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Leadership in Agile Organizations

Which leadership is needed in today’s public organizations?

Sandra GroeneveldInstitute of Public AdministrationLeiden Leadership Centre27 October 2016

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Leadership

Leadership (Yukl, 2006)the process of influencing others to understand and agree about what needs to be done and how to do it, and the process of facilitating individual and collective efforts to accomplish shared objectives

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Public Leadership

Public leadership of the 21st century is …

• Distributed• Shared• Inclusive• Connective• Transformational• …

Common thread: focus on leaders’ behavior without regarding the organizational context in which it should be embedded.

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Ambivalence in Public Leadership

Bureaucracy

Antipode of

bureaucracy

Responsiveness

Resilience

Flexibility

Innovativeness

Equity

Efficiency

Reliability

Predictability

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Ambidexterity (March, 1991)

Explorationincreasing variance

experimentationsearching for

alternativesrisk taking

Adaptive leadership

Exploitationreducing varianceadherence to rulesalignmentrisk avoidance

Administrative leadership

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Complexity leadership (Uhl-Bien, Marion & McKelvey, 2007)

Enabling leadership – managing the entanglement between administrative and adaptive structures

• Foster interactions and interdependencies that are consistent with the strategy and mission of the organization and prevent administrative leaders from killing them.

• Facilitate the integration of creative outcomes into the administrative structures.