Erica Gabrielle Foldy

The relationship between power and collective leadership (CL) has been theoretically understood and empirically addressed in many different ways. To make sense of this diversity, we investigate and diagram the role of power in CL. First, we identify six representations of power—six ways in which scholars have found that power shapes the emergence and enactment of CL. These representations include: Even in CL, individual power matters; Leaders can devolve power to their subordinates by empowering them; Contextual characteristics related to power can influence the possibility and enactment of CL; CL can create the collective power necessary for people in marginalized positions to challenge embedded power dynamics; Power is intrinsic to the co-construction process; Attributions affect who can enact CL, how they are viewed, and whether they have power. Second, we offer a conceptual framework that provides a comprehensive way to understand the relationship between power and CL. The framework includes two dimensions, one related to power (that runs from episodic to systemic) and the other related to CL (that runs from entitative to emergent). Third, we create a conceptual map by placing the six representations within this framework. Based on our research, we make the case that we cannot understand CL without understanding the ubiquitous, complex, and even contradictory role of power. We also suggest avenues for expanding and elaborating discussions of power in the CL literature.

In the concluding article, we move from providing a map of the collective leadership (CL) research field that has been conducted to date to providing a travel guide that we hope can inspire both experienced and novice travelers to push out the frontiers of exploration of CL. A Rapid Appraisal analysis of the extant CL research revealed that most of the work to date has focused on shared and distributed leadership; taken an empirical rather than a conceptual focus; and strongly emphasized qualitative versus quantitative research methods. Looking ahead to future CL research, we identify the following three challenges as being the most significant for leadership researchers to confront: the fundamental ambiguity of the space in which CL resides; the definitional problems inherited from leadership studies and exacerbated by its ambiguous nature; and the need to more fully embrace issues of process in CL. In response to these challenges, the following three guidelines are provided: the need to decipher CL configurations and its power-based foundations; the need to establish how leadership is made relevant in a collective setting; and the need for CL researchers to adopt strong process models.

In this introductory article we explain the impetus for creating the Special Issue, along with its goals and the process by which we created it. We present a map of the terrain of collective leadership (CL) that builds on earlier frameworks, recognizing that the terrain is expanding and has become increasingly difficult to traverse. The map is comprised of two axes or dimensions. The first axis, the ‘locus of leadership,’ captures how scholars conceptualize where to look for manifestations of leadership. That is, does the leadership reside in the group or does it reside in the system? The second axis is the view of ‘collectivity’ that plots how scholars conceptualize the collective. Do they see it as an empirical type of leadership or a theoretical lens through which to study leadership? We then plot distinctive CL research into four cells, providing definitions and references to empirical work emblematic for each cell. In introducing and summarizing each of the five articles we have selected for this Special Issue, we show where each of these is located on the CL research map, and distil how each provides a clear connection between theory and method in a way that advances our understanding of CL.

Many organizations attempt to increase cultural competence as one way to foster organizational change to enhance equity and inclusion. But the literature on cultural competence is largely silent on the role of emotion, despite the strong feelings that inevitably accompany work in cross-racial dyads, groups, and institutions. We offer group relations theory as an approach rooted in the importance of emotions, especially anxiety, and offering a rich awareness of how unconscious processes, including defense mechanisms like splitting and projection, drive that anxiety. We show how this approach helps us both diagnose and address difficult dynamics, including by recognizing entrenched power inequities. We draw on examples from others’ research as well as our own research, teaching, and consulting to illustrate key concepts. Ultimately, we argue that buried emotions can create distance and inhibit change. Surfacing and addressing them can foster connection and provide a way for organizations to move forward.

The Learning Pathways Grid (LPG) is a visual template (see Figure 1) for a particular kind of conversation analysis. LPG analysis helps professionals discover links from cognition to action, to the effects of action and makes those links explicit; it then supports a pragmatic redesign of action. LPG analysis is a powerful action research tool. It allows professionals to develop reflective practice skills in a rigorous, structured and collaborative way. While ‘reflective practice’ may appear mysterious and unattainable, the LPG allows practitioners at any level to identify ways in which their espoused beliefs and actual actions conflict or are in sync, a key reflective practice skill.

~Studies of street-level discretion tend to focus on what influences

workers’ behaviors and the consequences of their choices for advancing or compromising policy goals, but studies rarely focus on the space before action, that is, the processes through which workers make decisions and, in particular, how they deliberate with one another about practice problems within groups dedicated to improving social service delivery. Drawing from two qualitative studies of peer discussion groups, a study of teams of child welfare workers and a study of interorganizational groups composed of employment service workers, we find that workers in each setting grappled with similar types of problems but differed in their focus on specific clients or routine tasks, how they sought to legitimate their responses, and the extent to which their proposed solutions modified established approaches to practice. Our analysis suggests that features of the accountability contexts associated with the two policy fields help explain observed differences.

Introduction

Simulation instructors often feel caught in a task-versus-relationship dilemma. They must offer clear feedback on learners’ task performance without damaging their relationship with those learners, especially in formative simulation settings. Mastering the skills to resolve this dilemma is crucial for simulation faculty development.

