From competency to conversation: A multi-perspective approach to collective leadership development

Collective leadership involves the participation of multiple entities in the leadership process. This body of research is informed by a variety of theoretical perspectives, including person-centered, social network, social relational, sociomaterial, and institutional views. Despite multiple calls for leadership development to move beyond individual leadership, collective leadership development remains focused on coaching and competency development, extending rather than reconsidering the person-centered perspective. We argue that it is necessary and timely to align the practice-based literature on leadership development with theoretical and empirically based perspectives on collective leadership. We provide a multi-perspective framework of collective leadership development by 1) introducing a wider disciplinary range of theoretical perspectives on collective leadership development; 2) integrating these perspectives with leadership development approaches for different forms of collective leadership; 3) illustrating how the multiple perspectives on collective leadership development can be applied to specific work contexts; and 4) identifying directions for future research. (c) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.