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.

中文翻译：

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统一发散与集体领导力的发展

什么是集体领导，它是如何发展的？尽管人们对集体领导的兴趣日益浓厚，但它的定义以及对其发展的背景过程的理解是有限的。我们利用一项为期五年的纵向研究来解释集体领导力如何通过战略模糊性和具体化之间的持续谈判来发展。我们在定向工作、集体工作和集体领导之间进行了划分，以使该领域的概念和定义更加清晰。我们开发了一个过程模型来解释背景条件如何影响集体领导力的发展。引入适应分歧、定向收敛和统一分歧的概念，我们展示了组织间合作如何从集体工作转变为集体领导。