Cultural Complexity and Relational Leadership

The purpose of this chapter is to analyze how leadership emerges in inter-organizational partnership settings and how its emergence affects cultural complexity. The chapter covers the leadership practices of inter-organizational partnerships as social value-creating networks and the implications for understanding cultural complexity. The chapter reviews scholarly literature covering various topics, including leadership studies, inter-organizational partnerships, cultural complexity, the Ubuntu perspective, the practice approach, and relational leadership. The relational social constructionist leadership (RSCL) lens is adopted and presented as the theoretical framework and operationalized through the practice approach. The primary dataset on which this chapter is based was derived from the international case study of the Twende Mbele African Partnership for Monitoring and Evaluation. Additionally, a case study on the development of South Africa’s National Anti-Corruption Strategy is employed for validation purposes. The analysis of these case studies pays attention to the relational leadership practices of “agreeing”, which comprise ten sub-themes, namely: collaborating, collective responsibility, common objectives, fostering agreement, hosting partners, informal relationships, inviting others, leading-as-dialogue, rotational leadership and trusting. The discussion of the findings on relational leadership practices of agreeing reveals that the Twende Mbele initiative, rooted in African culture, embodies relational leadership principles that strongly align with the ethical values of Ubuntu, particularly those related to “humaneness” and “harmony”. The Ubuntu perspective is integrated to explore how relational practices can be used to understand the complexities of culture within the African context. By focusing on relational leadership practices as the unit of analysis, the emphasis shifts away from individual entities (positional leaders and organizations) toward the collaborative domain; a departure from the conventional approaches found in the three bodies of literature examined in this chapter: relational leadership theory, literature on inter-organizational partnerships and discussions within Ubuntu scholarship. Relational leadership serves a dual role as both a leadership theory and a guiding theoretical framework for studying how leadership emerges and is practiced in collective settings. The core tenets of the Ubuntu perspective are contrasted with those of the RSCL lens and the practice approach. This examination reveals that the “relationality” construct and its associated ontological and epistemological elements, such as intersubjectivity and socio-material practices, are prevalent and interconnect in these three intellectual realms. The relation principles of Ubuntu as a moral and ethical African worldview are useful for understanding how relational leadership practices could be leveraged to create social and economic value for inter-organizational partnerships in the African context as a culturally complex phenomenon.