Collective leadership is cast as a new and emerging paradigm. However, for many Indigenous communities, collective leadership has been a way of life through the millennia. Where mainstream models of collective leadership focus on what people do, think, and feel in the here and now, we argue such an approach ignores contributions of other generations. The Māori ecosystems view set out in this article positions a revolutionary departure from previous work on collective leadership because of the extraordinary set of relationships it encompasses, including those across generations and across living and non-living entities. Meeting this special issue’s call for innovative research methodologies, our work is informed by the ancient practice of wānanga, which challenges secular, reductionist, quantitative research. Wānanga traverses time and space and involves a quality of consciousness that brings forth an integrated collective intelligence. Inquiring into three watershed leadership moments, we show that collective Māori leadership is an ecosystem held together by activating a knowledge code, cultivating ties of affection, and working the tensions. Unlike the ‘new broom sweeps clean’ approach where incoming leaders tend to discard the work of predecessors, true collective leadership is an integrated ecosystem sustained from one generation of leadership to the next.
Mindfulness has received increased attention in organizational studies. Yet we ask, is mindfulness necessary, indeed achievable, in every "moment" and every context? Mindfulness as co-opted by organizations is often considered a positive and helpful state, while little attention is paid to the important notion of mindlessness. Our comprehensive exploratory review of mindfulness and mindlessness highlights theoretical debates and responds to calls for a more balanced approach to mindlessness and mindfulness. In addition, it highlights practical implications to management learning by introducing Eastern Buddhist principles of non-attachment, practiced through the key concept of Skillful Means. A distinctive contribution of this article is a Five-Fold Framework detailing five aspects of a skillful mindful and mindless approach: context-flexibility, managerial emotional display, managerial learning under complex situations and dilemmas, transferring mindfulness practices from individual to organizational level, and context-sensitive research.
The primary aim of this article is to offer an indigenous perspective of relational leadership as a way-of-being and doing leadership. It is based on a longitudinal qualitative investigation of M aori leaders and practitioners in the screen industry. The findings revealed three distinct themes; embodying relational leadership, enacting relational leadership and macrocontextual influences in relational leadership. This study affirmed the ways in which culture and worldviews shaped the identity of M aori leaders, confirming that relational leadership is a process of social construction, which emerges from the dynamic interaction between ontology (ways of being) and praxis (ways of doing). This contribution charts new territory in leadership theory contributing new ways of understanding relational leadership from an indigenous M aori perspective. It highlights the importance of holistic theorisations of leadership that examine culture, identity and the macro-contextual dimensions that influence leadership.
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