Vulnerability and construction of leadership in self-managing organizational context – team level perspective

Self-managing organizations (SMOs) and less-hierarchical forms of organizing have recently been under intensive scrutiny. Real-life experiments where the reporting lines between supervisors and subordinates have been severed, have become more common (Lee and Edmondson, 2017; Martela, 2019). As a result, also leadership in SMOs have aroused interest of numerous organization and management scholars. Traditionally, leadership research has focused on leader-follower relationships and on leaders as individuals (Pearce & Manz, 2005). However, in self-managing organizations more collective leadership concepts seem to be more appropriate (Barnett and Weidenfeller, 2016). In this paper we build on the post-heroic approach to leadership. We draw on a conceptualization of leadership as non-hierarchical, distributed throughout the organization as a relational practice of collaboration, empathy, trust and empowerment (Pearce & Manz, 2005; Cunliffe and Eriksen, 2011 Denis, Langley & Sergi, 2012).