Twenty-second International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations

Abstract

Forced by megatrends such as climate change, sustainability, digitization, and new work, organizations must periodically go through liminal space-time as a phenomenon of floating between the past and future. The latin word “liminality” describes a threshold as a space-time of ‘in-betweenness’ with the circumstances of embarrassment of not knowing ‘what’s next’ and the grief and pain of the disappearance ‘what was’. In such wrenching times of organizational transformation, and its duration, leadership have its´ greatest need of metamorphoses. It is like the caterpillar’s metamorphosis into a butterfly: leadership is in the process of growing wings, ready to emerge from its´ cocoons, transformed – new leadership! With new leadership, the focus of leadership changes away from hierarchical leadership towards leadership as a team task und function. Teams have the company’s vision in mind and take on more responsibility for the entire company. Nevertheless, managers/leaders are not obsolete; their roles are changing. Such a metamorphosis results in the need to question the classic understanding of leadership as well as the current leadership styles and to realign them. This study is based on a conceptual preliminary study on the subject of “Explaining Leadership” and investigate the uncovered mechanisms of leadership within flexible forms of organizations. It is argued that the causal configuration of leadership is best understood as the interplay between the key mechanism of power, along with human agency and collaborative agency, within specific structural and contextual conditions. This paper shows the current results of this empirical study started in 2021.