Collaborative Leadership and its Influence in Building and Sustaining Successful Cross-Functional Relationships in Organizations in Kenya.

Abstract

Due to the current business and workplace complexities caused by the pandemic and diverse competition in the marketplace, organizations today are faced with many challenges more so in developing concerted shared values to get the most out of their employees and stakeholders more than ever before. This paper aims to investigate the influence of collaborative leadership in building and sustaining cross-functional relationships in organizations in Kenya by critically reviewing, integrating, and summarizing the theories and models within collaborative leadership. These theories play a significant role in developing the understanding of how organizations can successfully create interpersonal relationships and cross-functional collaborations. This interpretive, hermeneutic qualitative paper reviews and discusses three major theories and models that relate to collaborative leadership practice based on secondary data to deduce collaborative leadership principles relevant for organizations. The study reviewed articles ranging from the year 2000 to date from seven leadership journals with search criteria as collaborative leadership, and collaborative theories. The three theories highlighted are, the Three Needs Theory, the Theory of Negotiated Order, and the Clear Leadership Model. The study proposes three critical collaborative leadership dimensions that aim to help organization leaders be successful in developing cross-functional collaborative relationships and partnerships: leading self, dedication to the “we”, and authentic engagement. The study also highlights that leaders must be able to facilitate productive relationships between employees by listening, understanding their impact, and have an open-minded attitude; handle the complexity of partnerships of different levels with ease, and have the patience to deal with very high levels of frustration by taking calm approach. This study highlights that if collaborative principles deduced from the theories and models are well understood, assimilated, and applied by leaders, their organizations would build solid cross-functional collaborative governance structures, establish clear operations and behaviors that will result in successful partnerships and collaborations at all levels.