The leadership dynamics of systems change

Leadership studies and systems thinking

Critical leadership studies challenges the glorification of singular leaders by showing how such images obscure the collective and systemic character of organizing while reinforcing hierarchy, exclusion, and myths of autonomy, mastery, and control (e.g.,Collinson, 2011; Ehrlich et al., 1990; Tourish and Pinnington, 2002). Feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial interventions push that critique further by showing how leadership discourse repeatedly smuggles in Western, masculinist, imperial, and managerial assumptions about who leads, whose voice counts, and what forms of authority appear legitimate (e.g.,Ashcraft, 2022; Ferry, 2026; Ford, 2006; Liu, 2021; Sinclair, 2007). Taken together, these critiques make it much harder to treat leadership as the property of exceptional (white, male) individuals acting upon passive organizations from above.

Hence relational leadership theory, dialogic approaches, and work on leadership in interaction all recast leadership as a situated accomplishment emerging through dialogue, power, and intersubjective exchange rather than residing in a person (Clifton et al., 2020; Cunliffe and Eriksen, 2011). Systems and complexity approaches go further still, portraying leadership as an emergent property of complex adaptive systems and broader ecologies of interaction rather than the output of individuals directing events from above (Hazy and Uhl-Bien, 2015; Painter-Morland, 2008; Uhl-Bien, 2021). These developments render leadership studies more relevant to climate change, digital infrastructures, democratic erosion, social inequality, and other systemic crises.

With its post-heroic turn, the field of leadership studies has gained a far richer language for interdependence, process, and sociomaterial complexity than it once had—introducing the vocabulary of rich interconnectivity (Uhl-Bien and Arena, 2017), social movements (Brown and Hosking, 1986), and even anti-leadership (Sutherland et al., 2014). As a result, the most pressing questions for the field are no longer related to whether leadership is relational, collective, or systemically embedded. We know the answers to such questions. But we still need to ask whether the new vocabularies that have been established to answer these questions remain sharp enough to grasp complexity without dulling our capacity to judge, to criticize, and to hold actors and institutions to account.

In exploring this question, it is worth digging deeper into the tensions between leadership and systems thinking, noting that the foundational assumptions of systems thinking often conflict with those that underpin leadership thinking, at least its dominant mainstream articulations. In classic accounts of systems thinking, a system is closed if no material enters or leaves it; it is open if there is import and export and, therefore, change in its components (Bertalanffy, 1950). Importantly, it is possible to conceptualize this process without humans in charge. In fact, their absence functions as the main source of systems thinking’s analytical force—it ensures that systems thinking can be applied to any phenomenon, whether or not humans are involved, ranging from a single cell, to a thermostat regulating temperature, a family, a financial market, an ecosystem, or an organization. In mapping such starkly different phenomena, systems theory unsettles distinctions such as human and non-human, organic and inorganic, subject and object. It gains explanatory reach by refusing to treat human intention or consciousness as the necessary starting point of analysis.

One can trace this decentering of the human as far back as Samuel Butler’s (2020) proto-cybernetic novel Erewhon, first published in 1872. This same systems-oriented tendency characterizes much of the history of management thought, from Taylor’s view of the factory as a machine-like system designed to optimize for efficiency (Butler and Spoelstra, 2025) to postwar management science’s treatment of organizations as information-processing and decision systems shaped by traditions such as cybernetics, systems analysis, game theory, and computing (Haigh, 2001; Thomas, 2012; Waring, 1991). What stands at the centre in these traditions is not the exceptional individual but the system as such. Organizations, as systems, become knowable and governable through models, simulations, and mathematical calculations. Even more recent attempts to dissipate binaries like human/machine, life/matter and organic/inporganic, such as political theorist Jane Bennett’s (2010) vital materialism, suggest that it makes increasingly less sense to begin from the assumption that leadership should center on a sovereign human subject, or that leadership theory even needs an account of human subjectivity to begin with.

This brief background sketch helps explain why systems theory is not an easy bedfellow for leadership scholars. Historically, leadership discourse has placed humans—with their will, visions, morality, self-sacrifice, etc.—at the very centre of analysis. If systems theory gains traction by decentering the human, leadership discourse keeps bringing the human back in, often as a romanticized, even antimodern response to the rise of bureaucratic managerialism (Guthey, 2016). Zaleznik’s (2004) distinction between managers and leaders makes this point clearly: managers maintain order, routine, and process, while leaders bring imagination, risk, and desire. In this idiom, the system administers while the leader animates. That contrast has done an enormous amount of heavy lifting (Burns, 1978; Heifetz, 1994; Kempster et al., 2011; Painter-Morland, 2008; Rost, 1993).

