Fit for purpose no more?

Having been invited to contribute to this symposium, as a sometime proponent of distributed leadership (DL) who has since become a sceptic, I commence with an explanation of how I came to doubt what has emerged (at least in education) as the conventional wisdom. It is important to do this to highlight some of the general problems in justifying DL. Shifts in scholarly understanding and the abandonment of previous thinking are often difficult to pin down precisely in terms of time. Although the details may not matter, the re-thinking of ideas occurs in fields where there are settled assumptions and emerging trends in knowledge, and these inform shifts in thought. One of the attractions of DL has been, and continues to be, that it offers a way of understanding leadership collectively. At face value, this bucks tradition because the custom in the field of leadership has been to understand it individually: that is, as something that individuals have and do, rather than collectively.

This individualism was revitalized and built momentum late in the previous millennium, on the back of a handful of influential leadership publications in the late 1970s. It was while this was occurring that my doubts arose about the significance accorded to individuals as leaders. A pervasive view in the field at the time was the so-called ‘great man’ view of leaders, which, although it had been disavowed by some critics, re-asserted itself during this fecund period for leadership. Rather than purging itself of its well-rehearsed commitment to greatness and heroism, this thinking changed its approach. It was now evident in the assumptions used to justify the models or typologies of transformational and charismatic leadership that were esteemed in a burgeoning literature. Claims such as these that accord prominence to the contribution of high-profile individuals are susceptible to criticisms about causality: that is, the relationship between actions, events and outcomes, and the agency attributed to individual leaders. At that time, however, with a couple of rare exceptions (e.g. Greenstein, 1969: 33–62; Hook, 1945: 65–75), there was a paucity of interest in leader causality. Rather than robust criticism, then, many leadership scholars added to an ever-expanding shopping list of what individual leaders could achieve, provided that they stuck to recipe models. Moreover, as such claims about leader exceptionality soared, there was a corresponding increase in the expectations of leaders and grounds for confidence in what leadership had to offer. A reckoning was likely to follow, and is currently evident (see Kellerman, 2012).

For a number of scholars (including me) the idea of the leadership of one person became increasingly problematic, for reasons which have been well-rehearsed over the past decade or so (see Gronn, 2011). If so, then was there any security in numbers? That is, if the exclusive hold of leader individualism was doubtful, then surely the scholarly focus had to be on pluralities, did it not? This is the conclusion at which I personally arrived, although, as I tried to put flesh on the bones of DL, doubts crept in.

There were two major concerns as the popularity or uptake of DL diffused throughout the leadership field. (Incidentally, if anyone doubts the surge of early-2000s interest in DL, then Richard Bolden (2011) has documented, from a very low base, more than 9000 references mentioning DL and 187,000 Google hits.) First, there seemed to be a disconnect. Among some scholars adopting DL as a framework (or lens, as is now preferred) for data analyses, there was a strong inclination to continue focusing on individual leaders (typically, in education, school principals). This tendency was a bit like cognitive dissonance or the attempted reconciliation of two irreconcilables. If leadership was distributed, then why persist in focusing on one person? Perhaps the reason was this: allowance was being made for multiple leaders (in a school, for example), but the default option was to continue thinking of one person as more important than the others. Second, there seemed to be a substitution error. If orthodox thinking could be criticized for its arbitrariness in assuming that there was merely one leader, then were not those critics being equally arbitrary in substituting two (or more) leaders for one? That is, there was no more justification for the automatic presumption of multiple (or 2+) leadership than the parallel presumption of leadership singularity or monopoly.

If, in the face of these objections, evidence about leadership was to retain credibility and knowledge was to be advanced, then arguably there was an ontological hurdle to be surmounted. That is, what was the requisite unit of analysis in leadership? If one was not safe in assuming that the leadership unit was exclusively an individual or that invariably (as in DL) it was a collectivity, then what was a justifiable assumption? Surely a revised unit of analysis had to be able to encompass a spectrum of possibilities identifiable between the two polarities of individual leadership and collective leadership. Such possibilities were likely to comprise combinations of both of these forms, with all of the likely variations positioned at points on the spectrum, according to the empirically documented proportions of each.

To illustrate my point, I need to divert for a moment. A current point of contention in the field is whether leadership should be thought of generically, or whether it varies according to particular activity domains (e.g. education, health). If for the moment it is accepted that leadership knowledge has general applicability and utility across domains, then, in respect of the two polarities just distinguished, insights can be drawn from outside the domain that is the focus of this symposium – education. To illustrate an extreme case of individual leadership, the well-documented instance in the field of political leadership is authoritarian dictatorship. We can readily agree that this form contrasts (dramatically) with a group’s collective leadership that operates consensually and in which formal leader role designations rotate or are shared. If it can be shown that both these instances are not only possible conceptually, but also that real-world examples exist (see the evidence below), then our language has to do justice to that ontology. Currently, DL does not fit that bill. It tells only part of the story – hence my title and question mark.

