From Organizational Leadership to Lead Organizations—The Future of Leadership in Interorganizational Networks

Dear Colleagues,

As more and more production and service organizations depend on networks comprising of multiple organizations to achieve their goals, the notion of leadership is climbing up the levels of analysis ladder and gaining new meanings. In other words, in the future, when we talk about leaders we may not be talking about people but about organizations. Leadership of inter-organizational networks is firstly not about organizational leadership but about an organization that leads. Yet, research on networks has focused on the structures and processes of the entire network rather than on the organizations that compose the network. The complexity of whole networks, from a leadership perspective, is that the network participants are autonomous organizations with their own professional and managerial agendas that are not directly subject to the lead-organization. These organizations typically have limited formal accountability and commitment to the lead-organization or even to the network's goals. As a result, the tensions typically discussed in the more classical leadership literature are either promoted to higher levels of analysis or exchanged with new ones. In the current special issue, we may contribute to the following related concepts: decision-making processes, network outcomes, monitoring-controlling behaviors, collaboration, network structures, governability & accountability and cultural diversity.

References

Osborne, S. (2010). The new public governance? London and New York: Routledge.

Provan, K., & Milward, H. B. (1995). A preliminary theory of interorganizational network effectiveness: A comparative study of four community mental health systems. Administrative science quarterly, 1–33.‏

Uster, A., Beeri, I., & Vashdi, D. (2018). Don’t push too hard. Examining the managerial behaviours of local authorities in collaborative networks with nonprofit organisations. Local Government Studies, 1–22.

Uster, A., Vashdi, D. and Beeri, I., (2019). From Organizational Leadership to Lead-Organizations – The Future of Leadership in Inter-Organizational Networks. Journal of Leadership Studies, 12(4), 79–81.

Dr. Itai Beeri
Guest Editor

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• Lead‐Organizations
• Network leadership
• Organizational leadership