Leaderless leadership in radically decentralized organizations

Abstract

Our chapter contributes to understanding the phenomenon of leadership in radically decentralized organizations (RDOs). We argue that in RDOs leadership is not a person, but a collective system where responsibility and decision-making are decentralized to allow potentially all to take care of the processes of organizing. Sustainable RDOs can abolish hierarchy by relying on patterns, structures, and practices that sustain egalitarian ways of working. They have avoided the risk of oligarchisation by designing holistic systems with an egalitarian-inducing infrastructure and a bundle of co-occurring social practices. We first analyze the terminology that refers to various forms of RDOs and problematize how decentralized organizing is talked into being. The findings are then summarized into the concept of community-led practices, where social practices function as formal and systematic collective leadership processes that support egalitarian ways of working.