Distributed leadership

Distributed leadership is a conceptual and analytical approach to understanding how the work of leadership takes place among the people and in context of a complex organization. Though developed and primarily used in education research, it has since been applied to other domains, including business and even tourism.[1] Rather than focus on characteristics of the individual leader or features of the situation, distributed leadership foregrounds how actors engage in tasks that are "stretched" or distributed across the organization. With theoretical foundations in activity theory and distributed cognition, understanding leadership from a distributed perspective means seeing leadership activities as a situated and social process at the intersection of leaders, followers, and the situation.

  1. ^ Benson, Angela M.; Blackman, Deborah (October 2011). "To distribute leadership or not? A lesson from the islands". Tourism Management. 32 (5): 1141–1149. doi:10.1016/j.tourman.2010.10.002. S2CID 154212800.