My argument is that instead of being distributed, leadership is configured. That is, leadership practice is arranged or patterned to comprise a configuration. There is nothing magical or exclusive about this choice of word. Constellation might do just as well, except that it has already been used to designate a particular version of three-person collective leadership (see Hodgson et al., 1965). What configuration tries to capture is the coming together of elements that comprise an object (leadership practice). In anticipation that leadership configurations are likely to be mixed in manifestation (i.e. degrees of individualism and collectivism), structure (informal and formal, emergent and designed) and membership (degrees of constancy and fluidity), and that their continuity or discontinuity varies through time, I have suggested that leadership configurations are hybrid. (For an extended discussion of these points see Gronn, 2011, 2016a.) In summary, to the extent that as a researcher one is justified in designating the evidence of human conduct encountered in fieldwork as leadership (rather than power or something else – see below), then the unit of analysis has to make allowance not merely for one person alone or two or more persons (as in DL), but for patterns or arrangements that (potentially) encompass an individual, individuals and collective sets of leading agents.

I turn now to review some evidence of leadership configurations. Before considering education specifically, I draw on the political example just mentioned. The kind of subtlety that I am appealing for – which, in my view, leadership analysis requires if it is to do justice to real-world complexity and thereby retain its utility – is ably illustrated by Sheila Fitzpatrick’s (2015) history of leadership in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. This study registers the point that I want to make rather starkly.

When I had begun digging around in the organizational leadership literature and came across mentions of DL as far back as the 1950s, I probed still further and found instances of it even earlier in the immediate post-World War II years (these examples were collated in Gronn, 2008: 145–148). What this handful of discussions revealed is that the possibility of leadership being viewed as a collective phenomenon, as well as an individually conceived one, had in fact been acknowledged by scholars, albeit by a minority of them, but that subsequently (for reasons that are unclear) this same scholarly leadership community had become fixated overwhelmingly on individualism. By and large, collective versions of leadership were either ignored or marginalized. Currently, however, they are undergoing a resurgence: apart from Fitzpatrick’s work, Brown (2014) has made a highly persuasive case for understanding contemporary political leadership across the globe in collective terms, and Denis et al. (2012) have provided a comprehensive synthesis of various forms of leadership plurality.

As to Fitzpatrick’s analysis itself, there are two features of relevance to the current discussion. First, she shows that the period of post-1917 Soviet rule assumed three broad guises: collective leadership under Vladimir Lenin (1917 to 1923–1924 approx.), emerging dictatorship with co-existing team leadership initially and then later consolidated dictatorship under Joseph Stalin (approx. 1924–1925 to 1953), followed by a reversion to collective leadership again in the years following his death (1953–1957) (Fitzpatrick, 2015: 1–31, 155). Taken at face value, then, this sequence resembles an oscillation between my two suggested configurational polarities. But the second (and more important) feature of Fitzpatrick’s study is that although collectivism may have taken a back seat for much of the time during Stalin’s long period of leadership hegemony it never really disappeared. As a general rule, whenever Stalin was uncertain in his decision-making, Fitzpatrick shows him to be deliberately using his small group of up to a dozen Politburo members as a sounding board. The sole occasion when he feared that the team (as she labels it) might move against him in a coup came (in 1941) as a result of his paranoid distrust of the Soviet military and his near-fatal decision to ignore completely its compelling advice about a Nazi invasion from the west – Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa (Fitzpatrick, 2015: 151–152).

If now I bring the discussion closer to home and focus specifically on higher education, that might help sharpen the significance of leadership understood both individually and collectively. Think about universities and their leadership. The number of instances currently in which it might be credible to claim that the senior-level leadership of universities approximates to a one-woman or one-man band surely has to be rare. Regardless of whether one’s focus is on the executive-level leadership of vice chancellors, or at faculty, school or divisional levels, the preferred model is usually a reliance on a form of collective decision-making. But if proponents of DL take comfort from such structures and their operation as being open and shut cases of leadership distribution, then they need to think again, because in fact both collectivism and individualism operate in tandem in the university sector.

