Leadership as Bounded Agency: An Integrative Framework of Organizational Constraints

Résumé fourni par la source

Main Objectives: Leadership research remains dominated by leader-centric perspectives that treat organizational context as a backdrop rather than as constitutive of leadership action. This article develops an integrative framework conceptualizing leadership as bounded agency enacted within an organizationally constituted space of action. Background Problems: Behavioral decision research and organization theory each explain one source of boundedness while holding the others constant, and the two literatures rarely engage one another. No account specifies how cognitive and organizational constraints combine. Novelty: We integrate leaders’ cognitive and interpretive constraints with knowledge, institutional, and governance constraints, and derive interaction propositions specifying how their joint configuration, rather than either set alone, constitutes the leader’s space of action. Research Methods: A theory-synthesis conceptual review drawing on 40 substantive sources across four constraint domains, selected for their contribution to framework development and analyzed through structured mechanism mapping. Finding/Results: The framework specifies five domain mechanisms and two interaction mechanisms. Where constraints bind simultaneously their effects are non-additive: competing evaluative criteria contract the choice set faster than either constraint alone predicts, and joint knowledge and legitimacy pressure produces symbolic coordination, meaning visible integration activity that leaves knowledge boundaries unresolved. Conclusion: Leadership is best understood as bounded agency constituted through interacting organizational constraints rather than through individual capacity. The framework shifts analysis from normative effectiveness toward the mechanisms and configurations that shape what leadership can be.

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.