Chapter 9: Beyond the Leadership Dyad: Applications of Social Network Analysis to Study Leadership Networks Emergence and Effectiveness

Researchers are increasingly looking beyond leader–follower dyads to conceptualize leadership as a social influence process that unfolds over time within multiple formal and informal leadership relationships that co-exist within groups. To this end, researchers are using social network analytic approaches to understand the patterns of leadership that emerge within groups (i.e., “Who leads whom?”). We review and synthesize the extant literature to determine how research has leveraged descriptive network statistics, which characterize patterns of social relations among actors, and inferential statistical models, which create probabilistic statistical models of networks enabling researchers to directly test hypotheses regarding the antecedents and outcomes of networked relational patterns, to understand leadership structure emergence and effectiveness. Our review identifies strengths and weaknesses of network approaches and suggests directions for future research.