Collectivistic Leadership as a Mechanism of Leadership Without Hierarchy in Emerging Organisational Forms: An Integrative Literature Review

Abstract

This integrative literature review examines how collectivistic leadership and new organizational forms interact, what conditions enable or constrain that interaction, and what organizational outcomes their alignment produces. Despite their parallel development as research domains, studies theorizing their intersection as a joint phenomenon remain rare. A systematic search of the Scopus database using paired keyword combinations yielded 481 records. Following deduplication, abstract screening, and full-text review against pre-specified inclusion criteria, 21 peer-reviewed articles published between 2005 and 2025 were retained. Among the key findings, the relationship between collectivistic leadership and new organizational forms follows no single pattern: where structural change is intentional, collectivistic leadership drives structural form; where change is forced by crisis, structure precedes and shapes leadership; and in values-driven new ventures, both emerge simultaneously. Hierarchical authority functions as a precondition for collective governance rather than its obstacle — initiating, legitimizing, and protecting the conditions under which collectivistic leadership becomes viable. Innovation appears as an emergent outcome of their alignment, with collectivistic leadership enabling knowledge exploitation and structural autonomy enabling exploration. Digital transformation reinforces this dynamic bidirectionally: it drives structural flattening and decentralization, while collectivistic leadership in turn shapes how technology is adopted and deployed. Enabling conditions — including interpersonal trust, shared vision, cultural readiness, and structural stability — determine whether these relationships take root or stall, explaining why identical structural changes produce collectivistic leadership in some contexts and fail in others. The central finding is that the literature treats these phenomena in two different ways: some authors treat them as one, others as two distinct ones, reflecting different theoretical frameworks applied to the same underlying mechanism. Combining organization design theory and leadership theory offers a richer understanding of how organizational form and leadership practice shape each other, and opens new possibilities for studying innovation in contemporary organizations.