Although vice chancellors might exercise overall executive authority (within the policy frameworks determined by their councils and governing bodies) and work in concert with a small circle of pro- or deputy-vice chancellors, each of whom exercises specialist portfolio responsibilities (e.g. research, teaching, international outreach), those same portfolio-holders still have considerable latitude and discretion for individual leadership autonomy. In a national research assessment framework or exercise such as in the UK, for example, a research pro-vice chancellor, rather than a vice chancellor, is highly likely as a member of a system of collective executive oversight to provide (within a set of rules determined by an external funding authority) strong personal direction in shaping an institution’s research profile, and in mobilizing its resources and outputs. The same point applies to her or his opposite number in, say, an executive-level teaching portfolio. Moreover, a parallel dynamic that combines degrees of both collective and individual leadership operates increasingly at the senior level of faculties, where there tends to be a division of labour comprising a mix of a dean or faculty head having overall delegated authority (under university regulations) who then collaborates (depending, perhaps, on a university’s enrolment size) with a group of heads of departments and/or with expertise-based specialist portfolio-holders. Such, then, is what I take to be a configurational mix of leadership: neither wholly nor solely the leadership of the one, nor of two nor of the many, and with the precise composition of the collective and individual patterning varying empirically from institution to institution.

The discussion so far, however, leaves a number of questions unanswered. There is sufficient space to consider two. First, if my line of reasoning about configurations is on the right track, then how far back in time can one assume that it might apply? Would not an historian be inclined to insist that the phenomena of pre-state chiefdoms and absolutist monarchs, for example, in their many guises and manifestations, not to mention the persistence of those guises over (in some cases) thousands of years in numerous parts of the globe, give the lie to claims about the co-existence of degrees of individualism and collectivism?

The short answer to that question is that the jury is still out, except that the likelihood of a verdict in favour of co-existence is continuing to strengthen. This is principally because an increasing body of data in the fields of archaeology and anthropology is uncovering evidence of such patterning as far back as antiquity. (Considerably more detail than is reported here can be found in Gronn, 2016b.) The magnitude of the database now available to scholars is impressive. On the one hand, there is accumulating material from archaeological digs. On the other, there is a big archive of ethnographic data on (what some scholars refer to as) Late Pleistocene-appropriate foraging societies. The broad conclusion to be drawn is that in early social formations there were two countervailing sets of cultural values in (and they have remained in) contention: egalitarianism and hierarchy. Nonetheless, the received wisdom paints a different picture.

The view of theorists of social and cultural evolution has been that when the nascent polities of early social formations underwent differentiation what resulted was increased complexity that manifested itself in evidence of staged societal advance. Thus, as acephalous (or leaderless) mobile hunter-gatherer foraging bands broke down or lapsed into a dysfunctional state, they are claimed to have been superseded by sedentary centralizing chiefdoms and ‘big man’ societies (or paralleled by them, in the case of chiefdoms by small city states). These in turn were succeeded by a ubiquitous era of monarchs and emperors, which finally gave way to widespread nation state consolidation (as, for example, in much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe). In this perspective, the egalitarianism of hunter-gatherer band societies prevailed both initially and for an extended period of time. Eventually it was trumped by inequality, and entrenched systems built around stratification and institutionalized hierarchy.

Although the hierarchical pressures were genuine, recent scholarship is contesting this view (with its implicit Whiggish assumptions about human progress) and is pinpointing varying trajectories towards increased social complexity. Here, neither egalitarianism nor stratification disappear but prevail either alternately or sequentially over time in emerging polities, or they even co-exist. To substantiate their claims, some scholars have drawn attention to two contrasting and contending power strategies in play in early societies (personalized power and corporate power), and evidence of varying degrees of their institutionalization. Thus, in respect of third-millennium BCE ¹ Europe and Polynesia, for example, there were individualizing and group-oriented chiefdoms. The former (as evident in unearthed buildings and richly adorned tombs) displayed disparities in personal material possessions and evidence of ranking, whereas the latter manifested evidence of social solidarity and communal activities.

Without labouring the point unduly, it has been Mesoamerica (or Central America) that has challenged orthodox classification schemes. For over 3000 years, parts of this region had displayed a complex cyclic pattern of ‘more corporate and more overt ruler-centred social formations, rather than a simple evolutionary staged sequence’ (Blanton, 1998: 150–151). In these ruler-centric societies, network strategies were adopted by chiefs and their retinues to shore up elite privilege and control of exchange systems, networks and wealth. Contrasting corporate strategies, however, emphasized the ‘solidarity of society as an integrated whole, based on a natural, fixed, and immutable interdependence between subgroups and, in more complex societies, between rulers and subjects’ (Blanton et al., 1996: 6). In Classic Mayan society, for example, elite individuals ‘used their personal networks of ancestors, of affines [or relations by marriage], exchange partners and personal allies as a basis of their power’, although in Teotihuacan society, on the other hand, ‘one is hard pressed to identify a single ruler at Classic period Teotihuacan in burial, text, or graphic depiction’. Similarly, Teotihuacan art was notable for an absence of scenery depicting some humans as subordinated to others. In fact, Teotihuacan society was a hierarchical state which manifested collective leadership (in the guise of co-rulership) and power-sharing (Feinman, 2001: 164, 167). Moreover, there were ‘many “hybrid” cases [in which] features of both strategies can be enumerated’, particularly in late pre-Hispanic Aztec society (Feinman, 2001: 173). Although this glimpse of recent scholarship may not have yielded a direct mapping of contemporary leadership terminology onto the practices of previous societies, the affinity between past and present is sufficient to support my hypothesis that we may be dealing with similar phenomena.

