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This chapter presents the book’s conceptual foundations. It identifies key concepts developed from the research and explains how they relate to each other. The peculiar challenges of leading professionals arise from two interrelated organizational characteristics, which coexist in constant dynamic tension within professional organizations: extensive autonomy and contingent authority. To manage this tension, leaders need to develop a deep level of insight into the implicit power dynamics and covert political processes that permeate professional organizations, and strike an appropriate balance between challenging and propitiating powerful prima donna professionals. Plural leadership is a relatively new and rapidly developing leadership theory which is particularly relevant to professional organizations. This approach examines leadership as a collective phenomenon that is distributed among multiple individuals. Building on research in this area, this chapter introduces the concept of the ‘leadership constellation’, developed to represent the informal power dynamics among leaders of professional organizations.

This chapter explains in detail how leadership actually happens in a professional organization. The concept of plural leadership emphasizes that leadership is something that happens between people and is therefore co-constructed through interaction. This chapter develops a model of plural leadership dynamics, which emphasizes how leadership is fluid and unstable, changing and adapting as the relations between professionals change and adapt. Leadership dynamics in this context encompasses three microdynamics: ‘legitimizing’, ‘negotiating’, and ‘manoeuvring’. In other words, the model demonstrates how leadership in professional organizations is the result of a complex and highly nuanced set of interactions among peers, rather than a simpler, more transactional exchange between leaders and followers. In professional organizations, leadership represents an unstable equilibrium—it changes and adapts as relations between professionals change and adapt. The leaders who misjudge the subtleties of these interactions will quickly discover that nobody has to ‘follow’ them.

Professional organizations—such as accounting, consulting, and law firms, investment banks, hospitals, and universities—embody some of the most complex and challenging interpersonal and leadership issues that organizations present. Leaders of professional organizations must contend with ambiguous authority structures, complex interpersonal relations, and idiosyncratic professional colleagues: in other words, with the power, the politics, and the prima donnas. This chapter introduces the core themes of the book. It identifies the book’s intended audience, the kinds of practitioners and academics it will appeal to and why. It provides data on the scale and significance of the professional services sector and defines in detail what is meant by the concepts ‘professional organization’ and ‘professional services firm’. It outlines the empirical foundations, which include formal research interviews with more than 500 professionals in sixteen countries, and concludes by presenting a detailed overview of all the chapters in the book.