Responsible leadership and inter-organisational partnerships : a relational social constructionist lens

Abstract

Interorganisational partnerships are organisational forms in which multiple stakeholders work as a collective towards common objectives, and yet little empirical evidence exists on how the leadership construct occurs in such settings. Moreover, the heroic leadership discourse that focuses on the individual leader versus followers is deemed not to provide adequate answers to the relational dynamics that take place at non-hierarchical interorganisational partnerships.

The main research question is: How do relational leadership practices (RLPs) occur in interorganisational partnerships (IoPs) and what are the implications for responsible leadership theory (RLT)?

In the literature it became clear that the ‘relationality’ construct is at the centre of how leadership could be understood in IoPs. As such, this study adopted the relational social constructionist leadership (RSCL) lens as its ontology and epistemology. It employed the practice approach as its methodology, which is underlined by the abductive logic of inquiry. The research was based on two samples, namely: an international (African continent) IoP and a national (South Africa) IoP.

The research findings yielded eleven themes (RLPs of interest) and seventy-seven sub-themes (intersecting RLPs) based on data generated through dialogic interviews and focus groups which was analysed via coding processes using Atlas.ti 22 software. The set of findings that were presented via a word-cloud confirmed the centrality of the leadership construct in the data. The findings on RLPs demonstrated various perspectives of the research participants on how the leadership phenomenon is socially constructed intersubjectively in the two IoPs. The findings were discussed in terms of: (1) the social construction of leadership using the ‘RSCL Model’ (Endres & Weibler, 2017); (2) outcomes of social construction in terms of the ‘Direction, Alignment and Commitment (DAC) Framework’ (Drath, McCauley, Palus, van Velsor, O’Connor & McGuire, 2008); (3) the core tenets of RLT, namely: ethics, relationality and purpose; and (4) Ubuntu relational philosophy, which was deployed abductively to examine the RLPs under the theme of ‘agreeing’ in order to contextualise the understanding of the RLPs in the African milieu.

This thesis makes the following contributions to leadership research and practice: (1) RLT has been advanced through the application of the RSCL lens and the practice approach in IoPs. The findings show that over two-thirds of the identified RLPs are not adequately represented in extant RLT. (2) RLT’s individualist-orientation (heroic) has been complemented with the relational and collective (post-heroic) orientations in terms of understanding how leadership responsibilities unfold in IoPs as RLPs. (3) It was found that there is a close alignment between the Ubuntu worldview and RLT in terms of moral, ethical and relational orientations, but the Ubuntu perspective adds a nuanced appreciation of the African context via its core intersubjective values of humaneness and harmony. (4) Relational leadership scholarship has been advanced through the application and subsequent modification of the RSCL Model and the DAC Framework informed by empirical analysis. (5) The thesis enunciates a new Responsible-Leadership-As-Practice theoretical framework. (6) In practice, insights from this thesis could inform the (re)design of leadership curriculum and research activities to emphasise social-relationality and praxeology of leadership in IoPs.