Network Leadership
David M. Boje
January 10, 2001
Figure One: Diagram of Four Narrative Frames
X dimension (Transaction - Transformation) - For George MacGregor Burns (1978), MORAL VALUE LEADER - emerges from, and always returns to, the fundamental wants and needs, aspirations, and values of the followers (p. 4). The servant leader, say in bureaucracy (or quest) has the moral obligation to serve and in an ideal world, moral ends are valued over means. For Burns his project is to "deal with leadership as distinct from mere power-holding and as the opposite of brute power" (p. 4). The transactional leader according to Burns, approaches followers with an eye to exchanging one thing for another: jobs for votes, or subsidies for campaign contributions. The means are valued over the ends.
Y dimension (Will to POWER - Will to SERVE) - For Nietzsche and Machiavelli, the leader is driven by much ambition, and acts beyond simplistic dualities of good not evil. Burns and most of leadership theory restricts its use to the lower half of Figure One, to the Will to Serve others, and not serve the ambition of power.
Z dimension (MONO-phonic to POLY-phonic) - We hear a lot about voice these days. The bureaucratic and heroic leader has a single voice (monophonic). The network and chaos leader are among many leaders and many voices (polyphonic). Boje (2000b) provides a review of the four voices of leadership.
Bureaucratic
narrative forms are high on recurring transactions (as opposed to
transformations), supposed to be servants of the clients (as opposed to power wielding),
and highly monophonic (single voiced as opposed to including everyone's
voice). The bureaucratic leader shouts from the top of the pyramid, and
all are supposed to obey. All is well until the market shifts and the old
transactions patterns are no longer efficient. Stuck in its ways, the
bureaucratic narrative can not seem to let loose of the old ways. At the same
time bureaucracy is the most efficient form of capitalist enterprise. Alfred
Chandler wrote about the M-form, the multidivisional form, where technically
trained and highly qualified people were put in charge of decentralized
divisions reporting to a central headquarters. The rules are there to keep
managers from behaving in capricious and torturous ways to subordinates.
Bureaucracy can be a very good affair, if it is fitted to a stable situation
where the same behaviors can be repeated over and over again. But, if you are
a non-traditional student you know all too well that a bureaucracy fit for
everyone else is not very accommodating to you. Executive leaders are able to
bob and weave between the layers and rules to get things done. At the
same time there is an illusion of control, the probability of being able to
give commands and have then realized is not too great.
Max Weber theorized bureaucracy as the rational-legal order. The leader is the "head buffalo" who is treated by the herd as all seeing and all knowing. The ideal bureaucratic leaders is a selfless server of the public good. The logic of the collective is put into great manuals with endless lists of rules to govern every transaction. This way the rules are made available to all corporate agents. Information centralizes so that a few can interpret which rules will govern each situation. This results in an asymmetric distribution of information. Only a few know things. The collective counters by institutionalizing as much knowledge as possible and playing by the rules becomes increasingly important. Individuals are not free to exercise leadership; only a few may lead the many. This results in gate keeping, not out of malice, but because the few decision makers get overloaded by transactional demands. Leaders end up being referees who interpret the rule book for each event. Knowledge becomes more specialized. As this occurs, people stop sharing what little information they have ("It is not my job"). There are attempts to standardize and routinize every new thing. The bureaucracy is slow to act and can not handle highly complex information very well. Much of the time and energy is dissipated in writing down everything (manuals, job descriptions, budgets, reports, records). The job of the hierarchy is surveillance of each lower level. Records of infractions are stuff full of incident reports, which can be used to keep people in line. Overall, the moral authority of bureaucracy is to serve the client, but what ends up happening, is all the time goes into documenting and defending one had not broken any rules.
