Leadership Research Summary:
- The literature on creative leadership has identified personality characteristics, abilities, mental states, and behaviors that perform well in creative companies, but it has not yet addressed how creative leaders arise from social networks. In the context of modern visual arts, this conceptual study outlines the stages of creative leader development.
- This study includes the accomplishment and ascription leader emerging processes and then adapts them to the setting of the art world using a relational approach of creative leader emergence.
- By facilitating their development within social networks, researchers contend that both competence and identity contribute to the status creation of creative leaders. The study uncovers the mechanisms of leader atypicality through which innovative leaders develop inside network structures in addition to the processes of leader prototypicality through which leaders form within groups.
- The instance of Pop artist Andy Warhol, who is highlighted for his development as a creative leader within the New York art scene and, serves as a key example for conceptual examination.
Leaderships Research Findings:
- This study examined the ways in which creative leaders emerge within social networks. It combines the literature on sociology of art and leader emergence to introduce two processes for creative leader emergence: achievement and ascription.
- The analysis leads to two theoretical implications: competence and identity reinforce each other, and leaders can be both insiders and outsiders in the art world.
- It also contributes to the wider literature on leader emergence by demonstrating that leaders can also emerge while they enact groups, networks and communities of followers based on mechanisms of atypicality.
- This study explored the relationship between the role identity of leaders and leader emergence.
- It is not certain if creative leaders within social networks develop a leader role identity or motivation to lead. Future research could more explicitly analyze the role of social identities, such as gender, social class, race, religion and intersectional identities, in creative leader emergence and effectiveness.
- Andy Warhol’s emergence as a creative leader is used as a case study to illustrate the conceptual analysis. Future research could focus on the process of inside-out transformation following psychological and physical trauma, and investigate collective and distributed modes of creative leader emergence in sectors such as art, architecture and fashion.