Sending the Right Signals: A Theoretical Model to Understand How Interpretative Leadership Capacity Advances Cross-Sector Collaboration
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18666/JNEL-2024-12046Keywords:
cross-sector, interpretative leadership, Leadership-as-Practice, cross-sector collaborationAbstract
Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) are increasingly asked to facilitate cross-sector collaboration between state, private industry, and nonprofit actors and organizations. Growing evidence indicates certain contexts and conditions support cross-sector collaboration more than others. However, there is still limited understanding of how, specifically, process and practice produce leadership activity necessary to advance cross-sector collaboration. The purpose of this study is to examine illustrations of how the leadership practice of interpretative signaling emerges in facilitated committees working to enable cross-sector collaboration. Relying on a Leadership-as-Practice (LAP) frame, this video ethnography of Collaborative Leadership Learning Group (CLLG) sessions establishes a theoretical model helpful to capturing how everyday dialogic, relational, and socio-material interactions emerge leadership between committee members attempting to enable cross-sector collaboration. Leadership practice was primarily connected to informal authority that was dispersed through networks of people and community systems. Four forms of interpretative signaling are illustrated as a general practice in the theoretical model.
References
References
AbouAssi, K., Makhlouf, N., & Whalen, P. (2016). NGOs’ resource capacity antecedents for
Partnerships. Nonprofit Management and Leadership, 26(4), 435-451.
Alvehus, J. (2019). Emergent, distributed, and orchestrated: Understanding leadership through
frame analysis. Leadership, 15(5), 535–554.
Alvehus, J. & Crevani, L. (2022). Micro-ethnography: Towards an approach for attending to the
Multimodality of leadership. Journal of Change Management, 22(1), 1-21.
Antaki, C. (2011). Six kinds of applied conversation analysis. In C. Antaki (Ed.), Applied
Conversation analysis: Intervention and change in institutional talk (pp. 1-14).
Palgrave Macmillan.
Appiah, K. A. (1994). Identity, authenticity, survival: Multicultural societies and social
reproduction. In A. Gutmann (Ed.), Multiculturalism (pp. 31-48). Princeton
University Press.
Barge, J. K. (2012). Systemic constructionist leadership and working from within the present moment. In
Mary Uhl-Bien and Sonia Ospina (Eds.), Advancing Relational Leadership Research: A Dialogue
Among Perspectives (pp. 107-142). Information Age Publishing.
Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York, NY:
ZoneBooks.
Carroll, B. & Simpson, B. (2012). Capturing sociality in the movement between frames: An
Illustration from leadership development. Human Relations, 73(4), 441-463.
Carroll, B., Levy, L., Richmond, D. (2008). Leadership as practice: Challenging the competency
Paradigm, Leadership, 4(4), 363-379.
Caufield, J. L., Lee, F. K., & Richards, B. A. (2021). Leadership as an art: An enduring concept
framed with contemporary leadership. Leadership and Organization Development
Journal, 42(5), 735-747.
Chandler, L. S. & Kirsch, R. E. (2018). Critical leadership theory: Integrating transdisciplinary
Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan.
Chen, B., & Graddy, E. A. (2010). The effectiveness of nonprofit lead-organization networks for
Social service delivery. Nonprofit Management and Leadership, 20(4), 405-422.
Crevani, L. (2015). Relational leadership: In B. Carroll, J. Ford, S. Taylor (Eds.), Leadership:
Contemporary Critical Perspectives (pp. 188-211). SAGE.
Cox, E. (2013). Coaching understood: A pragmatic inquiry into the coaching process. Thousand
Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Dalton, C. (2021). Metaphor as useful jump from sense-making to meaning-making in
management education. Academia Letters, Article 342.
Denyer, D. & James, K. T. (2016). Doing leadership-as-practice Development. In J. A.
Raelin (Ed.), Leadership-As-Practice: Theory and Practice (pp. 262-283) New York, NY:
Routledge.
Fairhurst, G. T. & Grant, D. (2010). The social construction of leadership: A sailing guide. Management
Communication Quarterly, 24(2), 171-210.
