Understanding emergent leadership across cultural levels: A theoretical framework

Elif Leman Bilgin

Junior Management Science (JUMS), 2025, vol. 10, issue 2, 402-423

Abstract: Emergent leadership literature emphasises identifying and nurturing leaders at all organisational levels to foster team harmony and align efforts toward shared goals. Since past studies focused largely on individual traits predicting leadership emergence, the interplay of different cultural levels, such as national culture, organisational culture and team culture in relation to individuals emerging as emergent leaders remains unexplored. This study extends beyond discussing the antecedents and outcomes of emergent leadership and provides an in-depth understanding of the phenomenon through different cultural levels. It introduces an overarching theoretical framework proposing that a) the unfolding of emergent leadership occurs at four levels, which are organic emergence, non-normative emergence, conditional emergence and non-emergence, based upon the type of interaction between cultural levels and potential emergent leaders, b) for emergent leadership to occur, potential emergent leaders must have or display some of the compatible antecedents, c) the approval of higher-level authority figures at the organisational or national level is a precondition for the occurrence of emergent leadership in stratified teams.

Keywords: emergent leadership; individual traits; national culture; organisational culture; team culture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/320453/1/1928902480.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:jumsac:320453

DOI: 10.5282/jums/v10i2pp402-423

Access Statistics for this article

Junior Management Science (JUMS) is currently edited by Dominik van Aaken, Gunther Friedl, Christian Koziol, Sascha Raithel

More articles in Junior Management Science (JUMS) from Junior Management Science e. V.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().