Adaptive leadership theory: Leading and following as a complex adaptive process

In this article, I develop a theory explaining how recurring patterns of leading-following interactions produce emergent leader-follower identities, relationships and social structures that enable groups to develop and adapt in dynamic contexts. In describing this emergent leading-following process, I attempt to shift the theoretical focus away from people as leaders or followers, and instead foreground the evolutionary value of a dynamic and fluid leading-following process. By emphasizing an interactive and contextually embedded process of leading and following in groups, this theory provides a theoretical basis for challenging the individualistic, hierarchical, one-directional and de-contextualized notions of leadership that permeate the existing literature.