But this is also precisely the moral, humanistic perspective that systems-oriented leadership vocabularies risk losing from view. The problem is that systems thinking can strip leadership of the meanings and ends that make it something more than a technique of coordination. Seen in this light, leadership scholarship’s repeated return to purpose, value, and morally justified ends reflects not just an outdated attachment to heroic humanist, but a commitment to the idea that leadership, as a discourse and as a practice, remains tied to questions of what is worth doing, worth defending, and worth becoming. This exposes a fault line in leadership research. Systems thinking helps leadership scholars grasp how to navigate complexity, interdependence, and emergence. This comports well with the historical emphasis in leadership research on achieving goals, alignment, and effectiveness—what Weber would call formal or instrumental rationality (Brubaker, 1984; Guthey et al., 2022; Weber, 1964). But leadership research has also served to raise questions of substantive rationality—that is, about purpose, judgement and responsibility. The imperative for large scale systems change now forces those two often contradictory impulses within leadership thinking into direct contact, if not conflict.

Relational leadership and its challenges

The foundational assumptions of systems thinking often conflict with those that underpin leadership thinking, at least in its most dominant mainstream articulations. Relational approaches to leadership (e.g.,Cunliffe and Eriksen, 2011; Uhl-Bien, 2006; Uhl-Bien and Ospina, 2012) can help inject a concern for purpose and value into research on systems change, but it should be noted that not all leadership scholars mean the same thing by the term “relational.” They differ, in particular, with respect to whether they treat relationality as an interactional phenomenon among human actors or as a broader ontology of emergence (Bolden, 2011; Fletcher, 2012; Uhl-Bien, 2006). It helps, then, to distinguish between relational leadership in an interactionist or phenomenological register and relational leadership in a more posthuman register. The former still begins from human actors, even if it decenters the individual leader. This approach may be less leader-centered, but not necessarily less human-centered. The latter begins from relationality itself. In that case, leadership emerges through the interplay of human and non-human forces. From this perspective, even forms of leadership conventionally recognized as heroic are not adequately explained by reference to an individual leader. “The leadership of Steve Jobs,” for example, becomes a misleading shorthand. What is at stake is not the heroic vision of one person, but the temporary stabilization of a wider assemblage composed of persons, objects, technologies, affects, institutions, histories, images, contingencies, and so on. The direction of Apple, insofar as this is what “the leadership of Steve Jobs” refers to, would therefore count as an emergent effect of a broader relational field rather than the achievement of a singular heroic leader (Sharma and Grant, 2011).

Such accounts are compelling, but not without problems of their own. In emphasizing distributed agency, relationality, and sociomaterial entanglement, it is easy to lose sight of power, domination, ambition, and ego. Distributed or relational accounts can become so abstract that they obscure the struggles, inequalities, and asymmetries that shape leadership in practice (Empson, 2020). This issue becomes especially clear in relation to technology. It may well be true that we have all become, or are rapidly becoming, cyborgs of a kind. Posthumanist and new materialist scholarship has done valuable work here by unsettling human exceptionalism and by showing how agency emerges through assemblages of bodies, objects, affects, and infrastructures rather than through isolated individuals alone (eg. Bennett, 2010; Haraway, 2015). Yet rather than taking comfort in the death of the Enlightenment subject or in the blurring of the human-machine boundary, we might also ask if the human in these relations requires some kind of protection. Humans, rather than human/non-human assemblages, need shielding from at least some forms of AI-mediated surveillance and exploitation. In this context, disentanglement may matter more than entanglement as a practical and political ambition.

Relational or posthuman vocabularies of leadership, therefore, do not automatically settle the normative question. It is not enough merely to point out that leadership is always already relational, or that it is becoming increasingly distributed, collective, or posthuman. Such claims can remain overly abstract and, at times, no less removed from reality than the fantasy of the saviour-leader who will come to rescue us. They do not help us determine what to defend and what to resist, nor do they offer much guidance for questions of responsibility when harm gets dispersed across digital platforms and infrastructures.

