An autumnal update on our leadership research

The team from the Centre for Voluntary Sector Leadership was pleased to present four papers at the recent Voluntary Sector and Volunteering Research conference 2017. This gave us a great opportunity to showcase our work, and learn from academic and practice colleagues who share our interest in a thriving and resilient voluntary sector. 

Below, Dr Carol Jacklin-Jarvis blogs on our current research on leadership, particularly focusing on collaborative leadership.

Our research programme is growing, and we recently blogged about our portfolio of externally-funded projects.  In addition, there are core projects that are contributing to our growing understanding of leadership in and of voluntary organisations.  This blog introduces these core projects.  The Centre’s PhD students and academics all contribute to these projects in different ways.  Indeed, one of the great opportunities of the Centre is to develop our thinking collaboratively.

Literature Reviews

As with any academic work, a key task is to ensure that we know what has already been written, and identify where there is a gap in knowledge, so we have recently completed two literature reviews.  The first is a review of the way in which the concept of leadership has appeared in recent voluntary sector literature.  Our conclusion is that this literature has primarily focused on what is often described as a ‘leadership-as-person’ perspective.  In other words, the voluntary sector literature has tended to focus on the characteristics and skills of individuals in formal leadership positions.  Our aim is to contribute a rather different perspective, drawing on ideas in the mainstream literature that conceptualise leadership as a practice which is shared between people with formal position and without.  This is a much more inclusive and participative approach to leadership, and we believe it has some resonance with a voluntary sector context.

The second literature review focuses on the concept of collaboration as it has been explored in the voluntary sector literature.

Leadership for collaboration

The aim of this project is to explore how leadership is enacted in the context of collaboration within and across sectors, through case studies of individual actors from voluntary organisations. The study explores the idea that individuals engage in a series of interwoven arrangements for collaboration (partnerships, working groups, joint projects, and informal arrangements) on behalf of their organisation.  The research explores how individuals in leadership roles with voluntary organisations make sense of this ‘collaborative fabric’, and what they do to make inter-organisational collaboration happen in this complex context.

Collaborative Leadership in austere times

This study, focused on ‘collaborative leadership’ enacted by individuals in a context of austerity and turbulence, and introduced at the CVSL launch, is ongoing. While it has explored the practice of cross-sector collaborative leadership in the context of public sector children’s services in the UK, we anticipate that the findings will be on relevance to individuals who engage in collaborative leadership in different context. Certainly, many individuals working in the voluntary sector share the increasing requirement to ‘do more with less’ and what this implies for individuals and their organisations in tackling cross-cutting societal challenges in increasingly efficient ways.

CVSL Leaders Panel

CVSL has assembled a ‘panel’ of voluntary sector leaders in the UK. The aim of the project is to engage with these leaders over time through mixed quantitative and qualitative research methods, including: web-based surveys; interviews; focus groups, online discussions, and deliberative enquiry. This will allow us to track changes in attitudes to key challenges facing the sector, and the role of leadership, with a particular focus on smaller organisations.  

Many of our participants for research projects are drawn from this panel, so do contact us if you are particularly interested in joining one of these projects.  In addition, we have a series of smaller seed-corn projects that we hope to grow as our work develops – for example comparing voluntary sector development in two different policy arenas; and exploring voluntary action in new residential communities.  Please get in touch if you are interested in discussing any of these projects or possible new projects.

20th October 2017