Foldy, E. G., Goldman, L., & Ospina, S. (2008). Sensegiving and the role of cognitive shifts in the work o
of leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 48(1), 514-529.
Foley, D. E. (2002). Critical ethnography: The reflexive turn. International Journal of Qualitative
Studies in Education, 15(4), 469-490.
Fraser, N., & Honneth, A. (2003). Redistribution or recognition? A political-philosophical
exchange. Verso.
Fu, J. S., & Cooper, K. R. (2020). Interorganizational network portfolios of nonprofit
Organizations: Implications for collaboration management, Nonprofit Management and
Leadership, 31, 437-459.
Fulton, B. R., Oyakawa, M., & Wood, R. L. (2021). Critical standpoint: Leaders of color advancing
Racial equity in predominantly white organizations. Nonprofit Management and
Leadership, 30(2), 255-276.
Gardner, W. L., Lowe, K. B., Meuser, J. D., Noghani, F., Gullifor, D. P., & Cogliser, C. C. (2020).
The leadership trilogy: A review of the third decade of the leadership quarterly. The
Leadership Quarterly, 31(1), 1-26.
Gazley, B., & Brudney, J. L. (2007). The purpose (and perils) of government-nonprofit
partnership. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 36(3), 389-415.
Gazley, B., & Guo, C. (2020). What do we know about nonprofit collaboration? A systemic
Review of the literature. Nonprofit Management and Literature, 31(2), 211-232.
Gergen, K. J., & Hersted, L. (2016). Developing leadership as dialogic practice. In J. A.
Raelin (Ed.), Leadership-As-Practice: Theory and Practice (pp. 178-198). Routledge.
Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Northeastern University
Press.
Goppell, J., & Ray, K. W. (2015). Dialogic process consultation: Working live. In G. R. Bushe &
R. J. Marshak (Eds.), Dialogic organization development: The theory and practice of
Transformational change (pp. 371-391). Berret-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Gray, B. & Purdy, J. (2018). Collaborating for our future: Multistakeholder partnership for
Solving complex problems. Oxford University Press.
Herman, R. D., (2016). Executive leadership. In D. O. Renz and R. D. Herman (Eds.), The Jossey-Bass
handbook of nonprofit leadership and management (4th ed., pp. 167-187). Jossey-Bass.
Hindmarsh, J., & Heath, C. (2007). Video-based studies of work practice, Sociology Compass,
(1), 156-173.
Humphreys, M., Ucbasaran, D., & Lockett, A. (2012). Sensemaking and sensegiving stories of jazz
Leadership. Human Relations, 65(1), 41-62.
Ihm, J. & Shumate, M. (2018). How does a board of directors influence within – and cross-
Sector nonprofit collaboration?. Nonprofit Management and Leadership, 29, 473-490.
Isaacs, W, (1993), Dialogue: The power of collective thinking, Leadership, 4(3), 1-4.
Kliewer, B. W. & Priest, K. L. (2019). Building Collective Leadership Capacity: Lessons
Learned from a University-Community Partnership, Collaborations: A Journal of
Community-based Research and Practice, 2(1), 16. DOI: http://doi.org/10.33596/coll.42
Knoblaunch, H., & Schnettler, B. (2012). Videography: Analysing video data as focused
Ethnographic and hermeneutical exercise, Qualitative Research, 12(3), 334-356.
Larsson. M.,& Lundholm, S. E. (2010). Leadership as work-embedded influence: A micro
discursive analysis of an everyday interaction in a bank. Leadership, 6(2), 159-184.
Larsson. M., & Lundholm, S. E. (2013). Talking work in a bank: A study of organizing
properties of leadership in work interactions. Human Relations, 66(8), 1101-1129.
Lim, S., Brower, R. S., & Berlan, D. G. (2021). Interpretative leadership skill in meaning-
Making by nonprofit leaders. Nonprofit Management & Leadership, 32, 307-328.
Lord, R. G. & Hall, R. J. (2005). Identity, deep structure and the development of leadership
skill. The Leadership Quarterly, 15(4), 591-615.
