BUS603: Managing People

Adaptive leadership is another follower-centered approach to the leadership process. However, the earlier theories of adaptive leadership continue to be leader-centered. For example, adaptive leadership has portrayed the tasks of the static leader as helping static followers adapt to the challenges they encounter in a given situation, changing and adjusting to new circumstances, and grappling with the problems at hand. Moreover, the adaptive leadership process incorporates four standpoints: systems, biological, service, and psychotherapy perspectives. The task of the static leader, then, is to recognize the complexities of leadership situations and enable followers to adapt to complex leadership and organizational changes. Similarly, it is the leader who makes followers aware of biological changes for adaptation and, by using her or his positional leadership authority, serves followers' needs by finding solutions to their problems. Finally, by using the psychotherapy perspective, the leader then creates a supportive environment for successful adaptation. This approach is an old paradigm of the Boomer generation that does not fit with the demands of the digital age.

Thus, I propose DeRue's adaptive leadership theory, which advocates for dynamic and fluid leading-following adaptive processes where individuals cultivate leader-follower identities through simultaneous and interchangeable leading and following actions within the group. This theory challenges the traditional "individualistic, hierarchical, one-directional and de-contextualized notions of leadership". Furthermore, DeRue rightly noted, "the nature of work in organizations is changing to include more interdependent work, more fluid and less centralized work structures, and a greater emphasis on the need for leadership at all levels of an organization". Thus, the aforementioned adaptive leadership theory seems most relevant to digital natives because it provides a theoretical basis to adapt and succeed in leading and following double interactions between and by all members of groups in virtual organizations.