Should you become a leader in online collaborative learning? Impact of assigned leadership on learning behaviors, outcomes, and perceptions

The growing prevalence of collaborative learning spaces in higher education highlights the importance of student leadership for group learning. Thus, leadership assignment as a common practice in online collaborative learning merits special attention. To investigate the impact of assigned leadership and its key characteristics in promoting team learning in the online context, a semester-long quasi-experiment was conducted with 94 students in a graduate-level blended course. The results revealed significant differences between assigned leaders and group members in certain participating behaviors. However, the impact of assigned leadership on learning outcomes and perceptions was insubstantial. Additionally, student leaders' academic achievement was found to have little impact on group members' learning behaviors and learning outcomes, and mixed results were reported regarding the influence of leader behaviors on group performance. The research findings can inform the crucial decision of leader selection and extend our understanding of leadership in online collaborative learning.

The development and disruption of relationships between leaders and organizational members and the importance of trust

Our contribution lies in extending theorizing on relationship quality, by illustrating how the interwoven relationships between a leader and ‘follower’ may support or disrupt relationship development over time. Based on a study of leaders and organizational members in high-tech start-up firms, we provide concurrently a broader, more in-depth understanding, and therefore a more detailed and nuanced view, of how relationship quality develops or is disrupted. In particular, we highlight the importance of trust, exploring the under-researched topic of how differing interpretations of trust by leaders and organizational members can impact leaps of faith, acceptance, short-term or longer-term relationship quality. The findings address critiques of Leader Member Exchange (LMX) theory as the dominant explanatory construct for relationship quality, and highlight the need for longitudinal qualitative studies to explore the meanings both leaders and individual members of their organization give to their relationship over time.

Where have all the followers gone?

In this short article, we explore and problematise the axiomatic assumption of follower in the field of leadership studies notably the leader–follower axiom as the essential foundation of much leadership theorising. We do so, firstly by drawing on our experiences of exploring followership conceptually, and secondly, by reviewing conversations with executive MBA students. From these sources, we argue that the absence of identifications with followership offers a challenge to leadership assumptions around the socio-materiality of followers and their relations with leaders within organisational contexts. This leads us to questions like: what if follower identifications do not typically exist or are rejected in everyday organisational working contexts – despite discursive labelling of individuals as followers or following practices? Would or should leadership research and its examination of leader–follower dynamics fundamentally change and in what ways? We explore these questions and suggest very different orientations that might appear with regards to notions of the leadership relationship, leading and following dynamics, practice-based attention to leadership and perhaps very different approaches to leadership development. Such a (re)appraisal of the leadership lexicon may move notions of follower identification out of social constructions of organisational leadership and towards social media (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) – where the phenomenon of being a follower is ever present, but is redefined as a phenomenon of vicarious fantasy associated with interest, curiosity and entertainment.

A deontic perspective on the collaborative, multimodal accomplishment of leadership

This article makes a case for investigating leadership from a micro-interactional perspective which integrates discursive, sequential and multimodal analytical layers. It thus builds on existing discursive leadership research by demonstrating that leadership is not achieved only through talk, but by means of a complex interplay between verbal and non-verbal resources. Focusing on video-recordings of authentic meetings, I investigate the interactional interplay between the superior, the meeting chair and the other participants by means of a deontic perspective. Drawing on the status–stance distinction and teasing out how proximal and distal deontic rights are enacted and how these relate to leader and follower identities when conceptualized from a social constructionist perspective, I demonstrate that leadership is an essentially collaborative accomplishment in which all participants play a crucial role. Finally, I argue that this can only be uncovered fully when attention is paid to the variety of means – verbal as well as non-verbal – that interlocutors have at their disposal when attempting to influence each other towards achieving organizationally relevant goals.