Madden, J. R. (2017a). Reimagining collaboration: Insight from leaders of affordable housing cross
sector Collaborations on successful collaboration design, performance, and social innovation.
Journal of Nonprofit Education and Leadership, 7(3), 182-196.
Madden, J. R. (2017b). Inter-organizational collaboration by design. Routledge.
Macgilchrist, F. (2011). Ethnographic discourse analysis and social science. Qualitative Social
Research, 12(1), 13-14.
Maitlis, S. (2005). The social processes of organizational sensemaking. Academy of Management
Journal, 48(1), 21-49.
Maitlis, S. & Christianson, M. K. (2014). Sensemaking in organizations: Taking stock and moving
Forward. The Academy of Management Annals, 8(1), 57-125.
Mendez, M. J., Howell, J. P., & Bishop, J. (2015). Beyond the unidimensional collective
Leadership model: Study of leadership patterns in committees. Leadership &
Organization Development Journal, 36(6), 675-696.
Mosteo, L., Chekanov, A., & Rovina de Ossa, J. (2021). Executive coaching: An exploration
of the coachee’s perceived value. Leadership & Organization Development Journal,
(8), 1241-1253.
Naples, N. (2003). Feminism and method: Ethnography, discourse analysis and activist research.
Routledge.
Pfeffer, J. (1981). Management as symbolic action. The creation and maintenance of
organizational paradigms. In L. L. Cummings & B. M. Straws (Eds.), Research in
organizational behavior (Vol. 3., pp. 1-52). JAI Press.
Provan, K. G., Fish, A., & Sydow, J. (2007). Interorganizational networks at the network level: A
Review of the empirical literature on whole networks. Journal of Management, 33(3),
-516.
Puranam, P., Alexy, O., & Reitzig, M. (2014). What’s ‘new’ about new forms of organizing?
Academy of Management Review, 39(2), 162-180.
Pye, A. (2005). Leadership and organizing: Sensemaking in action. Leadership, 1(1), 31-49.
Raelin, J. A. (2007). Toward an epistemology of practice, Academy of Management and
Learning Education, 6(4), 495-519.
Raelin, J. A. (2016a). Imagine there are no leaders: Reframing leadership as collaborative
agency. Leadership, 12(2). 131-158.
Raelin, J. A. (2019a). Toward a methodology for studying leadership-as-practice. Leadership, 1
https://doi.org/10.1177/1742715019882831
Raelin, J. A. (2019b). Deriving an affinity for collective leadership: Below the surface of action
Learning. Action Learning: Research and Practice, 16(2), 123-135.
Robinson, J. & Renshaw, P. (2021). Place – The final frontier: Exploring the outer reaches of
Collaborative agency using the Japanese concept of Ba. Leadership, 18(1), 13-39.
Samra-Fredericks, D. (2003). ‘Strategizing as lived experience and strategist’ Everyday
Efforts to shape strategic direction, Journal of Management Studies, 40(1), 141-174.
Schatzki, T. (2001). Practice mind-ed orders. In K. K. Cetina, T. R. Schatzki, E. V. Savigny (Eds.), The
practice turn in contemporary theory (pp. 43-55). Routledge.
Schulze, J. H., & Pinkow, F. (2020). Leadership for organizational adaptability: How enabling
Leaders creates adaptive space. Administrative Sciences, 10, 37.
Simpson, B., Buchan, L., and Sillince, J. (2018) The performativity of leadership talk. Leadership, 14(6),
-661.
Sklaventi, C. (2020). Moments that connect turning points and the becoming of leadership.
Human Relations, 73(4), 544-571.
Sutherland, N. (2016). Investigating leadership ethnographically: Opportunities potentialities.
Leadership, 14(3), 263-290.
Swart, C. (2015). Coaching from a dialogic organization development paradigm. In G. R. Bushe
& R. J. Marshak (Eds.), Dialogic organization development: The theory and practice of
Transformational change (pp. 349-371). Berret-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Taylor, C. (1994). The politics of recognition. In A. Gutmann (Ed.), Multiculturalism (pp. 25-75).