Consider the following example. A recent New York Times article reports on the use of ElliQ (Saslow, 2026), an AI companion robot introduced to help lonely older people in the United States. Rather than care workers or other forms of human interaction, what appears is a portable digital companion designed to provide conversation, reminders, and a sense of company. In posthumanist language, one could see this as a case of non-human leadership, since a human-non-human assemblage called ElliQ exerts profound influence over many of its users. The reported results seem, on one level, positive: at least some users feel less lonely and more cared for. Yet this apparent success also reveals the limits of such distributed leadership. The loneliness in question arises from a broader social and political failure of care, one that no technological plaster can resolve easily. What gets managed with ElliQ is not the underlying condition but one of its surface symptoms. Seen from this angle, the example does not merely show that distributed leadership is real; it rather shows how easily distributed leadership can slide into accommodating system problems.

The critical purchase of relational and systems perspectives weakens when we assume in advance that they are normatively superior to their heroic alternatives. They can sensitize us to the distributed, sociomaterial, and affective dimensions of objects doing leadership. But they can also plunge the researcher into a posthumanist linguistic morass of entanglement, mattering, intra-action, assemblage, emergence, and so on, to the point where questions of human subjectivity, power, exploitation, domination, and responsibility recede from view. This, for us, is the real issue at stake when it comes to leadership and systems change. We do not want to revive the saviour-leader, whether in heroic, charismatic, or transformational form. But neither do we want to dissolve leadership into a vague romance of relationality and entanglement. If leadership studies is to respond seriously to the systems crises of our time, it will need to do more than oscillate between the fantasy of the savior-leader and the romance of distributed agency. Toward this end, the field will need concepts sophisticated enough to register emergence, interdependence, and sociomaterial complexity, but also sharp enough to name injustice, defend the human, and answer difficult questions about responsibility in an algorithmic age.

How the articles in this special issue address this challenge

The articles in this special issue take up this challenge in different ways, together showing how leadership can be reimagined through the lens of systems change. In “No Man(ager) is an Island: For a process-oriented systems approach to leadership,” Walker takes aim at the continued resilience of leader-centered thinking, even in contextual approaches that claim to have moved beyond it. Through a case study examining Starbucks and Howard Schultz, Walker shows how transformational leadership, crisis leadership, and contextual leadership can continue to privilege the figure of the exceptional leader by treating context as something leaders react to, rather than something they help produce. In response, Walker’s article develops a process-oriented systems approach in which leaders, contexts, and crises are understood as co-constituted through communicative processes. It speaks directly to this issue’s concern with moving beyond heroic leadership without falling into contextual determinism. Leadership, in Walker’s account, is not located in the leader or the situation, but in the ongoing processes through which both are made meaningful.

Sim’s article, “Intersectional complexity leadership: Co-create organizational ecosystems from an intersectional feminist lens,” also begins with the limits of individualistic leadership models, but pushes the systems change agenda in a more explicitly feminist and justice-oriented direction. Sim brings intersectionality and complexity theory together to conceptualize “intersectional complexity leadership” as a way of understanding and dismantling interlocking inequities within organizational ecosystems. Rather than treating inequality as a problem of individual identity or representation alone, the article understands intersecting systems of oppression as complex, adaptive, and embedded in organizational life. This contribution is especially important for the special issue because it insists that systems thinking must not become politically neutral. Complexity, emergence, and interdependence only become useful for leadership studies if they also help us name and challenge the unequal distribution of power, voice, vulnerability, and responsibility.

The next two papers provide empirical contributions to complexity leadership theory. In “Complexity leadership theory and fostering organizational adaptability” Mahmud, Evaldson, Schmidt, and Kjellström show how enabling leadership sustains productive tension and links emergent ideas back into the formal organization so that adaptive change can take hold. Pan Fagerlin and Svensson’s “The Opening of an Adaptive Space: Sense Practices for Implementing Sustainability-Oriented Innovation Strategy” offers a more fine-grained account of how leaders cultivate such adaptive space through framing, narrative, and other sense-making practices. Taken together, these two papers contribute to an empirically based, multi-level understanding of systems change by linking the organizational conditions that sustain adaptive tension with the situated practices through which adaptive space gets actively constructed and translated into change.

