Taking the leadership role in the new employment relationship within knowledge-intensive organization

Knowledge workers cooperate more and more in multiple, flexible, temporal, and often virtual teams, with peers within and across organizational boundaries. The growing involvement of multiple actors inside and outside organizations has severe implications for how the employment relationship is managed. The temporary nature of team work implies that individuals have to rely on ‘swift’ trust derived from professional role-based settings, instead of long-term interpersonal relations. The growing interdependencies associated with this
boundlessness, implies that future leadership will be increasingly distributed but also diffuse. Decision making and accountability will become more shared among interdependent actors inside and outside organizations. In this paper we argue that leadership is no longer simply ‘what those in leadership positions do’, but refers to a process by which one or more actors stimulate themselves and each other in order to pursue shared values, goals and objectives. Whoever takes on the leadership role, needs to understand the way actors can be motivated and
energized to respond to future needs and requirements in organizations. Building on insights from HRM, leadership and organizational behavior literature, we explore how multiple actors are stimulated to take on their leadership roles in order to foster salient outcomes for multiple parties.