Executives in Science, Business and Society 3

contextual sentiments into their daily responsibilities. This
demonstrates the need for a more contemporary leader
behaviour research agenda in the banking industry.
In an era of technological progress, sustainability demands,
and hyper-interconnectedness, leaders need to reinvent
themselves as hierarchy, status and outdated management
practices become insufficient. Our economic reality is
changing rapidly; individuals, customers and employees
are not at the receiving end of information and decisions
anymore. Leaders are being held accountable not only for
what happens within the confines of their business, but also
for what happens in the value chain and the societal context
in which they operate. Leader behaviours increasingly
need to enact the paradigm shifts from shareholder-value
maximisation to stakeholder-value maximisation; from
individualism, hierarchy and control to community building,
continuous creation and knowledge capturing; from short
term financial gains to focus on long term sustainability.
This would add a level of complexity to business unequal to
the industrial era and Fordism.
Our literature review indicates that only about 9 per cent of
the articles have been designed to:
expansion ‘complex adaptive systems’ (Uhl-bien et al., 2007),
or the ‘ecosystem economy’. The attribution of leadership to
a specific individual in a suggestion of heroism (bureaucratic
leadership) needs to expand to include leader behaviours
and leadership qualified as:
1. distributed leadership: referring to the aggregate
leadership of an organisation dispersed among some, many
or all of the members;
2. adaptive leadership: referring to adaptive, creative
and learning actions that emerge from the interaction of
complex adaptive systems as they strive to adjust tensions;
and
3. enabling leadership: working to catalyse the conditions
in which adaptive leadership can thrive and managing
the entanglement between bureaucratic and emergent
functions of the organisation (Gronn, 2002).
To conclude, companies solely pursuing shareholder value
maximisation are in danger of becoming socio-economic
pariahs. Leader behaviours need to be distributed, adaptive,
and enabling to the emerging ecosystem economy. When
adopted, past heroes might remain future winners.
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show that leader behaviour research in financial
institutions needs to shift from a perspective based on the
industrial economic era to the age of connectivism;
show that research based on causal mechanisms needs
to be changed to research driven by the notion of complex
dynamic systems;
show that research done under the assumption of a stable
organisational context needs to be changed to research
conducted in a dynamic and ever-changing context;
show that research based on the notion of leadership
attributed to the individual needs to be changed to
research based on the notion of leadership as part of a
collective.
Based on the findings of the review, we propose that leaders
will play a much broader role in a more expanded context
than before. Prominent systems scholars will call this
REFERENCES
1. Luthans, F. Successful vs. effective real managers.
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3. Gronn, Peter. Distributed leadership as a unit of analysis.
The Leadership Quarterly. 2002, 13, 423 – 451.
4. Uhl-Bien, Mary; Marion, Russ; McKelvey, Bill. Complexity
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