Chapter 5: Individual and Collective Coevolution: Leadership as Emergent Social Structuring

This chapter addresses the interactive and coevolutionary nature of human structuring actions and interactions as leadership in and across 2 levels of analysis: the organization (mesolevel) and the individual person (microlevel). It suggests that an “action theory” approach can provide a more robust understanding of the dynamics of structuring actions as bridging mechanisms across levels of analysis while maintaining the invariance of the properties of complex adaptive systems. It incorporates social cognitive theory to explain microactions, such as personality development, mastery, and sensemaking, and uses Gidden’s (1984) modalities of structuration to characterize the meso level and its coevolution with the micro level. This multilevel theory building approach (Morgeson & Hofmann, 1999) focuses on the functional (outcomes) invariance of human dynamics in the context of a complex adaptive systems. This chapter is not about a new “type” of leadership behavior, it is about recognizing the emergent structuring that is inherent in all social interaction.

If we are trying to understand anything about human society, past or present, or about individual actions, we must go to a finer level of analysis and consider human natures as actually formed in the world. (Ehrlich, 2000, p. 13)