An understanding that organizations are a cluster of interconnected structures, linked processes, and mutually dependent practices that are best viewed in a systemic or holistic manner. Configurational approaches are valuable in developing a deeper understanding of organizational structure and function, but they also provide insight into the process of organizational change and strategic alignment.
Published in Chapter:
The Conundrums of Strategic Leadership: Leading of Organizations, in Organizations, or through Organizations?
David Starr-Glass (University of New York in Prague, Czech Republic)
Copyright: © 2017
|Pages: 11
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-1049-9.ch122
Abstract
Strategic leadership has emerged as the most significant and widely used leadership approach, and is seen as moving leadership away from a concern with the organization's internal dynamics to an involvement with its strategic alignment in the external environment – a leading “of” organizations, rather than a leading “in” them. Rhetorically, strategic leadership has a strong appeal; conceptually, however, it presents a number of conundrums. Strategic leadership seems to confound the process of strategic management with a process of leadership. It fails to recognize a relational understanding of leadership that might actively include people, develop inspiration, or sustain productive motivation. By focusing exclusively on hierarchical leaders and their externalized goals, strategic leadership also avoids a consideration of how leadership might actually work through the organization, rendering internal organizational dynamics invisible, if not irrelevant. This chapter explores these problems and calls for a reconsideration of what strategic leadership might mean.