How to Manage the Unmanageable? Leadership in Coping with Communities of Practice

Prior research on managing intrafirm communities of practice (CoPs) focuses predominantly on intentionally designing, structuring, and cultivating CoPs partially as classical lateral organizational units like project teams in... [ view full abstract ]

Prior research on managing intrafirm communities of practice (CoPs) focuses predominantly on intentionally designing, structuring, and cultivating CoPs partially as classical lateral organizational units like project teams in order to utilize them as a tool for innovation and knowledge management. This perspective is often contrary to a constitutive attribute of communities: their self-organizing character. Yet, academic literature has not considered how self-organizing communities are inherently intertwined with their surrounding hierarchical organization. Against this backdrop, this paper seeks to rethink the influence of external leaders on intra-firm CoPs that takes the self-organizing character of such social entities and their embeddedness into their host-organization into account.
This paper´s main proposition is that a form of ambidextrous leadership – an approach, which focuses on granting CoPs autonomy and simultaneously guiding them indirectly – is most suited to the self-organizing nature of such social entities and at the same time supports the usage of CoPs within hierarchical organizations. This idea is studied based on a multiple case study of internal CoPs within a strictly hierarchical and military organization: the German Federal Armed Forces (FAF). The main body of qualitative data was collected via semi-structured interviews with community members.
By introducing the theory of ambidextrous leadership, this paper aims on establishing a theoretical framework for CoP management. Hereby opening leadership enables self-organization within CoPs, which is guided and framed through indirectly closing leadership mechanisms. This result vanquishes the dichotomous view on CoP management of either direct governance of such groups or more autonomous approaches. As a consequence of this leadership conception, the self-organizing nature of CoPs remains intact and the CoPs embeddedness into the organization is deliberately complemented through external leadership activities.