Enacting responsible leadership in cross-sector partnerships: A dynamic choreography of power

IF 4.6 2区管理学 Q1 MANAGEMENT

Human Relations Pub Date : 2025-12-15 DOI:10.1177/00187267251398388

Jean-François Harvey

引用次数: 0

Abstract

How can leaders guide diverse organizations to work together on society’s biggest challenges when power is unevenly distributed? Cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) bring together companies, governments, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to address complex problems, yet their success hinges on how leaders navigate competing interests and shifting power dynamics. This study examines a high-profile CSP involving a Fortune 500 company, two international development organizations, and an NGO. Drawing on Mary Parker Follett’s ideas about “power-with” and “power-over,” I show how NGO leaders combined collaborative and more coercive tactics to move the partnership forward. My analysis reveals that responsible leadership (RL) in CSPs is not a static trait or style but evolves through a dynamic choreography of power as challenges and priorities change. The findings offer practical lessons for leaders seeking to balance ethics, inclusion, and influence in multi-stakeholder collaborations, and they extend theory by reframing RL as a shifting, context-sensitive process rather than a fixed style.

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在跨部门伙伴关系中建立负责任的领导：权力的动态编排

当权力分配不均时，领导者如何引导不同的组织共同应对社会面临的最大挑战？跨部门伙伴关系（csp）将企业、政府和非政府组织（ngo）聚集在一起，共同解决复杂的问题，但其成功与否取决于领导者如何驾驭利益竞争和权力动态变化。本研究考察了一家引人注目的CSP，涉及一家财富500强公司、两个国际发展组织和一个非政府组织。根据玛丽·帕克·福莱特（Mary Parker Follett）关于“拥有权力”和“移交权力”的观点，我展示了非政府组织领导人如何将合作与更强制的策略结合起来，推动伙伴关系向前发展。我的分析表明，csp中的负责任领导（RL）不是一种静态的特征或风格，而是随着挑战和优先事项的变化，通过权力的动态编排而演变的。研究结果为寻求在多利益相关者合作中平衡道德、包容和影响力的领导者提供了实践经验，并通过将强化学习重新定义为一个不断变化的、对环境敏感的过程，而不是一种固定的风格，从而扩展了理论。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Human Relations Multiple-

CiteScore

12.60

自引率

7.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： Human Relations is an international peer reviewed journal, which publishes the highest quality original research to advance our understanding of social relationships at and around work through theoretical development and empirical investigation. Scope Human Relations seeks high quality research papers that extend our knowledge of social relationships at work and organizational forms, practices and processes that affect the nature, structure and conditions of work and work organizations. Human Relations welcomes manuscripts that seek to cross disciplinary boundaries in order to develop new perspectives and insights into social relationships and relationships between people and organizations. Human Relations encourages strong empirical contributions that develop and extend theory as well as more conceptual papers that integrate, critique and expand existing theory. Human Relations welcomes critical reviews and essays: - Critical reviews advance a field through new theory, new methods, a novel synthesis of extant evidence, or a combination of two or three of these elements. Reviews that identify new research questions and that make links between management and organizations and the wider social sciences are particularly welcome. Surveys or overviews of a field are unlikely to meet these criteria. - Critical essays address contemporary scholarly issues and debates within the journal''s scope. They are more controversial than conventional papers or reviews, and can be shorter. They argue a point of view, but must meet standards of academic rigour. Anyone with an idea for a critical essay is particularly encouraged to discuss it at an early stage with the Editor-in-Chief. Human Relations encourages research that relates social theory to social practice and translates knowledge about human relations into prospects for social action and policy-making that aims to improve working lives.