Methods

We conducted a case study of a debriefer stuck in this task-versus-relationship dilemma. Data: The “2-column case” captures debriefing dialogue and instructor’s thoughts and feelings or the “subjective experience.” Analysis: The “learning pathways grid” guides a peer group of faculty in a step-by-step, retrospective analysis of the debriefing. The method uses vivid language to highlight the debriefer’s dilemmas and how to surmount them.

Results

The instructor’s initial approach to managing the task-versus-relationship dilemma included (1) assuming that honest critiques will damage learners, (2) using vague descriptions of learner actions paired with guess-what-I-am-thinking questions, and (3) creating a context she worried would leave learners feeling neither safe nor clear how they could improve. This case study analysis identified things the instructor could do to be more effective including (1) making generous inferences about the learners’ qualities, (2) normalizing the challenges posed by the simulation, (3) assuming there are different understandings of what it means to be a team.

Conclusions

There are key assumptions and ways of interacting that help instructors resolve the task-versus-relationship dilemma. The instructor can then provide honest feedback in a rigorous yet empathic way to help sustain good or improve suboptimal performance in the future.

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Using qualitative data, this paper documents how organizations contribute to the construction of their members’ race and gender identities.  Data collection took place in four organizations, from a small nonprofit to a large financial services firm.  Using interactions as the unit of analysis, I compiled and investigated a database of 114 interactions, creating a process model of how working in an organization can spotlight and change the expression of racial, ethnic and gender identities.  The paper makes four contributions: it suggests a broader reach for organizational influence on individual identity, since earlier research has explored work-related identities; it distinguishes among levels of influence by isolating the discrete role of interpersonal encounters, organizational practices, and the combination of the two; it casts light on how identity construction happens even without intentional effort by individuals or organizations; and it illustrates the importance of modest changes in the construction of identity.

Ample research documents the ubiquity of routines in street-level practice. Some individual-level and organizational-level research has explored how to break street-level routines, but little has looked at the work group level. Our study observed teams of state child welfare workers over 2.5 years, documenting whether they discarded old routines and learned new ones. Results suggest that team characteristics such as clear direction and reflective behaviors had greater influence on team learning than individual characteristics such as stress level, tenure, and educational level. We suggest that group-level factors be included in future models of what enables the re-creation of street-level practice.

Attention to the relational dimensions of leadership represents a new frontier of leadership research and is an expression of the growing scholarly interest in the conditions that foster collective action within and across boundaries. This article explores the antecedents of collaboration from the perspective of social change organizations engaged in processes of collaborative governance. Using a constructionist lens, the study illuminates the question how do social change leaders secure the connectedness needed for collaborative work to advance their organization's mission? The article draws on data from a national, multi-year, multi-modal qualitative study of social change organizations and their leaders. These organizations represent disenfranchised communities which aspire to influence policy makers and other social actors to change the conditions that affect their members' lives. Narrative analysis of transcripts from in-depth interviews in 38 organizations yielded five leadership practices that foster strong relational bonds either within organizations or across boundaries with others. The article describes how these practices nurture interdependence either by forging new connections, strengthening existing ones, or capitalizing on strong ones.

Cassandra Shaylor and Cynthia Chandler founded Justice Now in 2000. They push hard for prison abolition while advocating for better health care and conditions for prisoners in California's two largest women's prisons. They prioritize the leadership of prisoners, and offer interns the opportunity to work and meet with women inside prisons to learn firsthand about prisoners' human struggles as well as the policy implications of state sponsored violence. Their strategies include the following:

• Conduct Legal Visits Inside Prisons to Expose and Challenge Human Rights Abuses: Shaylor, Chandler and the Justice Now interns spend as much time as possible inside prisons to uncover human rights abuses and organize to challenge them. They build relationships with women inside and become the eyes and ears to the outside.
• Build Leadership Among Prisoners: Justice Now engages people in prison in the organization's work at every level. They also assist women who are already working as activists within the prisons.
• Push the Prison Abolition Frontier: While Justice Now helps to improve health care and other conditions, they oppose prison reformation efforts. Instead they push for prison abolition.
• Spread a Vision of a World Without Prisons: Through plays, music, oral histories and toolkits, the organization helps envision and promote a new approach to building lives, not locking people away.

In this leadership story Shaylor and Chandler, along with Justice Now interns and activists, describe their experiences in this case example.

Research suggests advances in students’ multicultural competence following multicultural counseling training. Increasingly, however, multicultural counseling courses have emphasized self awareness, which has increased the affective demands of these courses and student resistance to learning the material. This paper proposes a pedagogical model to enhance multicultural counseling training that attends both to content and process variables that may impact classroom learning. Its fundamental premise is that psychological safety, the belief that the classroom is safe for taking interpersonal risks, must be present for increasing knowledge and awareness around the charged, and often taboo, topics of race and culture in multicultural counseling training. The model integrates research from psychology, education, and management, including identity threat, culture-centered teaching practices, racial identity, and learning frames. The authors conclude with implications for classroom teaching.

