Distributed leadership in online communities

Contemporary researchers shifted their attention from observing the individual in the organization to monitoring a network of relationships within organizations. In complex situations, leadership is preferably a collaborative... [ view full abstract ]

Contemporary researchers shifted their attention from observing the individual in the organization to monitoring a network of relationships within organizations. In complex situations, leadership is preferably a collaborative and collective responsibility “where the responsibilities, competencies and decision-making need to be distributed onto several individuals rather than one” (Collinson, 2007). The new field for emergence of distributed leadership are networked structures. Integration of ICT facilitates the creation of network capabilities such as the ability to locate and share knowledge and respond to changes rapidly. Knowledge held by members of the network of relationships help dynamically to solve problems and create new knowledge. Distributed leadership is information-based and “creating an informational environment helps solve increasingly complex and often ambiguous problems” (Zack & McKenney, 1995). The focus of this paper is distributed leadership in online communities in Lithuania. The subject of the qualitative research were online community projects which include social media tools allowing and encouraging collective decision making, creativity, on-line collaboration, entrepreneurship etc. The structure of self-organization, formalization level, decision making, conflict management and other important dimensions for emergence of leadership were analyzed during the structured interviews with communities initiators, managers and participants.The qualitative research was conducted to broaden knowledge about distributed leadership processes taking place in online communities and to collect empirical data on features, singularities, stimulating factors and obstacles for leadership performance.