Chapter 4: Game-Changing Leadership Through Social Networks in Complex Systems: An Inquiry Into the Mechanisms of Individual Influence on Social Process and Structure

There has been increasing interest in network models of organizations and consequently for new models of leadership in a network context. Much of what has been done assumes a complex systems perspective (Hazy, Goldstein, & Lichtenstein; 2007; Uhl-Bien & Marion, 2008) and includes computational modeling, a relatively unexplored area in the leadership field (Hazy, 2007a). This paper extrapolates the individual insights from these complexity science models of leadership and asks: If extant complexity science research is taken as a starting point, what can be said about the theory of leadership that underlies these complex systems models? Can they be tied together into a multilevel theory of leadership in complex systems?