Distributed Leadership in Transformation Initiatives: The Emergence of Network Leadership

Abstract

Several research studies investigated organizational transformation in particular to examine various leadership theories and styles that emerged during different chronological evolution of leadership theories. In similar context, attention has been given recently to collective/team leadership theories that depend on more collective approach to leadership. Examining organizational transformation literature and leadership theory literature is expected to lead to identifying an intersection between these important topics. This paper intends to bridge distributed leadership theory and organizational transformation theory in achieving efficient and optimal results when implementing large scale organizational transformational initiatives and examining the notion of network leadership by overlaying social network theory to the characteristics of distributed leadership, which is expected to add to the current knowledge and use by scholars and policy makers while practicing leadership in a organizations going through transformation.