Systems Theory and Systems Approach to Leadership (original) (raw)
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A Systems Approach to Leadership Theories
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Executive Summary. This paper presents a perspective for gathering ideas about leadership. It organizes popular leadership principles around a systems approach framework, which consists of the classical input-processoutput paradigm coupled with control and design elements.
Leadership: A Systems Thinking Perspective
Accepting new paradigms are important to advancing scientific knowledge. Over the history of humanity, discoveries have been made because of the availab ility of new facts that would be either prev iously impossible or improbable for mult iple reasons. However, whenever one contextualizes the importance of leadership within the contemporary period of existence, one would find it difficult to dimin ish its contribution. Leadership makes or breaks organizations. Therefore, every facets of leadership should be scrutinized carefully; styles, types, reasons, and rewards, so that effective leadership can be appropriately placed and applied. Such broad perspectives may require further assistance because of missing links or inco mprehensible relat ionships. If such is the case, one may require broadening one's horizon by examin ing existing facts in new ways. The foregoing is a scrutiny of the broader perspectives of paradig ms and situating leadership appropriately within that massive scientific discourse.
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Systems leadership is heralded as a means for improving collaboration and alignment between those commissioning, providing and using public services. Despite the clamour, however, little attention has been paid to the challenges
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This paper forms part of The King’s Fund 2012 leadership review, addressing the topic from the perspective of those seeking to provide leadership extending well outside their own immediate organisational boundaries. To establish firm foundations on which to study this whole-system aspect of leadership, the paper first explores leadership, management and administration, responding to the first King’s Fund commission which identified that the NHS is over-administered, but under-led. The simple message that management is about control while leadership is about influence becomes supremely important as we explore more deeply into the different demands of increasingly complex systems. The paper then considers the difference between organisations and systems. In this we identify four different styles of whole system: • Networks • Markets • Collaborations • Social movements We note that the latter of these is rarely considered in relation to organisational studies, but with the rapid develo...
Based on the idea that a leadership concept should derive from – and indeed legitimize – the purpose of the “leadership“ function in an organization, the term "organization" should first be clarified. However, before undertaking this project, it should be noted that any emerging conceptual clarification or definition will be normative in character. That is, it will be formed using fundamental assumptions which cannot be proven or verified but should, at a minimum, be specified for the sake of transparency. On the other hand, the description should be able to characterize the nature of organizations independent of their intrinsic values and ideological beliefs. N. Luhmann's theory of social systems will be used here as frame of reference for a concept of the "leadership" function.
A Systems Thinking and Design Thinking Approach to Leadership
Systems Thinking, Design Thinking and Leadership have largely been developed independently of each other. More recently, there have been, ongoing initiatives to integrate Systems Thinking and Design Thinking. The main aim of this abstract paper is to suggest that the effectiveness of this integrated approach is uniquely linked to leadership. The paper will emphasise the important role played by leadership and explore how leadership has developed through the different paradigms. The benefits of viewing these transitions from a Kuhnian scientific paradigm perspective is highlighted followed by a Systemic view of leadership and then a presentation of a Design Thinking perspective noting that the attributes arising out of the two approaches will benefit leadership. This leads to a discussion of how leadership will benefit from the integrated Systems and Design Thinking approach.
