Background Nowadays, health systems are generally acknowledged to be complex social systems. Consequently, scholars, academics, practitioners, and policy-makers are exploring how to adopt a complexity perspective in health policy and system research. While leadership and complexity has been studied extensively outside health, the implications of complexity theories for the study of leader...

Health systems, particularly those in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), need stronger management and leadership capacities. Management and leadership are not synonymous, yet should be considered together as there can be too much of one and not enough of the other. In complex adaptive health systems, the multiple interactions and relationships between people and elements of the system me...

This paper asks how complexity theory informs the role of leadership in organizations. Complexity theory is a science of complexly interacting systems; it explores the nature of interaction and adaptation in such systems and how they influence such things as emergence, innovation, and fitness. We argue that complexity theory focuses leadership efforts on behaviors that enable organizational eff...

There is a trend in health systems around the world to place great emphasis on and faith in improving ‘leadership’. Leadership has been defined in many ways and the elitist implications of traditional notions of leadership sit uncomfortably with modern healthcare organisations. The concept of distributed leadership incorporates inclusivity, collectiveness and collaboration, with the result that...

The postmodern organization has a design paradox in which leaders are concerned with efficiency and control as well as complex functioning. Traditional leadership theory has limited applicability to postmodern organizations as it is mainly focused on efficiency and control. As a result, a new theory of leadership that recognizes the design paradox has been proposed: complexity leadership theory...

there is a trend in health systems around the world to place great emphasis on and faith in improving ‘leadership’. leadership has been defined in many ways and the elitist implications of traditional notions of leadership sit uncomfortably with modern healthcare organisations. the concept of distributed leadership incorporates inclusivity, collectiveness and collaboration, with the result that...

Leadership models of the last century have been products of top-down, bureaucratic paradigms. These models are eminently effective for an economy premised on physical production but are not well-suited for a more knowledgeoriented economy. Complexity science suggests a different paradigm for leadership—one that frames leadership as a complex interactive dynamic from which adaptive outcomes (e.g...

health systems, particularly those in low- and middle-income countries (lmics), need stronger management and leadership capacities. management and leadership are not synonymous, yet should be considered together as there can be too much of one and not enough of the other. in complex adaptive health systems, the multiple interactions and relationships between people and elements of the system me...