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The team members’ expertise has been shown to increase team effectiveness when it is actively coordinated. While in face-to-face teams such expertise coordination unfolds through direct interaction, expertise coordination in dispersed teams is unlikely to evolve automatically. In this context, shared leadership, that is, the distribution of leadership influence across multiple team members is argued to serve as initiating mechanism for expertise coordination.

Leadership is a crucial driver of project performance. While traditionally, the project leader was considered as the exclusive source of leadership behavior, recent research indicates that particularly dispersed projects may profit from joint leadership efforts by all project members. However, leadership functions in dispersed projects are likely to differ from those in a face-to-face context. In this chapter, we specify shared leadership functions for the domain of geographically dispersed project teams with high levels of task uncertainty. Arguing that shared leadership in dispersed teams occurs through interrelation of individual and team actions, we specify a dispersed screening function as well as self-, other-, and team-directed interrelation functions and develop propositions on how these functions are related to project performance. Furthermore, we point to motivational aspects of shared leadership and discuss the role of the vertical leader in developing and facilitating shared leadership.

The form of crisis-governance responses to austerity urbanism that is the focus of this paper is ‘fleet-of-foot’ partnerships. These non-statutory mechanisms which champion dispersed forms of leadership are crafted in policy discourse as lean, mean, crisis-tackling fighting machines. Their perceived agility and entrepreneurialism are often lauded, yet empirical evidence for these traits remains sparse. This paper investigates this concern through the lens of the Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) in England, which are deemed by some to exude some of the defining characteristics of ‘fleet-of-foot’ mechanisms.

A mixed method approach was utilised, including analysis of socio-economic datasets and qualitative policy analysis of primary and secondary material. The quantitative element includes analysis of employment and journey-to-work data, whereas the qualitative material originated from a review of LEP proposals, and narrative analysis of transcripts of interviews undertaken since 2010, together with other textual artefacts.

The findings reveal that dispersed public leadership is problematic as a mode of crisis-governance. LEPs were adopted as a crisis-governance fix. These loose (or looser) constellations of many, varied actors, are considered to be more flexible, responsive and delivery-orientated than more traditional and statutory democratic-administrative mechanisms: lean, mean, crisis-tackling fighting machines. Flexibility is a primary trait of ‘fleet-of-foot’ configurations and perhaps the defining feature of LEPs.

The programme of research remains on-going, which reflects the continual shifts in the form and configurations of LEPs.

Detecting some of the primary weaknesses of ‘fleet-of-foot’ public leadership arrangements, the research draws attention to some of the dangers of pushing austerity down and through ‘fleet-of-foot’ formations. The practical implications are highlighted by examining the limits of LEPs to achieve efficient outcomes or to open up a shared leadership space.

Through an engagement with current conceptual and policy debates where austerity ‘blows out’ across Europe, it is observed that austerian politics may be pushing partnership bodies too far, thus risking the danger of overburdening and under-resourcing the very distributed leadership mechanisms that are expected to reconcile local economic crises and stimulate local growth. This paper also contributes to the literature on dispersed public leadership, which runs counter to traditional command and control leadership constructs.

Studies of distributed leadership (DL) are increasing, but are not systematic, often taking a normative position emphasizing the superiority of DL to solo leadership and using the term in an imprecise way. The purpose of this paper is to re-conceptualize DL and develop a systematic framework to identify dimensions of DL and their association with team effectiveness.

Based on a comprehensive review of existing literature, this paper develops a systematic framework of DL and team effectiveness by deriving eight research propositions.

Based on two perspectives, role space occupation and dependency of actions, the paper identifies four main dimensions of DL: shared, conjoint, fragmented and dispersed leadership, each of which represents a specific pattern of DL activities. A leader-task-context (LTC) framework is developed to analyze outcomes of DL dimensions in different settings. The eight propositions developed clearly identify where DL can be best applied, how particular configurations of DL affect team performance, and in what situations it is most effective.

This paper has made several contributions. First, the authors address the question of what constitutes DL by conceptualizing its dimensions. Second, the authors extend the DL literature by arguing and modeling how different contexts influence the fulfillment of DL. Third, the authors develop an analytical framework of DL – the “LTC” framework – to help build a foundation and guide further research on the relationships between DL and team performance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine critically the concept of “leadership transmission”, considering what theoretical and practical value this metaphor brings to the healthcare modernization agenda.

The paper develops understanding of the transmission metaphor, whilst theoretical perspectives on leadership are reviewed, including debates, which shed light on the concept by focusing on the phenomenon of distributed or dispersed leadership.