2021
The General Theory of Leadership and practicing entrepreneurship in Los Angeles, California. Clearly these entrepreneurs were leading their businesses developed from some emergent idea, but defining this leadership was difficult because all other definitions of leadership, including the most popular, were insufficient or inadequate to capture their experiences. From the beginning we believed that the general theory of leadership could not be developed without first developing a general definition of leadership. In designing the general definition of leadership, this work first theorized that the human factor, the organizational factor, and the environmental factor had special centrality in the core of leadership emergence and practice. The organization interacts in a dynamic fashion with the environment through structural coupling as postulated by the structural coupling theory. Since the organization depends on the environment to supply resources and also to consume its products, structural changes in either or both the supplier environment and the consumption environment will trigger the need for structural changes in the organization. The emergent changes in the environment do not tell the organization what to do but will stimulate leadership emergence and behavior in individuals in the organization to seek to avoid or mitigate the impacts of threats to the organization or to prepare the organization to harvest the benefits of the emergent opportunities. The general theory of leadership is built around this concept of emergence and stimulation based on emergent phenomena in the organization's environment. For example, at the time of writing this introduction, the COVID-19 virus, which has killed nearly 620,000 Americans as of August 2021, emerged and circulated based on conditions favorable to its survival and spread, but it does not tell anyone what to do. Individuals must understand its dynamics and deadly impact and seek to create conditions unfavorable to its survival and spread. Vaccines, social distancing, and masking, among others, are actions that deny the virus its capacity to spread through contagion. General systems theory, specifically open systems theory, framed the development of both the general definition and the general theory. The theory was developed in theoretical biology by Ludwig von Bertalanffy beginning in the late 1920s and was fully developed around 1948. In open systems theory, a system is open if it takes in resources from the environment, processes those resources into finished products, and outputs those finished products into the environment. Therefore an organization, because it has the same structure and behaves in a similar manner as biological open systems, is an open system PART I WHAT IS LEADERSHIP? T oday there is a need to develop new models of leadership grounded in the understanding that humans, organizations, and organizational environments are all involved in the definition, emergence, and practice of leadership in organizations. It has been argued that the current models of leadership were designed for the industrial age 1 and do not, therefore, align with the needed leadership for today's organization. The development of the new models must be informed by a deep understanding of the organization and the environment in which it operates and must, in the end, take into account and address threats against the organization and the opportunities for the organization, both emergent in the environment of the organization. Because of the biopsychological complexity of the individuals in organizations, as well as the complexity of the organization and the complexity of the biology, physics, chemistry, politics, psychology, and sociology of supplier and consumer environments of the organization, the leadership models must of necessity be interdisciplinary. Interdisciplinary modeling for the leadership definition and theory developed in this book, for example, includes such fields as psychology, biology, physics, sociology, and mathematics. This interdisciplinarity provided a better understanding of organizational systems and could inform appropriate choices of leadership practices in organizations. But before we can begin to develop our general definition and general theory of leadership, we must first define "organization" as used in this book. An organization is an aggregation of coordinated actions and activities centered by an emergent idea intended to generate economic or social value for its promoters and to satisfy expectations of stakeholders. Successful
The systemic approach to leadership conceptualization and its development in an organization
For years leadership has represented an invariably popular problem and continuously subject to reinterpretation. The majority of classical leadership theories put emphasis on individual leaders or groups made up of a leader and subordinates, thus ignoring the broader aspect manifested by mutual interdependencies of organizations and leadership. Within the framework of modern leadership theories a more extensive exploration of the complex phenomenon represented by leadership is possible as a result of taking a systemic approach to the concept of leadership. The elaboration discusses, among others, the concepts referring to complex adaptive systems, i.e. Complex Systems Leadership Theory and Complexity Leadership Development. The purpose of the presented study is to discuss the problem of leadership following the systemic approach (as the system) and to analyze the development possibilities of leadership conceptualization in an organization perceived in such way.
New Paradigm of Systems Thinking
Accepting new paradigms are important to advancing scientific knowledge. Over the history of humanity, discoveries have been made because of the availability of new facts that would be either previously impossible or improbable for multiple reasons. However, whenever one contextualizes the importance of leadership within the contemporary period of existence, one would find it difficult to diminish its contribution. Leadership makes or breaks organizations. Therefore, every facets of leadership should be scrutinized carefully; styles, types, reasons, and rewards, so that effective leadership can be appropriately placed and applied. Such broad perspectives may require further assistance because of missing links or incomprehensible relationships. If such is the case, one may be required to broaden one's horizon by examining existing facts in new ways. The foregoing is a scrutiny of the broader perspectives of paradigms and situating leadership appropriately within that massive scientific discourse.