I have been thinking about leadership in an inter-organizational network. Specifically, I have been thinking about the valued role a leader can play in fostering engagement and in maintaining the boundaries in which engagement can occur. I like to call this "holding the container." Related to this is the role that the member of a network can play both in their role as a potential distributed leader as well as a person who collaborates with others.
One thing that is important here is the competency of the network member to engage and collaborate with others. This has, in fact, become one area of focus in my course in "Interpersonal Relations" In Management" that I offer in the business curriculum at Bentley University. I ask the students to consider what engagement would look like in a network environment and especially one that is mediated by technology. My question is as much for their learning as for my own. For a long time, I have considered how operating in a virtual environment impacts our traditional approach to collaboration and have written a good deal on this topic in this blog.
It strikes me that we could expand the issue of interpersonal relations and collaboration to how do our traditional notions of organizational behavior apply in a network environment. This has both practical and academic components. On the practical side is the issue of what phenomena of organizational behavior occur in a network and how do we intervene to deal with them. On the academic side is how do we adjust what we teach and how we teach in the business curriculum to be congruent with our contemporary world. By expanding our purview to that of organizational behavior, we encompass a variety of topics like leadership, motivation, group dynamics, inter-personal relations, decision making and conflict. We could then ask questions like the following.
Is the manifestation of organizational behavior in a network simply a variation on a familiar theme or does a network environment (often virtual in nature) represent a shift in paradigm such as to disrupt our traditional notions of organizational behavior? As an example of disruption, we can identify Daniel Pink's book "Drive" which sets out Motivation 2.0 as a shift in the traditional view of motivation.
I believe that a perspective of organizational behavior in a network environment requires a more contemporary view of leadership, and thus, of membership as in the case of distributed leadership. As for interpersonal relations, my students and I believe that relating virtually does require enhanced sensitivity and new tactical skills. As my students tell me, breaking up with a significant other via Facebook is not a good thing to do.
One can then go on to consider that in a network environment, the concepts of strong and weak ties, core and periphery replace the more solid sense of a group boundary and the striving for equal and equidistant relationships. This is especially so since theorists tell us that often innovation happens at and because of the periphery.
Being successful in network leadership may require the leader to let go of "knowing." This is likely also true of members. In turn, this creates a more hospitable environment for people to join together in the creation of new collective knowledge.
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