Leading Dangerously: A Case Study of Military Teams and Shared Leadership in Dangerous Environments – A Review
The contemporary organizations are continuously faced with innumerable challenges related to their long-term survival as well as success. A few of them are highly uncertain global business environment, globalization, dangerous operating environs, among others. In order to cope with these countless challenges, modern day organizations have begun restructuring their work teams into high performance teams, from what was earlier the case of rigid hierarchies. Hierarchical leadership is no longer working today as current day organizations and work teams are relying heavily upon what is called as shared leadership. Shared leadership is a rather innovative and new concept in the field of management, organizational behavior and leadership studies. However, this concept is still in its nascent stages and research is under process to understand the extent to which this kind of leadership is useful in various organizational and leadership situations.
Very few studies have been focusing on the influence that shared leadership in dangerous circumstances that are highly unpredictable and extremely dynamic, wherein the resultant leadership outcomes possibly lead to severe physical or psychological damage. One such study is the one that was conducted by Ramathun and Matkin, wherein the authors conduct a qualitative study to describe and explain shared leadership and its influence in extremely dangerous circumstances. In this particular study, the authors have conducted eight semi-structured interviews with diverse individuals. For instance, there were interviewees who were members of a shared team as well as subject matter experts in the field of military leadership in order to gain a better understanding about the correlation that exists between shared leadership and the performance of the team, specifically in dangerous contexts or circumstances.
The above study identified that aspects like “mutual influence, leadership development, dangerous dynamism, and distributed knowledge, skills, and abilities provided rich description of the phenomenon.” The findings of this particular study specifically point to the fact that military teams in dangerous circumstances make increased use of two important aspects out of the few listed above; they are precisely mutual influence and leadership emergence. These are used to share leadership while also making sure that the high performance is achieved by the teams. Furthermore, this study also established that dangerous dynamism along with distributed knowledge, abilities, and proficiencies might restrain the correlation between shared leadership and high performance of the teams, specifically in dangerous situations.
The current study is a very interesting read with respect to effective management of teams and leadership as it sets aside a variety of myths that are associated with the concept of shared leadership, precisely in military situations and the dangerous environments in which they operate in most often. One of the most important findings of this particular study is that leadership emergence essentially acts as an enabler for the process of shared leadership for the military teams, precisely in dangerous circumstances, eventually empowering multiple team members to offer leadership in contexts where it lacks and continuing to perform the other team roles that have been assigned after that dangerous situations is successfully handled and dealt with. This inference gains further importance due to the fact that military teams, which quite often have to operate in circumstances of war, may possibly face disruptions in the communication that happens between the teams or might even end up in situations wherein the assigned team leader may lose his life in combat. In such kind of circumstances, leadership emergence will enable shared leadership process.
One thing that I liked very much about the article is that clarify and cohesive manner in which the data and the findings were presented. The information and the elucidations given were rather exhaustive and it helps the readers to easily understand the various management and leadership concepts. There is nothing that I disliked about the article.
The major positive element about this article is that interviews were structured in such a way that authentic information is obtained from the interviewees. Increased authenticity serves as a kind of increased validations, especially in the current case of shared leadership where very little research has happened so far. One negative aspect or may be a better way would have been to increase the number of interviewees along with including other categories of military leaders in the list of people interviewed.
References
C. Pearce, J. H. (2010). New forms of management: Shared and distributed leadership in organizations. Journal of Personnel Psychology, 9(4), 151-152.
D. Day, P. G. (2004). Leadership capacity in teams. Leadership Quarterly, 15(6), 857-880.
M. Seeger, T. S. (2003). Communication and organizational crisis. Westport: CT: Praeger.
Matkin, A. J. (2014). Leading Dangerously: A Case Study of Military Teams and Shared Leadership in Dangerous Environments. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 21(3), 244-256.
