Complexity Leadership Theory: A Perspective for State-Owned Enterprises in Ghana

Abstract

This article explores the bureaucratic leadership which has bedeviled state owned enterprises for many decades and how its efficacy  can be in the 21 st century business environment where there uncertainty and chaos. In some manufacturing and state owned enterprises, these theories of traditional bureaucratic leadership approach and decision making strategies persist even though technology and innovation supposed to have taken the greater part of the way of thinking and making organizational objectives achieved through modern way of managing business entities. Thus, SOEs are critical to the economic activity in emerging market countries. The creation of SOEs was meant to provide employment, meet social and political needs, and operate in the sectors of the economy that were of strategic importance to the state. The problem is to offer alternatives of bureaucratic structure that has been used in SOEs and how best to use these alternative theories in practical terms. The pace of change confronting organisations today has added complexity to the organisational landscape and now calls for more flexible and adaptive leadership. Adaptive leaders are able to work more effectively in the unstable global business environment and are also able to adopt a proactive approach in order to keep abreast of the increasing stakeholder pressures in the enterprises. However, inadequate applicability of traditional leadership models have indicated the need to develop new leadership models to solve complex organisational challenge. Hence complexity leadership approach seeks to combine these dynamics to the bureaucratic hierarchies in order to explain the way informal organisational dynamics function properly and also to describe how theses valuable adaptive functions can be promoted to better the operations of SOEs in Ghana.