Relational Leadership: New Developments in Theory and Practice

In this symposium we explore relational leadership and related concepts, highlighting new developments in theory and their implications for practice. Relational leadership is defined as a pattern of reciprocal interrelating between workers and managers to make sense of a situation, to determine what is to be done and how to do it. This process of reciprocal interrelating involves communicating through relationships of shared goals, shared knowledge and mutual respect. We start with a mapping of the territory by Foldy and Ospina who argue that relational leadership is one of several forms of collective leadership. Ancona, Backman and Parrott follow with an updated look at distributed leadership and its characteristics – distributed, decentralized and decoupled from roles, outlining similarities with and differences from the concept of relational leadership. Gauthier and Hornstrup each explore relational leadership as a process of sensemaking in the face of complexity, recognizing both cognitive and emotion...