When Top Management Leadership Matters: Insights From Artistic Interventions

Abstract

This article addresses how top management leadership behaviors matter in innovative interventions in organizations. A comparison of six cases of artistic interventions in four countries reveals that lack of visible top management support and sense-making orientation during and after the process resulted in little added value for the organization in three cases. Three other cases show various ways in which top management can legitimize such experimentation, from which more positive outcomes flowed at the individual and collective levels. The implications are counter-intuitive because top management faces two sets of tensions in innovative processes: presence/absence and providing orientation/being open to learning. The article suggests ways that top managers can address these tensions, including by engaging in constellations of distributed leadership, for which this article proposes a new definition.