Unified Divergence and the Development of Collective Leadership

What is collective leadership and how is it developed? Despite growing interest in collective leadership its definition, and understandings of the contextually situated process through which it develops, are limited. We draw on a five-year longitudinal study to explain how collective leadership develops through ongoing negotiations between strategic ambiguity and reification. We delineate between directed work, collective work, and collective leadership to bring conceptual and definitional clarity to the field. We develop a process model to explain how contextual conditions influence the development of collective leadership. Introducing the concepts of accommodated divergence, directed convergence, and unified divergence we show how interorganizational collaborations can move from collective work to collective leadership. We argue that 'unified divergence' enables us to provide a more precise conceptual definition of collective leadership, which we define as: the interaction of strategic ambiguity and inward- and outward-facing reification practices, resulting in agreed collective aims, alignment and coordination of activities, commitment to collective success, and the maintenance of divergent perspectives.