Distributed Leadership and Policy Success : Understanding Political Dyads

Recent research in business and management fields has revealed that shared leadership — and especially the pairing of complementary skill sets in a leadership dyad — is a key characteristic of many successful enterprises. Work in political psychology on the nexus between presidents and key advisers (e.g. George and George, 1956) has also indicated such patterns. Yet the popular impression conveyed by the contemporary personalization of politics encourages a leader-centric emphasis. We need to look afresh at the psychological and group dynamics that prevail where the successful interdependence of a leadership pair within a more general constellation of distributed leadership leads to policy (and indeed political) success. This paper adopts a comparative case study approach to comparing a successful leadership dyad with one that was notoriously dysfunctional: Australian prime-minister Bob Hawke and treasurer Paul Keating (1983-1990); and Kevin Rudd, prime-minister (2007-2010 and briefly 2013) and his deputy and successor Julia Gillard (2010-2013). Based on the case analysis we indicate a road map for more sustained research on distributed leadership in government