A Unifying Framework for Understanding Adaptive Leadership at Multiple Levels of Analysis

Fully developed paper accepted following double-blind peer review and presented at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting:

Adaptive leadership refers to the notion of leaders effectively responding to change. Many leadership scholars have called attention to – either implicitly or explicitly – the importance of adaptive behavior for understanding leadership effectiveness. Yet, a cohesive and cumulative body of knowledge regarding adaptive leadership is surprisingly lacking. The present work aims to demystify the elusive phenomenon of adaptive leadership by developing a model that aims to comprehensively depict why and how leaders change their leadership behavior. The general proposition offered is that adaptive leadership can be decomposed into a process component (leading-level of analysis) and a dispositional component (leader-level of analysis), and that these components meaningfully interact to shape adaptive leadership. Theoretically, momentary change is explained via action control while change at longer timescales is proposed to be driven by learning. Our goal is to do justice to the complexity of adaptive leadership – a real-world and core behavioral phenomenon – by adopting a multilevel, developmental, and inherently contextualized perspective.