The impact of social networks on leadership behaviour

Abstract

Dominant streams in the leadership literature conceive it either as a role within socio-political structure or as a behavioural predisposition of agents. Leadership roles are determined by decisional power, most typically related to hierarchical positions of agents and by the position of agents within socio-political networks. Leadership behaviour can be seen as the outcome of psychological predispositions of agents or by processes influenced by intricate interactions sometimes associated with theoretical concepts such as complexity. Limitations in attaining meaningful predictions of leader potential can be related to the separation of leadership as agency from leaders as agents. Social network analysis allows for the contingent examination of the two. In this paper the theoretical integration of two literature streams offers a number of hypotheses tested via an empirical case study where the evolution of the interaction and influence networks across multiple decision events is compared with attribute and psychometric data of the actors. In this semi-experimental setting leadership emergence is studied among four groups of undergraduate students faced with a decision choice in an iterative political simulation game.

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