Systemic Leadership: Ethical and Effective

Abstract

This volume devotes a number of chapters to the possible productive interface that there may be between systemic thinking, leadership, and gender. Systems thinking help us understand the relational networks and dynamics that individuals encounter within organizations, and hence provide us with clues as to why leadership patterns emerge in specific ways. The next few chapters present us with a more theoretical overview of systems thinking and explain the notion of “systemic leadership”. After we have made the claims and assumptions of this approach clear, we will move towards a more focused discussion of what systemic leadership offer both male and female leaders in various contexts. In this first theoretical exposé of systemic leadership, Collier and Esteban propose that in postindustrial economies, “systemic leadership,” that is, leading from the middle of an organization and managing that system, its human participants and its paradoxes – creates solid and sustainable communities where participatory management is successfully achieved.