Heroic
narratives follow a journey to create new knowledge or find hidden competitive
advantage. Heroic leaders talk about transforming everything, including
bureaucracy. Heroic stars go on quests to find transformation (as opposed to
transaction advantages), people aim to serve the benefactors of the quest, and
are monophonic (only one hero at a time may speak for companions). The transformation
can be the discovery of hidden qualities of self, or the boon (gifts and
skills) that will save the people. The hero is supposed to be benevolent and
chivalrous. And the hero learns to trust various buddies encountered to help
in the quest. You can not be a hero if you are a despot and dictator. It takes
brotherly bonds to keep a band together. And it takes a superordinate
mission to rally the team to face the perils of the journey. For Max Weber,
the hero is charismatic. the heroic leader has magical powers and demonstrates
divine inspiration, skilled virtuosity, and extraordinary insight and
sometimes wisdom. The heroic leader develops high trust with
followers. Still the collective ends up distrusting the hero and puts
all kinds of checks and balances in play. Weber calls this the routinization
of charisma. Moses could at any point turn into Napoleon; better safe
than sorry. The collective tames charisma by erecting hierarchy and
networks of surveillance. Rules are created to handle the theory issue
of succession. The hero it seems is good only for transformation and reform,
not for stable periods of leadership. The hero is brought forth by the
mob to find the resources for them to survive. In this sense the hero is a
servant leader. The problem arises is that once the leader is in power
they can learn to love power more than service. For Nietzsche the will
to power is what motivates the heroic journey. But the exercise of superhero
power is both fascinating and scary for the masses. Weber therefore argues
that the hoard will band together and routinize the heroic charisma by
installing rules, professional standards, and hierarchy. This kills off
inspiration, innovation, and the collective falls into bureaucratic ways.
Approaching its death, a hero is called forth to initiate yet another
journey. Sometimes this heroic journey is a descent into the abyss to
face one's inner enemies and great dragons, so as to return with the Holy
Grail.
Chaos
narratives are transformational (but it is the situation that
transforms), narrate powerful situations (that do not serve anyone's
particular needs), and the storytelling tends to be polyphonic (so many voices
speaking it is hard to hear). Chaos systems achieve self-designing outcomes.
They are situations of high energy and the heat is turned up so nothing is
static. It is not a system people much enjoy lining or working in.
There is a lot of energy and spontaneity required to survive a complexity
system. Chaos can arise with changing markets, the collapse of bureaucratic
efficiencies, or the failure of the quest to find the boon. Sometimes chaos is
just a manager who does all the wrong things at the wrong times. More often
chaos is the turbulence of a changing global market. Out of the
transactional failures and dynamics come the waves of transformation that
enrich the chaos and complexity narratives. The chaos leader peeks across the
edge of the abyss to see what scary things lurk down there. In dancing around
the edge of the abyss, there is a rich discovery of efficient maneuvers.
Information diffusion tends toward random. And little insignificant bits of
information can meld with others to create cascades of transformation. The
process of strange attractors. This is a leadership that must be free to move
quickly, to dart in and out of the abyss, in order to reconfigure collective
action. If you stop, you may fall in, since the ground itself is moving
and to stand still is quite dangerous. Once a stable pattern emerges,
the rule-making and hierarchical machinery take over. Everyone wants to
tame chaos. Information is rich and uncoded. Mysteries abound that need
careful tracings of patterns that are difficult to discern. Leaders
respond to chaos with complex arrangements of self-managing teams in quickly
transforming configurations. Some emerge and stabilize into networks, other
calcify into bureaucracies of repeated and predictable transactions. Chaos
arrangements are rich in polyphony (many voices get to speak), but it can be
very difficult to hear anyone. Everyone talks at the same time in the
rush to make sense of it all at once. Information is not equally
distributed, not due to hierarchy, but to to the fragmented forces of
chaos. Information sharing and transaction costs are very high due to
the lack of information codability. The are not enough recurrent transactions
to make rules effective or efficient. Narratives about chaos are
multidimensional. There is a lot of Antenarrative (the possibility and betting
that a storyline will emerge). Probabilities are hard to assign. The
moral hazard of chaos is that the power of the ground-transformations will
overwhelm the quality of life. People who tend to chaos patterns get
hunted down like witches (they get blamed for the transformations to what
everyone believes can be normalized transactions). Leaders learn to trust
classes of events more than people. They are constantly searching for
the patterns in the environment that will allow some advantageous move to be
taken. The equilibrium keeps promising to appear, but then quickly
disappears. Leadership is frustrating since it is hard to develop
reliable and predictable behaviors to contend with the transforming
situations. Still there is the possibility that some heroes will emerge to
constitute a network of self-managed teams that can effectively deal with all
the raging changes.
