This paper explores leadership as an emergent social process. We begin by discussing and contesting the tradition privileging linear management processes, and offer as a counterpoint accounts of distributed leadership out of which our focus on leadership as a plural process grows. Our concept of...

We investigate overlapping contests in multi-divisional organizations in which an individual's effort simultaneously determines the outcome of several contests on different hierarchical levels. We show that individuals in smaller units are advantaged in the grand (organization-wide) contest for...