Management research often describes collective leadership as a new and emerging idea. In Aotearoa New Zealand, Māori leaders have practiced it for generations.
In a paper in Human Relations, Chellie Spiller and colleagues set out a Māori "ecosystems" view of collective leadership. Mainstream models, they note, focus on what people in a group do, think and feel in the here and now. That approach leaves out the contributions of other generations.
The Māori view reaches much wider. It includes relationships across generations — those who came before and those still to come — and with living and non-living parts of the world.
To study it, the authors used wānanga, an ancient Māori practice of collective inquiry that draws out an integrated, shared intelligence. They examined three watershed leadership moments and found that collective Māori leadership works as an ecosystem held together by three practices: activating a knowledge code, cultivating ties of affection and working the tensions.
The contrast they draw is with the "new broom sweeps clean" approach, in which incoming leaders discard their predecessors' work. In the Māori view, true collective leadership is an integrated ecosystem sustained from one generation of leadership to the next.
Sources
Spiller, C., et al. (2020). Paradigm warriors: Advancing a radical ecosystems view of collective leadership from an Indigenous Māori perspective. Human Relations. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726719893753
