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Finding Complexity Leaders as Catalysts in Ethics-related Collaboration

William R. Hanson, Ph.D.

Complexity Leadership is an emerging theory that attempts to discover

collaborative patterns of behavior leading to such outcomes as organizational
learning, problem solving, creativity, and innovation. These outcomes rest on
agentic catalysts, or tags, that seem to initiate and maintain collaborative
behavior within the corresponding phenomena under study. While catalyst can
be both human and nonhuman, this study focuses on faculty agents. Specifically,
this research examines formal and informal leaders that catalyze collaboration
within an ethics-related context at a small university. Data were collected with an
online survey for all full-time institutional members holding faculty status; the
response rate was 73%. This work applies Dynamic Network Analysis (DNA) to
explore collaborative patterns in contexts of weekly interaction, ethics policy, and
ethics-issue confidentiality within a complexity framework. Findings present a
method to apply complexity leadership concepts in the quest to find both formal
and informal leaders who act as catalyst in varying collaborative contexts.
Resulting patterns of behavior are useful in generating future research questions
and propositions.

Keywords: Complexity Leadership Theory, Ethics, Networks, Dynamic Network

Analysis

College, University, Industry Represented: Anderson University College of

Business

Download copies of COINs 2009 research and industry papers at ScienceDirect.

Link: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/issue/59087-2010-999979995-
2182758

Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, Volume 2, Issue 4, The 1st

Collaborative Innovation Networks Conference - COINs2009. Edited by Kenneth
Riopelle, Peter Gloor, Christine Miller and Julia Gluesing.

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