ABSTRACT
The emphasis on mobilisation, pooling and networks necessitates that generative leaders not only move outside their traditional departmental boundaries but also that they engage with a wide range of power relations among firms, and with many different types of actors each from their own fields, cultures and spatial scales of operation (Koppenjan and Klijn, 2004). While pushing towards something new, generative leaders are required to deal with the potential clashes of different institutional cultures and agendas and asymmetric power relationships (Burfitt and MacNeill, 2008). Generative leadership is not only about generating new networks and structures for innovation, but is also about social uncertainty and ambiguity. Changing the playground meddles with social relationships and power structures; thus, uncertainty is inherent. As Gibney (2012: 616) says, “leadership of uncertainty requires leaders to both have an appetite for risk and to be risk-aware; but to guide responses/solutions in the context of many unknowns”. At the day-to-day level, increased uncertainty calls for humility and a willingness to be proved wrong and work with uncertainty (Gibney, 2012). For all these reasons, as Beer and Baker (2012) emphasise, any discussion of place leadership inevitably raises questions of power and the ability to influence either other actors within or external to a city. Generative leaders need to pool different sources of power and ways of exercising it. To understand generative leadership, we need to understand how different sources of power come together in networks to influence city development. Interestingly, in this kind of setting, power is not only a cause of leadership but also a consequence of it. If, and only if, followers follow, leaders become truly powerful (Riggio et al., 2008).
