ABSTRACT
This chapter conceptualizes leadership processes as occurring in dynamic, adaptive social systems that are hierarchically organized. At the individual level, it maintains that people integrate leadership-relevant information using dual-processing systems that allow both automatic, local processing and more conscious, brain-scale processing to occur simultaneously. Local processes are very fast but are relatively inflexible, and they respond independently to information in a variety of leadership-relevant domains. Brain-scale processes integrate this independent local knowledge into a combined conscious meaning, which is spontaneously created through interactions of elements in brain-scale processing structures. These processes explain leadership perceptions and behavior in many task and social activities, but they also apply to the tuning of self-identities to a particular context and the development of self-identities over time. Thus, they pertain to both proactive and reactive behaviors and information processing. Dyads, groups, and larger social organizations also rely on local (individual) and more global, multi-person processes, but their integration processes often play out over time and people, and may depend on the structure of task environments as well as explicit integration mechanisms.
