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Abstract
In Part One ("Adaptive Leadership: When Change Is Not Enough, Summer 2002, Volume 20, Number 2) we discussed the need for adaptive leadership. In this article, Part Two, we discuss four principle ingregients for enhancing adaptive potential: cultural competency, knowledge management; creating synergy from diversity; and holistic vision. We believe that these four principles, when consciously developed by a leader or organization, will enhance their abilities to respond more adaptively in a contempory global context.
"Assimilation and accommodation are not two separate functions but the two functional poles, set in opposition to each other, of any adaptation."
Jean Piaget, in Biology and Knowledge (1971: 173)
We believe that our adaptive leadership theory, described in Part One, provides a useful model for leadership, given the context of the world we live in today. Over the last two decades, the pace of change and level of complexity experienced by organizational leaders has been unprecedented. Never before have leaders and their organizations been faced with so much information, choice, diversity, competition, and time pressure. Leaders' attention is shifting more and more toward acquiring knowledge, developing globally-appropriate strategies, stakeholder-based economic and community development, discerning and meeting customer needs, creating more responsive and effective governments, tracking marketplace changes, implementing change, transferring technology, and monitoring workplace demands. Long gone are the days of simply worrying about employee productivity, motivation, and the supervisor-employee relationship.
Traditional theories and practices for leading (such as trait theory, leadership style theory, situational leadership theory, and contingency theory) were created predominately in the 1950 and 1960's and provide only partial guidance to leaders of today. These approaches, which Burns (1978) calls transactional leadership models, focus solely on the exchanges which occur between leaders and their followers (Northouse, 1997). Even transformational leadership theory, which was created in the 1970's and which Burns distinguishes from transactional models, still focuses on the leader in relation to his followers.
Our adaptive leadership theory, however, focuses on more than just the traditional concern for the leader-follower relationship. Although our theory acknowledges the importance of the leader-follower relationship, in addition we focus on leaders' relationship with the contextual environment. Contextual environments within which leaders and their organizations operate are considered in synchronic and diachronic perspectives. It also focuses attention on...