Chapter 7: Beyond Transactional and Transformational Leadership: Can Leaders Still Lead When They Don’t Know What to Do?

This chapter develops a theory of leader influence on emergent structures in organizations. It proposes that structure emerges spontaneously from the interactions of units, and that this structure can be influenced by changes in thresholds or biases that make some patterns more likely to emerge than others. Leaders are conceptualized as influencing the structure emergence process through their effects on three types of biases, those associated with affect, goal orientations, and identities. The theory that is developed is applied on both an intra- and an interpersonal level to explain the emergence of structure. Consistent with an important aspect of complexity theory, effective leaders are seen as influencing the process by which structure emerges, but not necessarily directly controlling the specific outcome of the structure emergence process.