Network
narrations are grounded in transactions (there is a good deal of bargaining
and negotiating), there are powerful narrations, rich with polyphony (many
voices get to speak). The network begins in decentralized disarray and
tends toward hierarchy and centered direction over time. The limit to
decentralization is the chaos pattern and the limit to centralization is
bureaucracy. The danger of the network is it becomes a Hobsonean war of all
against all, thereby making transaction costs unstable and costly, something
the network was meant by its members to overcome. The network tries to tame
the free wheeling forces of the marketplace through acts of collaboration.
This leader to the emergence and formation of a hierarchical governing
structure. The network begins to develop barriers to entry and
exit. The ground is transforming, as in chaos, but through collaboration
it is possible to find efficient niches here and there. Collaborative
transactions by a small number of network members invites hierarchy. But
this hierarchy makes it difficult to adapt the network to transforming
situations. The information of the network is based on minimizing
transaction costs that will effectively read transformations in the market.
Power is very self-interested. Still efficient bargaining and negotiating
rounds leads to trust and that results and collaborative moves. Otherwise the
network falls into a war of all against all (the Prisoner's Dilemma - do I
trust that the other prison will rat me out or collaborate my story?). Supply chains
are power-driven to set prices and manage exchange toward
self-interests. Some networks come together to serve the public, but
this is more an instance of heroic behavior than it is networking. Supply chains
negotiate to find the cheapest labor to make the highest quality products that
can be sold and resold a successively higher prices. Buyers and sellers in a
network know each others' identities (this is not true of an ideal
marketplace). There is haggling to reduce respective transaction costs. This
creates a moving equilibrium. The network is healthy as long as it keeps
adapting to fluctuations on supply and demand for its collective products and
services. The network struggles against insider trading of information by
setting up banks of information available to net members. The moral authority
is to keep the game rules fair but allow for self-interest seeking
behavior. Banding together in a network creates collective advantage,
but the powerholders are quick to dessert in favor of better odds. It is
tempting to manage network transactions with rules and contracts, but then
they quickly become bureaucratic federations. The network can be quite chaotic
when prices are set by bilateral bargaining, and allegiances shift quickly to
find lower transaction costs. This changes the pattern of the network, and
makes collective collaboration impossible. Information is full of lags, leaks,
and distortions. The network agents therefore are motivated to
collaborate to stabilize transactions and set up a level playing field. This
is the action of ISO9000 (TQM), ISO14000 (Environmental standards), and SA8000
(Human Rights standards). Actors do not learn and change quite as quickly as
in the chaos one, but they are a bit more rapid than bureaucratic ones.
Network leaders provide mediating energy, they set up exchanges between other
partners, point out collective advantages in collaboration, and identify
enemies and outcasts. Networks can become chains of restraint or bands of
reform to overthrown restraint. Network leadership moves between these
extremes. Network leadership is much like courtship, trying to flirt
with someone you do not know well, until the advantages of collaborative
exchange become envisioned. Then there are secure dates in safe liaisons
before serious capital becomes part of the relationship. Cheating and
divorce is also possible among network members.
Table One summarizes the situation and qualities of bureaucratic, heroic, chaos, and network leadership.
Table One: Comparisons of Four Leader Types
|
Bureaucratic Leader |
Heroic/Quest Leader |
Chaos/Complexity Leader |
Network Leader |
SITUATION
|
|
|
|
INFORMATION
|
|
|
|
HIERARCHY
|
|
|
|
TEAMS
|
|
|
|
As with anything else, in the real world, organizations are hybrids of all these types and situations. What is most interesting is to see how the situations change and what leaderly choices fit or do not fit at one time or another.
References
Flight of the Buffalo - Boje
Transformational Leadership - Boje
Leadership Model of Various Types - Boje
Links to other leadership papers