In summary, these exemplary non-profit organizations were often very strategic in how they framed problems, solutions and the people they served. This suggests that public organizations could also be more deliberate in their framing processes. Organizational leaders might want to talk explicitly about the shifts they are trying to create, and whether these fit together or act at cross purposes, in addition to how well they match the organization’s goals and mission. Prompting cognitive shifts is at the heart of public leadership.

Leadership studies focusing on race–ethnicity provide particularly rich contexts to illuminate the human condition as it pertains to leadership. Yet insights about the leadership experience of people of color from context-rich research within education, communications and black studies remain marginal in the field. Our framework integrates these, categorizing reviewed studies according to the effects of race–ethnicity on perceptions of leadership, the effects of race–ethnicity on leadership enactments, and actors' approach to the social reality of race–ethnicity. The review reveals a gradual convergence of theories of leadership and theories of race–ethnicity as their relational dimensions are increasingly emphasized. A shift in the conceptualization of race–ethnicity in relation to leadership is reported, from a constraint to a personal resource to a simultaneous consideration of its constraining and liberating capacity. Concurrent shifts in the treatment of context, power, agency versus structure and causality are also explored, as are fertile areas for future research.

This chapter describes an approach for teaching reflective practice in the action science/action inquiry tradition. We offer a theoretical background for our approach and then break it down into three key stages: (1) understanding the social construction of reality; (2) recognizing one's own contribution to that construction; and (3) taking action to reshape that construction. We articulate key concepts (e.g. the ladder of inference and competing commitments) and tools (e.g. the change immunity map and the learning pathways grid) for each stage. We end with suggestions for assignments that integrate learning across stages and concepts. In short, we offer a conceptually grounded set of concrete practices for teaching reflective practice.

Recent scholarship has shown that, despite the broad representation of women in the workplace, gender inequities in organizations remain widespread. Because gender schema ”embedded ways of thinking about men and women” contribute to this phenomenon, addressing such mental models should be a part of gender equity initiatives. This article provides data that suggest that some individuals hold within themselves quite contradictory schemas of men and of women. It then illustrates how individuals can use these internal inconsistencies to push through superficial understandings of gender to more complex ones. By facilitating this learning process in training and other kinds of organizational events, change agents can strengthen organizational efforts to achieve gender equity.

A traditional view of scholarly quality defines rigor as the application of method and assumes an implicit connection with relevance. But as an applied field, public administration requires explicit attention to both rigor and relevance. Interpretive scholars' notions of rigor demand an explicit inclusion of relevance as an integral aspect of quality. As one form of interpretive research, narrative inquiry illuminates how this can be done. Appreciating this contribution requires a deeper knowledge of the logic of narrative inquiry, an acknowledgement of the diversity of narrative approaches, and attention to the implications for judging its quality. We use our story about community-based leadership research to develop and illustrate this argument.

Public-sector organizations tend to be more racially and ethnically diverse than private-sector organizations, leading to the challenge of enhancing heterogeneous work group effectiveness. Recent work suggests that a group's "diversity perspective," or set of beliefs about the role of cultural diversity, moderates diverse group performance. One perspective, the integration and learning perspective, argues that heterogeneous groups function better when they believe that cultural identities can be tapped as sources of new ideas and experiences about work. However, simply holding the integration and learning perspective may not be sufficient. Research on general group learning has shown that it requires particular behaviors and cognitive frames. This article integrates recent work on diversity perspectives with long-standing research on team learning to propose a conceptual model of learning in culturally diverse groups. It suggests that both the integration and learning perspective and more generic learning frames and skills must be present.

This reader uses an alternative approach to gender at work to provoke new thinking about traditional management topics, such as leadership and negotiation.Presents students with an alternative conceptual approach to gender in the workplace. Connects gender with other dimensions of difference such as race and class for a deeper understanding of diversity in organizations. Illustrates how traditional images of competence and the ideal worker result in narrow ways of thinking about work, limiting both opportunity and organizational effectiveness. Provokes new ways of thinking about leadership, human resource management, negotiation, globalization and organizational change.

Handbook of Action Research draws together the different strands of action research, reveals their diverse applications and demonstrates their interrelations. The text articulates an emergent, participatory worldview that will challenge the modernist paradigm and value system.

This far-reaching volume, in illustrating the latest approaches in social inquiry, moves the field forward with innovative insights and participatory practices. It grapples with questions of how to integrate knowledge with action, how to collaborate with co-researchers in the field, and how to present the necessarily "messy" components of such participative research in a coherent fashion. The organization of the volume reflects the many different issues and levels of analysis represented.

Proposes an elaborated action-learning framework that decomposes action-learning method into the three components of argument, practice, and outcome. Illumination of multiple facets of change; Analysis of the interaction of the three methods in significant change processes; Application of the framework to a case of gay and lesbian workplace advocacy; How the different action-learning methods work together to create change in an organization.