Princeton University Press.
Thompson, A. M., Perry, J. L., & Miller, T. K. (2007). Conceptualizing and measuring
collaboration. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 19(1), 23-25.
Uhl-Bien, M., & Arena, M., (2018). Leadership for organizational adaptability: A theoretical
Synthesis and integrative framework. Leadership Quarterly, 29, 89-104.
Uhl-Bien, M. (2006). Relational leadership theory: Exploring the social processes of leadership &
Organizing. The Leadership Quarterly, 17, 654-676.
Van de Mieroop, D., Clifton, J., & Verhelst, A. (2020). Investigating the interplay between formal
and informal leaders in a shared leadership configuration: A multimodal conversation
analytical study. Human Relations, 73(4), 490-515.
Van de Ven, A. H. (2007). Engaged scholarship: A guide for organizational and social research.
Oxford University Press.
Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. SAGE Publications.
Weick, K. E., Sutcliffe, K. M., & Obstfeld, D. (2005). Organizing and the process of sense
making. Organization Science, 16(4), 409-421.
Wright, A. L., & Hibbert, P. (2015). Threshold concepts in theory and practice. Journal of
Management Education, 39(4), 443-451.
Yip, J., & Raelin, J. A. (2011). Threshold concepts and modalities for teaching leadership
practice. Management Learning, 43(3), 33-354.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Sagamore Publishing LLC (hereinafter the “Copyright Owner”)
Journal Publishing Copyright Agreement for Authors
PLEASE REVIEW OUR POLICIES AND THE PUBLISHING AGREEMENT, AND INDICATE YOUR ACCEPTANCE OF THE TERMS BY CHECKING THE ‘AGREE TO THE TERMS OF THIS COPYRIGHT NOTICE’ CHECKBOX BELOW.
I understand that by submitting an article to Journal of Nonprofit Education and Leadership, I am granting the copyright to the article submitted for consideration for publication in Journal of Nonprofit Education and Leadership to the Copyright Owner. If after consideration of the Editor of the Journal of Nonprofit Education and Leadership, the article is not accepted for publication, all copyright covered under this agreement will be automatically returned to the Author(s).
THE PUBLISHING AGREEMENT
Assignment of Copyright
I hereby assign to the Copyright Owner the copyright in the manuscript I am submitting in this online procedure and any tables, illustrations or other material submitted for publication as part of the manuscript in all forms and media (whether now known or later developed), throughout the world, in all languages, for the full term of copyright, effective when the article is accepted for publication.
Reversion of Rights
Articles may sometimes be accepted for publication but later be rejected in the publication process, even in some cases after public posting in “Articles in Press” form, in which case all rights will revert to the Author.
Retention of Rights for Scholarly Purposes
I understand that I retain or am hereby granted the Retained Rights. The Retained Rights include the right to use the Preprint, Accepted Manuscript, and the Published Journal Article for Personal Use and Internal Institutional Use.
All journal material is under a 12 month embargo. Authors who would like to have their articles available as open access should contact Sagamore-Venture for further information.
In the case of the Accepted Manuscript and the Published Journal Article, the Retained Rights exclude Commercial Use, other than use by the author in a subsequent compilation of the author’s works or to extend the Article to book length form or re-use by the author of portions or excerpts in other works.
Published Journal Article: the author may share a link to the formal publication through the relevant DOI.
Author Representations
- The Article I have submitted to the journal for review is original, has been written by the stated author(s) and has not been published elsewhere.
- The Article was not submitted for review to another journal while under review by this journal and will not be submitted to any other journal.
- The Article contains no libelous or other unlawful statements and does not contain any materials that violate any personal or proprietary rights of any other person or entity.
- I have obtained written permission from copyright owners for any excerpts from copyrighted works that are included and have credited the sources in the Article.
- If the Article was prepared jointly with other authors, I have informed the co-author(s) of the terms of this Journal Publishing Agreement and that I am signing on their behalf as their agent, and I am authorized to do so.