Not Only Solitary Leaders: Concepts and Theories

Overall, this chapter aims at offering a theoretical conceptualization of the phenomenon of political collective leadership. Research in organization theory and management studies has devoted increasing attention to models of collective leadership, challenging the idea of the single leader who is alone at the top. The chapter illustrates and discusses several contributions, from the literature on “shared leadership” to the analyses of duos and small groups of leaders at the top. The insights received from the literature review suggest, first, to introduce a distinction between individual, dual and multimember leadership. Then, they guide the selection of some dimensions that may help classify forms of collective leadership. The first dimension regards the existence of formal position sharing or, in contrast, of power sharing that is based on an arrangement between actors who hold different positions. The second deals with the division of labor (or its absence) and how this aspect may be related to some types of complementarity between leadership partners.