Learnings and Reflections - Distributed Leadersip

INTRODUCTION

This write-up is about my critical learning experience during the course of the leadership, change and complexity module. In all the 10 sessions we had, I will be reflecting on five of the sessions that I think I was able to relate with deeply, and found to be thought provoking, inspiring me to evaluate my paradigm to leadership and I believe has broaden my thoughts on leadership, especially in a dynamic work environment.

These four sessions are:

1. Distributed Leadership;
2. Followership, Psychoanalytic and Relational Leadership;
3. Leadership Paradoxes;
4. Issues of Ethics and Authenticity;
5. and Leadership and Culture.

LEARNINGS AND REFLECTIONS:

DISTRIBUTED LEADERSIP

If I was asked, what distributed leadership was before the class, I would have defined it as “making every member of a team/group responsible for their actions and inactions in achieving the common goals and objectives of a team/group”. But during this session, I came to understand that it is more than that. It spurs the questions about authority and power in leadership in my mind and I was wondering what the difference between delegation of authority (duty) and distributed leadership is. I was also able to clearly distinct between the two. Realising fully that delegation is about the devolution of responsibility by the person in charge of a team or group, while distribution of leadership gives room for the emergence of new ideas and creative ways of solving problems to flow through the groups and teams, not minding the hierarchical status of the person from whom the idea comes from. And in juxtaposing the two, accountability at the distributed level sums up to be the overall accountability of the organisation, while in the case of delegation, accountability is only between the person delegating and the person(s) who responsibility is delegated to.

Also, considering the findings of various scholars about distributed leadership, stating that it has been most successful in the education sector (Bolden et al., 2008a, 2008b; Groon, 2009; Bolden and Petrov, 2014) and juxtaposing this point of view with the video on “the failing school” shown in class. The successes which I think can be evidently attributed to various factors identified as macro and micro level factors (Groon, 2009) in this sector which includes predefined rules and regulations of operations, accountability and auditing requirement, type and level, skills sets of the players involve, prescribed tasks, technologies, resources etc. I became very much interested in the applicability of the theory – Distributed leadership in a work environment. Especially in an environment such as Japan and China for instance where there is a high level of paternalistic perception of leadership (Farh and Cheng, ?). As it seems, distributed leadership had not been evidently noticed in other work settings in its definite term, but I think it is evident in its concept and ideology and I think in my future role as a leader in any sphere I find myself, the concept of distributed (Hybrid) leadership is very much applicable, except that the individual leader in the organisation (often the “Big Boss” in the organisation, team or group) must set the pace and readily adapt the macro and micro level factors in the organisation, team or group as it applies (Which I will gladly do if I happen to be at the helms of affair). I also think that the individual leader(s) in an organisation cannot be totally eliminated or downplayed by the distributed leadership’s ideology. Hence, I come to an agreement with Peter Groon’s point of view that what various scholars has termed distributed leadership should be called hybrid leadership (Groon, 2009).