Collaborative Leadership in an Organizational Context: A Research Agenda
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Date
2026-05-06
Authors
Gilbert A. Ang’ana
James M. Kilika
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Journal of Human Resource & Leadership
Abstract
Organizations not only exist to make a profit and be financially sustainable but also to make a differenceand have a meaningful legacy using specific business modelsadopted. To achieve that outcome organizations must establish effective authority relationships to work together efficiently. This is what entails collaborative relationships and leadership. Theliterature on collaborative leadership despite having significant developments over the last two decades has been faulted. There havebeen vastperspectives from scholars withminimalconsensus on what constitutes acceptable dimensionsof collaborative leadership and how that fits in an organizational context. Thesemisalignments haveresulted in challenges tothe full realization of the benefitsof collaborative leadership as a result of its skewed implementation and application in an organizational context. The result is a lack of appreciation and belief by business practitioners and organization leaders on the implications of collaborative leadership application on their organization’s financial sustainability. This effect goes deeper in that organization leaders are not very clear on the impact of their organization'sbusiness model and their role in facilitating successful collaborative leadership. This conceptual paper aimed to bridge that gap by reviewing and integrating extant conceptual, theoretical, and empirical literature on collaborative leadership and presenta case for the development of a new theoretical model suitable for the expansion of the current understanding of deployment of collaborative leadership in an organizational context. Thepaper reviewed 397 articles from various journals, whichwere searched through the google search engine. 132 articles were finally used in the development of this paper sieved bythe year of publication from 2001-2021. The findings lead to the development of a proposed and integratedconceptual framework model linking collaborative leadership to financial sustainability as an organizational outcome while acknowledging the significance of the role played by the organization’s business model and top echelonsupportin the relationship.Severalpropositions are presentedfor consideration and validation through empirical work. The study calls on future research to consider the adoption of the proposed model in extending research on leadership to new frontiers.
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Angana G.,A.&Kilika J.M.(2022). Collaborative Leadership in an Organizational Context: A Research Agenda. Journal of Human Resource & Leadership.