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This part aims to push thinking on strategic leadership one step further. In all of the previous parts we follow quite a hierarchical model, in which leaders at the top outline the vision, the strategy, and the key implementation tools. Here, Russ Marion and Mary Uhl-Bien challenge the validity of this view of strategic leadership. They argue that strategic leadership is about interacting effectively within a complex interplay of environmental and organizational forces to enable fit environments and adaptive organizations. For them this means that strategic leaders need to pay significant attention to the interdependence between their organizations and both competitors and other relevant organizations in the niches in which they operate. It also means that they need to develop adaptive leadership capacity far down in the organization and show a willingness to follow those leaders at the lower levels. Marion and Uhl-Bien then argue both that strategic leaders have a more interdependent view of organizations and that they have a greater willingness to act as followers than we see in any of the leadership and/or strategy literature. As this approach to strategic leadership is quite new, we do not have application chapters here.

Mackenzie's LAMPE theory provides a new view of leadership that is multi-level, processual, and reflective of leadership as it actually occurs in practice. While we see this approach as representing a much needed frameshift for leadership research, we believe Mackenzie may be able to “break the frame” even farther by incorporating elements of complexity science into his thinking. We suggest how complexity science might help Mackenzie flesh out his ideas about distributed leadership, as well as consider leadership that is not only about alignment and control but also about enabling and releasing informal, interactive dynamics within the organization.

The purpose of this paper is to study a class of issues that in spite of recognised needs and explicit managerial demands have proven hard to have “stick” in organisations (information security is used as an example). It offers a theory-driven rationale why superficially different issue areas can indeed be considered as instances of the identified class, and builds on complexity leadership theory (CLT) to explain how the related strategic challenges can be explained and possibly alleviated.

A. Kenneth Rice’s notion of organisations’ “primary task” is used to home in on its opposite that is here labelled “peripherality”. Existing strands of organisation research that can be related to this notion are then revisited to ground the fundamental concept theoretically. The CLT is finally used to provide a detailed understanding of the underlying dynamics.

The paper explains how and why certain issue areas seem resistant to common managerial intervention methods even though it would seem that organisational members are in fact favouring proposed changes (a state that would normally increase the chances of success). It also offers ideas how these challenges may fruitfully be approached.

Problems related to the suggested “peripherality” class of issues have thus far been approached as wholly unrelated (and for that reason as idiosyncratic). The proposed framework offers a hitherto never attempted way systematically to link these challenges – and so structure and concentrate discussion about possibly common remedies.

The current strategic leadership literature tends to advocate a leader-centric (upper-echelon) approach to strategy, one in which the leader positions the organization competitively within an environment. Based on complexity theory, we argue that strategic leadership in a fast-paced environment works to organize both the environment and the organization in ways that enhance the firm's adaptability, innovativeness, and fitness. We propose a two-pronged strategy: Foster cooperative relationships with the organization's environment, and enable adaptive organizations that are “partners” in the strategic leadership function.

A key distinction, mentioned by Dubin (1979, p. 227), is “leadership at a distance.” When Dubin was writing, there was little research on this topic. More recently, however, there has been an upsurge in leadership-at-a-distance work. We see a major review by Antonakis and Atwater (2002), following an earlier one by Napier and Ferris (1993), along with work by authors such as Shamir (1995) and Waldman and Yammarino (1999).

John Antonakis (PhD, Walden University) is professor of Organizational Behavior at the Faculty of Management and Economics of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. His research is centered on individual-difference antecedents of effective leadership, the measurement of leadership, and the links between context and leadership as applied to neocharismatic and transformational leadership models, and the development of leadership.