The transmission metaphor is perhaps misleading, by implying that “leadership can be caught” like a disease. However, defining leadership in terms of influence, a novel typology of transmission processes is introduced; top down (one‐way), inter‐organizational (bi‐lateral), and dispersed (multi‐directional). Recent research suggests that organizational changes are often led by the spontaneous concertive action of staff at all levels, not just by senior élite groups. The way in which dispersed influence processes arise, unfold, and are transmitted into organizational outcomes can be understood through theoretical narratives, which capture event sequences and combinations of factors unfolding over time in a given context. Given the scale and pace of the change agenda, healthcare modernization may indeed depend on widely dispersed leadership.

It is therefore necessary to establish the conditions in which leadership transmission is encouraged, to recognize, support, and develop the “unsung heroes” who assume change leadership positions, and to widen the agenda and coverage of NHS leadership development programmes.

There is currently no other commentary, empirical or theoretical, academic or professional, which examines critically the concept of leadership transmission, while exploring the nature of this perspective, and its theoretical and practical value.

This chapter relates quantum storytelling consulting (QSC) to ensemble leadership theory (ELT) by Rosile, Boje, & Claw (2016). What kinds of leadership does it take to attend to the forecaring in advance of the future and how does this relate to quantum storytelling? In a music ensemble, no one musician is the star: they are equal, all are the stars of the show, emerging as stars and then taking a supporting role in cyclic rotation. ELT is important to the world ecology because it is a together-we-are-all-leaders approach. Rather than restricting leadership to one or a few people, the ensemble of many networks of leadership is important. I will contrast ELT with more familiar models of leadership: dispersed, distributed, and relational that restrict leadership to a few. One primary difference is that ELT includes both community and ecology and it is rooted in Indigenous Ways of Knowing (IWOK) that extend from the ancient Southwest US and Mexico. My contribution here is to recognize that ELT is rooted in the rhizomatic fractal, whereas the other models of leadership discussed here (dispersed, distributed, and relational) have been linear-, cyclic-, or spiral-fractal waves. A fractal is defined as recurring self-sameness patterns across scalabilities. I will look to Deleuzian rhizomatic-fractals, which ELT purports to be and make an observation: ELT revived and reinvented in late modern capitalism, must be a correlate with the dominant hierarchic kinds of leadership of here and now, which is this world situation we are now in. Does not each revolution (steam, diesel/gas combustion, cyber-information, and liquid modernity) actually create anew the enslavement of human beings in hierarchic forms of leadership? At the end of this chapter, ensemble leadership will be related to whole-world ecological health.

This paper aims to explore how the characteristics of outstanding leaders promote dispersed leadership through the beliefs and experience of leaders in some of the UK's best known organizations.

Drawing on in‐depth qualitative interviews with 70+ leaders, interviews with direct reports and interviews with more senior leaders carried out between 2008 and 2010, the paper contrasts the approaches to leadership that distinguish high performing leaders from their peers and how these approaches create the climate for devolved leadership.

The paper highlights the key differences that distinguish outstanding leaders and explores how these differences create climates of empowerment that enable dispersed and devolved leadership to flourish. The paper argues that devolved leadership is not a haphazard process but involves leaders in deliberately creating the right conditions.

The paper presents the core characteristics of outstanding leaders and how they can not only produce better performing organizations, but also create more robust organizations with more capable, autonomous and innovative employees to help identify and develop leadership populations.

There is a clash between a focus on the leader and a concern for dispersed leadership in organizations. They seem to be opposing views of leadership – one focused on the individual, the other the collective. This paper assimilates these two perspectives and shows how a certain style of leader embeds leadership.

This paper describes the ways in which the next decade will be different from the last. Times are becoming more and more turbulent and a new kind of organisation is needed to survive and thrive in these times ‐ what we call a purposeful self‐renewing organisation (PS‐RO). This, in turn, requires a different style of organisational leadership ‐ leadership as a quality that is dispersed across the organisation not confined solely to the cadre of senior managers listed on an organisational chart.

Competitive advantage requires continuous innovation. Market‐led organizations must be led internally by those who most deeply understand emerging markets and who can drive product development. Bottom‐up leadership is the next phase of empowerment – to encourage knowledge workers to lead the development of new products. There is still too much emphasis on top‐down leadership. Organizations in fast‐changing industries need to disperse leadership throughout the organization to change fast enough to keep up. Leadership must now be based on content (knowledge) not merely process skills. As senior executives move up the hierarchy, far away from knowledge advancement, they can only use their process skills to develop content leadership in leading‐edge knowledge workers. Survival thus requires new conceptions of leadership.