individuals tend to be the elite, occupying senior positions in organisations and attracting their power from their position, status and control over resources, with leadership manifest as unidirectional, top down and hierarchical. In collaborative settings leaders may come from outside the established elite and may draw their leadership authority from quite different sources (Barnes et al 2005).
Distributed and shared leadership
Distributed (Brown and Gioia 2002), dispersed and shared (Pearce and Conger 2003) leadership approaches represent important developments in the leadership literature as they reject the notion of heroic leaders and a focus on top management, instead emphasising the need to turn followers into leaders through the development of leadership processes and skills in others. Hence, leadership practices are viewed as a relational process shared or distributed at different levels dependent on social interaction and networks of influence; leadership is seen as more of a dynamic group phenomenon, multi-directional and embedded in the context within which it occurs.
Distributed leadership is not related to individual achievement but to collective achievement, shared responsibility and teamwork; followers play a role in influencing and creating leadership; it leads to mutual learning, greater shared understanding and positive action; and the focus is on distributing the tasks and responsibilities of leadership up, down and across the hierarchy (Fletcher and Kaufer 2003). This view of leadership is embraced by Hosking and Morley who define it as “a more or less skilful process of organizing, achieved through negotiation, to achieve acceptable influence over the description and handling of issues between groups” (1991:240). Therefore, those people who make contributions of this kind can be considered to be leaders, and skilful leadership is the product of focused attention on the cognitive and political qualities of three major leadership processes – networking, negotiation and enabling.
Gronn (2002) identifies the value of distributed leadership as the way in which individuals voluntarily attribute influencing power to other individuals in the organisation - an aggregate of separate individuals to small sets of individuals acting in concert or larger pluralistic member organizational units. For Thorpe et al (2008) distributed leadership is associated with an openness of the boundaries of leadership, and a presumption that varieties of expertise are spread across the many rather than the few.
Distributed leadership would appear to resonate well with the demands of working in collaborative environments particularly their non hierarchical nature where a number of different stakeholders have legitimate power; where negotiation and consensus seeking strategies are important in the search for common purpose; where expertise and knowledge are dispersed amongst a range of professionals and agencies; where much activity takes place in groups and teams; and where mutual learning, shared understandings and inter-personal relationships are paramount.
However, Spillane (2006) cautions against an easy acceptance of distributed leadership for collaboration arguing that: “while collaborative leadership is by definition distributed, all distributed leadership is not necessarily collaborative. Indeed, a distributed perspective allows for leadership that can be more collaborative or less collaborative, depending on the situation” (2006:23).
Collaborative leadership
There is an emerging literature that can be loosely grouped under the banner of ‘collaborative leadership’ and which applies equally to both intra- and inter-organizational contexts. It seeks to reflect the increasing interdependence and connectivity in public governance and management and the limitations of traditional hierarchical approaches to leadership. For instance, Lipman-Blumen (1996) takes up the challenge of devising a new leadership approach to reflect the tensions between two antithetical forces – interdependence and diversity. She rejects individualistic, competitive, manipulative and charismatic leadership strategies in favour of what she refers to as ‘connective leadership’. She proposes a model based on three general categories or sets of behaviours used by individuals to achieve their objectives – a direct set, closely related to various forms of diversity and expressions of individualism, a relational set, which emphasises identification with others, and an instrumental set, which provides a source of ethically rooted action to harmonise the contradictory forces of diversity and interdependence.