Complexity Leadership Theory

History of Leadership Theory

Leadership theory is a progression that has evolved over time and will continue to evolve as we have witnessed throughout history.  Machiavelli reportedly claimed there were over 1,000 leadership books for sale during the 1500’s.  Bass reviewed more than 3.000 leadership publications before 1974.  We have well over 10,000 leadership publications in the 21^st century and that number continues to grow exponentially.  From the Great Man theory of the 19^th century to current theory where leadership is based on hierarchy, top-down, authoritarian, cascading types of approaches to leadership we see an increasing need to understand leadership and its implications for leadership development.

Contemporary Leadership Theory

Current leadership theories such as Leader-Member Exchange (LMX), Theory X Theory Y, Authentic, Situational, Transformational, Pseudo – transformational, servant-leadership, transactional, authoritarian, and others fit the top-down or cascading theories we often see in leadership development.  These contemporary leadership theories comprise most of what we see in leadership development.  An emergent theory challenges contemporary leadership theory as being too “leader-centric” without appropriate regard for agents that drive leadership.  Although LMX components derives from understanding and evaluation of vertical dyadic relationships between leaders and followers, the theory does not delve deep enough into the complexity of leadership theory.

Contemporary Leadership Limitations

Current leadership theory is one directional or limited to the leader/follower relationship.  Further limitations of contemporary leadership are the focal points of an individual’s character, actions, attributes, charisma, or other individual driven actions pertaining to these theories.  Leadership development in this realm inevitably pertains to an individual’s personal development and expansion of his or her capacity to fulfill their role.  Contemporary leadership theory fails to recognize the complexity of relational aspects that foster or inhibit leadership in broad or organizational perspectives.

Complexity Leadership Theory

An emergent theory known as complexity leadership (CL) reframes leadership by differentiating between leaders and leadership.  Furthermore, complexity leadership (CL) incorporates both definitions of leaders and leadership into a far-reaching and overarching theory that aligns with its supporting theories.  CL theory is an extension and expansion of network theory, systems theory, and complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory and arriving at CLT.  Each of these theories demonstrate how complex dynamic systems move, grow, and develop leadership throughout an organization or any system that contains leadership.

Expanding the Framework of Leadership

CLT expands traditional leadership theory from a leader-centric perspective to one that resides within complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory.  Complex leadership theory (CLT) emerges from CAS with the aspiration to examine the dynamic patterns of interaction within leadership theory.  CLT transcends leadership theory through an examination of interactions from the entirety of a system opposed to established paradigms founded in typical hierarchical structure.  CLT considers the various elements within a dynamic system as each component can produce unpredictable actions throughout the system.  Moreover, elements within a system may appear to be of little consequence within the entirety of a system but may have unknown reactions should the element change.

Summary

While contemporary leadership theory aligns with CLT, it is marginalized in its role when assessed from a systems perspective.  Thus, we can begin with this broad overview and build on network theory, systems theory, complex adaptive systems theory, and conclude with complexity leadership theory.  From this vantage, we can assess the role of contemporary leadership and how we can incorporate CLT in leadership development.