Evolution of Management and Leadership Models for Today’s Boundaryless Organization
This article is the first in a series dedicated to analyzing historic trends on organizational leadership approaches and how we can apply the findings to solve emerging challenges in ever-changing organizational settings.
Over time, the concept of “leadership” has been defined in many ways. Scholars have described it as any act of influence towards the attainment of goals. Other authorities in the field have labeled it one of the most observed but least understood topics in social sciences. This leads modern experts in the area to view leadership as an art as much as a science.
Views of leadership have evolved over time, but overall, it always boils down to one person communicating a vision and provoking another to act. Today this is still true, however, leadership in complex business conditions and ever-evolving work settings might call for us to re-evaluate our approaches and mindsets, especially when aiming to increase employee satisfaction to address attrition, continuance, and other organizational performance issues. Perhaps looking at the evolution of leadership trends since the dawn of the industrial era might help us learn and apply knowledge to light the way for leaders in the era of boundary-free organizations.
Pre-Industrial and Scientific Management Era
Towards the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, we saw the advent of leadership theories like the “Great Man”, “Traits”, and “Scientific Management”. Before the industrial and bureaucratic era, during relative global stability, leadership scholars focused their research and development on individual traits. Mainstream theorists of that time believed that good leadership stemmed from one person’s exceptional skills, charisma, or other personality traits and behaviors.
During the first industrial revolution, organizations aimed to become more efficient and effective. They tried to maximize their production output through strong administrative structures, which paved the way for the development of bureaucracies, and hierarchical or centralized organization with top-down authority models. As industries and organizational systems continued to increase in size and complexity, to adjust for new organizational structures and economic factors, leadership focus began shifting to more behavioral and contingency approaches.
Behavioral and Contingency Management Era
From the 1930s to the 1960s, scholars began noticing that relationship-building with employees and focusing on development of desired behaviors led to performance improvements. It was then that theorists took notice of human capital potential and shifted their focus from administrative structures to human and relationship development. This behavioral management shift created the foundations used today for diversity and inclusion management. Another characteristic of this post-war globalization timeframe is that it brought increased complexity to organizational landscapes across many industries. In this era, new ideas like contingency management for coping with different situational factors that affected leader-follower relationships emerged. In essence, contingency theories suggested that there is no one single approach for managing and leading organizations, as needs vary according to specific organizational needs and external factors.
Transformational leadership era
Towards the end of the twentieth century, the business landscape evolved to a more globalized and connected system. Telecommunications advancements enabled unprecedented interconnectedness and new access to business opportunities around the world. With the popularity of computers, management became more reliant on data and statistics, along with knowledge-based systems. Knowledge on human capital development had evolved into transactional and transformational leadership styles and advanced to address leadership-follower relationships at all levels of the organization, helping people adapt to increasingly changing organizational settings while maximizing performance.
Achieving this required companies to adopt more transformational development approaches that place greater emphasis on flattening hierarchies into horizontal structures. They also focused on newer relational leadership strategies for increasing motivation and commitment among employees to support organizational performance and resilience to changes.
With continued development of digital technologies towards the end of the century, leaders had to continue learning and adapting to new capabilities that enabled organizations to increase their flexibility, for example by leveraging geographically distributed workgroups, and telecommuting. These factors produced virtual teams, making organizations even more fluid and complex than in earlier stages of the industrialization timeline.
Industry 4.0 and the Pandemic Era
Two decades into the twenty-first century, advances in technology have created endless opportunities for organizational leaders to leverage competitive advantage. A global pandemic, which started in 2019 and continues to affect us two years later, created new requirements for social distancing and reducing mobility. It also pushed us to embrace technology and virtual collaboration systems at unprecedented rates. Suddenly, predictions about a “tenth era of leadership”, where organizations are decentralized and leadership happened at all levels of the organization took on a new meaning, as progress was accelerated into the next industrial revolution era known as Industry 4.0. This latest iteration of the industrial revolution is marked by integration of organizational systems and technology. Leveraging the latest digital systems, telecommunication networks, software, and the internet of things (IoT), manufacturing and industrial systems are highly automated and integrated, resembling human social networks.
Continuously expanding hyper-connectedness and highly sophisticated mobile platforms have made it possible for human talent in many industries to work from virtually anywhere. Pandemic-related social distancing requirements combined with the ever-increasing need for access to strategically placed, geographically distributed talent, has resulted in the development and adoption of talent-market platforms that enable companies to connect with specialized resources from virtually anywhere in the world. In this new era, effective leaders embrace transformational approaches focused on increasing cohesiveness and collective performance for these highly distributed organizations through vision, collective purpose, digital, and shared-leadership. Also, there is an ever-increasing emphasis on lifelong learning and innovation for serving the ever-changing needs of organizations in this new highly virtualized world.
The Future of Leadership…
In the new world of boundary-free organizations, effective leaders will embrace new leadership approaches to bring together the whole of the system with transformational and inclusive leadership practices that are effective beyond physical and geographical limitations. As we continue adapting to changing organizational needs, in part, stemming from the post-pandemic “new normal”, leaders need to get better than ever at leading people from very diverse backgrounds, worldviews, geographical locations, and psychological needs.
The new leader will have to leverage technology to accommodate for diverse worker expectations and needs, while understanding that technology is now embedded into organizational systems and culture. As newer generations (Y and Z) favor organizations that align with their personal values, future leaders will also have to use transformational approaches to develop collective visions that facilitate the transition into the new world of Industry 4.0.
The job of the new leader is not for the faint of heart and will require them to view themselves more as servant-leaders than executives. Promoting organizational principles and values to develop virtual team identity, cohesiveness, resilience, collaboration, learning, and continuous innovation for competitive advantage in this era requires a much higher level of human leadership skill than in any previous iteration of our industrial evolution. Emerging leadership models like shared-leadership offer insights for harnessing the strength of everyone in the organization, by fostering work environments based on trust, autonomy, risk taking, connectedness, and collaboration beyond physical boundaries.
Cynuria Consulting offers leadership development programs focused on specific skills for leading effectively in this new digital and highly evolving organizational leadership era. One thing that we can learn from looking at the evolution of leadership thought since the dawn of industrialization, is the clear shift from production output and scientific management unto talent development and human capital. Specializing in talent development solutions, we offer a variety of services and leadership development programs for individuals and organizations alike. We work with an agile approach and apply the latest methodologies in order to connect, inspire, and transform. Get in touch with us to see how we can help you.
