ABSTRACT
Throughout the 20th century, the traditional approach to leadership was based on "machine metaphors and machine-like assumptions". The focus of leadership studies, then, became to make these individuals better leaders, and, indeed, "much of empirical research on leadership focuses on predicting outcomes that reside at the individual level of analysis". The connectivity among actors within a system is one of the hallmarks of both the ecological approaches to leadership and complexity science; it also directly applies to leadership studies. This chapter provides one example of how an ecological approach to leadership might be studied in an effort to empirically support conceptual claims that ecological forms of leadership are good for organizations. Complex natural teleology is the mechanism that translates micro-level interactions into an order that is recognizable to us as macro-level structures and behaviors, such as leadership in its many forms: social movements, businesses, and governments.
