Leadership Style and the Management of the Effects of Complexity

Abstract

Within any organisation, be that a project or a company department, a number of people/systems come together to perform tasks and deliver the expected outcome. In the process of performing those, tasks, a number of interconnections are generated that reinforce one another and result in behaviours that are very different to the norm and cause complexity. The author presents results from a wider research in construction which investigated the effect(s) of socio-organic complexity on project performance and particularly through the attribute of leadership style adopted. The results proved the nonlinearity between performance and complexity and lack of actions that will manage the effects of complexity. A framework is developed, validated, and presented in this chapter, which, by using the characteristics of complexity, allows the measurement of the current level of actions and provides a set of additional actions that will enable management of complexity through the leadership style.