The second question left unanswered by my exposition of configurations is: where does power fit in discussions of leadership – individualized, distributed, configured or otherwise? (The reverse question is equally valid: is there scope for the play of leadership in analyses of power? Clearly, Fitzpatrick’s case study suggests that there is.) At the risk of being attacked for unnecessarily personalizing my answer, I want to draw briefly on a recent reflective essay on my experiences as a Head of Faculty (Gronn, 2015) to answer this question. Having written about power during my early post-doctoral years, I then (as I indicated earlier) switched my focus to leadership. My good friend Eric Hoyle (Bristol School of Education) was always slightly puzzled by this shift in priorities and used to ask me when I was planning to say something else about power. Now, is the answer, because it is only on the basis of the professional experience of three and a half years of faculty headship that (for me) the power–authority–influence–leadership relationship began to make sense. As a subsidiary point, it is the notion of ‘headship’ to which I have just referred (and will come back to briefly), in my view, that accounts for much of the field’s inability to map leadership practice accurately.

As the incumbent of a head role, leadership – in the conventional sense of inspiring, mobilizing or galvanizing collegial support for initiatives and projects – was expected of me and my fellow unit heads. I certainly had, as I prefer to express it, scope for exercising influence on the basis of the authority that went with my appointment, except that in many respects I was still very much powerless. I was in no position to alter institution-wide rules of budgeting and human resources, for example, even had I been motivated to flout them (which I was not). As the recipient of course and research grant funding, the academic unit of which I was the head had to play by rules compiled by funding agencies, and again there was very little if any scope to fiddle with these. If there was power to be had, then it went with control of resources. There were few ways in which I had power, embedded as it was (structurally) in time-honoured institutional practices, rules and regulations, and the checks and balances of a collegiate university.

This point is not a complaint or a lament but an acknowledgement of the numerous constraints on people positioned in headship roles and the limited degrees of freedom that they are afforded. Although I might be accused of viewing authority, power, leadership and influence in this brief paragraph as discrete and cut and dried, and as partitioning them into tidy boxes, in practice this kind of demarcation made a lot of sense to me. As a head I might have had some influence, but I never really thought that I exercised genuine power.

This rather sketchy analysis prompts me to conclude by returning to the confusion that sits around headship. The head of something is a person (there is usually, unless we are talking about a diarchy or a co-headship, just one individual) who carries overall authority to act on a unit’s behalf and for which s/he is responsible. The trap that many devotees of leadership fall into, it seems to me, is to assume that because X is in charge (i.e. accountable) then she or he must be the (one or the overarching) leader. For many leadership scholars the unthinkable option might be to not take for granted that the top person leads others. This may be the reason why some scholars of DL in schools to whom I referred earlier still want to cling on to principals as the superordinate or paramount leader figures, even though evidence of sharing may be staring them in the face. But that is to speculate. This failure to be clear about headship roles might also explain why scholars in the business management field tend to navigate in their leadership writings according to this simplistic formula: ‘Superior’ or ‘Superordinate’ (i.e. organizational head) = ‘Leader’, and ‘Subordinate(s)’ = ‘Follower(s)’. From this set of assumptions, it is a short step to mapping (the presumed) division of organizational labour as comprising the standard linguistic categories with which most of us have become familiar: leader and followers.

To the extent that all DL does as a framework is to remain straight-jacketed by these categories, and modifies them solely by transposing ‘Leaders’ for ‘Leader’, then it does little if anything to advance the field’s knowledge. Unless, then, DL scholars can get an ontological grip on the unit of leadership analysis in a way that takes account of the problems that I have raised, that addresses the kinds of assumptions implicit in the idea of headship and the limits of influence, and that finds a way of extricating themselves and the field from the discursive grip of such traditional shop-worn categories, it is time to abandon ship. Leave aside, if you prefer, the political and ancient examples that I summarized and what they promise to open up by way of longitudinal perspectives and questions. But from my point of view, because DL provides merely part of the story of what goes on in educational organizations such as universities, departments, faculties and schools, it has lost the analytical gloss that once it may have had.