Although there is a widespread conceit that complexity and systems change are contemporary phenomena, and that the past was characterized by greater clarity and stability, Grint’s “Whole System Change and the English New Model Army’s General Council Meetings 1647–49” provides a rich historical description of an early attempt at whole-system change under conditions of war, constitutional crisis, and deep political conflict. Grint’s analysis is especially useful because it shows that getting “the whole system in the room” does not eliminate hierarchy, exclusion, or antagonism: the General Council may have brought senior officers, junior officers, enlisted soldiers, and Levellers into unprecedented forms of deliberation, but the boundaries of the system remained politically contested and socially selective. In this sense, the article complicates any easy celebration of collective or distributed leadership by showing how systems change depends not only on participation and emergent agreement, but also on trust, coercion, executive authority, and the unresolved question of who gets to define the system in the first place.

Our final two papers shift the discussion in a more explicitly normative direction by asking what complex challenges leadership for systems change should address. Kempster’s “Leadership of systems change: Towards regenerative business” answers this question with a vision of regenerative business oriented toward good growth and human flourishing. Rather than treating systems change as merely a problem of coordination or adaptation, Kempster builds on his previous work (Kempster et al., 2011, 2017, 2019) to foreground questions of purpose, insisting that leadership must engage directly with the broader conditions that sustain or undermine human and ecological flourishing. In doing so, the article repositions systems change as a fundamentally moral and political undertaking, one that requires leadership not only to navigate complexity but also to take a stance on what kinds of futures are worth pursuing.

In the final contribution to this issue, “Academic leadership in a warming world”, Daniel Nyberg explores the leadership dynamics of systems change by asking what academic leadership might achieve in the face of the climate crisis. As business school teachers, Nyberg argues, we have a responsibility to act on climate change rather than remaining passive bystanders. In considering what forms responsible leadership might take in this context, he distinguishes between four possible roles for scholars: the Provocateur, the Catalyst, the Dissident, and the Rebellion. None of these roles is inherently better or worse than the others, nor are they beyond criticism. However, each draws on key elements of leadership thinking, including taking initiative, exhibiting courage, and practicing responsibility, in the attempt to mobilize collective responses to climate change.

Collectively, the articles in this special issue point toward an emerging sensibility in which leadership matters less as control or charisma and more as responsiveness, connection, and ethical engagement with the complexity of living systems. This is not leadership for systems change so much as leadership within systems change: a situated, adaptive practice that is both humble and transformative. The contributions to this issue contributions underscore the field’s turn toward systems thinking, but they do more than simply celebrate emergence or complexity. While some explore how leadership unfolds through adaptability, enabling processes, and the creation of adaptive space in complex organizational settings, others foreground intersectionality, ecosystems, and systemic inequity, showing that leadership within systems change must grapple not only with complexity but also with the unequal distribution of vulnerability, voice, and power. Across the issue, the contributions do not merely relocate leadership into systems. They ask what forms of human agency, coordination, critique, and responsibility remain possible once one starts from interdependence rather than heroic mastery.

Conclusion

At a time when we are becoming ever more entangled with machines, platforms, and technical systems, and when materialities and infrastructures increasingly do some of the leading, it may be worth asking whether some of the virtues once attributed to heroic leaders remain vital and productive, albeit in transformed form. One might think, for example, of the human voice, of presence, of judgement, of courage, or of the capacity to take responsibility in situations in which distributed systems diffuse it too easily. This, perhaps, is the real question for critical leadership studies. If we were to salvage only a few pages from the vast pile of writing generated by mainstream leadership scholarship, which pages would they be? What, precisely, is worth retaining from the rubble? It is easy enough to reject human-centered approaches altogether. It is intellectually fashionable to speak in the language of emergence, entanglement, relationality, and intra-action, and to claim that one has thereby advanced a more relational understanding of leadership. But even if one grants that move, the question remains: then what?

The point of asking such questions is not to defend the heroic tradition of leadership, but to challenge those strands of post-heroic thought that risk dissolving the very question of leadership into a posthuman vocabulary of assemblages and entanglements. Rather than returning to an inflated image of the individual leader, the aim is to ask what forms of human agency, voice, and responsibility remain worth defending under contemporary conditions. If we want leadership studies to respond seriously to the systems crises of our time, we need it to do more than oscillate between the fantasy of the saviour-leader and the romance of distributed agency. It will need to develop concepts capable of grasping how leadership is actually enacted in complex sociotechnical systems while still preserving the normative language needed to judge when those systems are exploitative, dehumanizing, or unjust.