ABSTRACT
Leadership is inherently a social phenomenon. It resides in the actions of an individual or set of individuals who endeavor to move a collective along a goal path. The problems that are encountered along this path that must be solved by leaders often emerge from the social dynamics occurring within the collective, and between the collective and its embedding environment. Thus, organizational leadership typically requires leader role incumbents to generate solutions that (a) accommodate multiple social constituencies both within and outside of the organization, and (b) account for often conflicting social demands and requirements. Further, leaders sometimes need to implement these solutions by convincing initially skeptical superiors, peers, and subordinates of a solution’s viability and by coordinating the activities of multiple organizational groups that are involved in the solution. Finally, effective leader problem solving requires that solution implementation be monitored through feedback from these various social groups. The inherent social embeddedness of organizational leadership means fundamentally that leader effectiveness is defined by how well leaders navigate through social dilemmas when generating problem solutions and implementing them within complex organizational dynamics.
