Integrative Public Leadership in the private sector in South Africa

ABSTRACT

Complex social issues exist in many emerging democratic contexts. It has been argued that boundary-crossing leadership is needed to overcome these issues. Scholarship has developed around this, arguing that leadership in these shared power contexts is different to leadership in hierarchical organisations. This study focuses on a sample of senior private-sector leaders in South Africa who have reached across sector boundaries, in their individual capacity, to make a difference. This extends the existing scholarship which has focused on public-sector and non-profit integrative leadership. The intention is to understand the relational context of their boundary-crossing work and to extend the concept of ‘Integrative Public Leadership’. The leaders studied manage relationships with the government, their own company and multi-company partners within a historical context. The findings emphasise three understudied issues: own-company buy-in, historical context and ‘integrative’ conflict. A shared concept of integrative leadership, located in the African context, could further enhance practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Integrative Public Leadership
• business
• government
• stakeholder
• leadership

1. Introduction

Public affairs scholars have recognised since the 1980s that the complex social problems faced by societies are beyond the scope of governments or any sector acting alone. In South Africa's case these issues include job creation, education, HIV/AIDS and crime prevention. The resources for resolving these issues are distributed amongst different stakeholders in what has been called a shared power world (Crosby & Bryson, 2010b). Because these kinds of complex social issues cannot be fixed by one entity acting alone, leaders of these entities need to act outside a narrow organisational frame. This requires sector-boundary crossing. Across the world and in South Africa there is an increasing call for this kind of action, most often between sectors (United Nations, 2013; National Planning Commission, 2013; Hamann, 2014). These collaborative initiatives are seen as a potential ‘panacea’ (Kolk, 2014) because they can draw on the strengths of each sector while overcoming their weaknesses (Bryson & Crosby, 2008).

The mainstream scholarly work on leadership has focused on leadership of individuals, teams and organisations. This literature is inadequate in articulating what it takes to operate in this shared power world where it is necessary to cross institutional and sector boundaries. New scholarship is needed (Huxham & Vangen, 2000) and a plethora of different approaches has emerged. Crosby & Bryson (2010a) consolidate and frame the field with requests for perspectives on ‘Integrative Public Leadership’. This is defined as ‘bringing diverse groups and organisations together in semi-permanent ways, and typically across sector boundaries, to remedy complex public problems and achieve the common good’ (Crosby & Bryson, 2010a:211).This concept was developed in The Leadership Quarterly in 2010 with ‘multiple twists of the integrative leadership kaleidoscope’. The authors concentrate on the non-profit and public sectors mainly in the United States. This study ‘twists the kaleidoscope’ to focus on different leaders in a different context – private-sector leaders in South Africa.

2. Integrative Public Leadership and the private sector in South Africa

There are a number of problems with the mainstream organisational leadership literature. Firstly, for example, most of this literature assumes that someone is formally or even informally acknowledged as the ‘leader’ and that there are in turn identifiable ‘followers’. This is not the case in a more collaborative context because people involved are more appropriately termed ‘participants’ with their own sector contexts. There is frequent ambiguity around who is involved and who should be influenced (Huxham & Vangen, 2000). Secondly, there is a problem with the assumption that there are clear goals or even that clear goals can be identified. In the collaborative context, agreeing on goals can itself be impossible and people need to move forward without a clear understanding of what the end point will look like (Huxham & Vangen, 2000). Thirdly, much of the leadership literature ignores the reality that often the work of leadership requires managing conflict, not just between individuals but also between groups (Fiol et al., 2009).

Many ideas and concepts have helped to fill the gap in the mainstream organisational literature. These include boundary spanning (Ernst & Chrobot-Mason, 2011; Palus et al., 2012), adaptive leadership (Heifetz et al., 2009), community and civic entrepreneurship (Selsky & Smith, 1994), bridging leadership (Dulany, 1997), systemic leadership (Senge, 2006), lateral leadership (Kühl et al., 2005), social identity and leadership (Hogg, 2009), complexity leadership (Uhl-bien et al., 2007), relational leadership theory (Uhl-Bien, 2006), cross-sector collaborative leadership (Waddock, 2014) and leading through conflict (Gerzon, 2006).

Because of the clear diversity of concepts and frameworks in this field, a potentially inclusive concept of Integrative Public Leadership was introduced to frame the discussion in a special issue of The Leadership Quarterly. Integrative Public Leadership is defined as ‘bringing diverse groups and organisations together in semi-permanent ways, and typically across sector boundaries, to remedy complex public problems and achieve the common good’ (Crosby & Bryson, 2010a:211). It is largely rooted in practice and emerges from Mary Follet's idea of integration as a social process (Mendenhall & Marsh, 2010). In this special issue, a variety of scholars take different perspectives on the concept, with many seeing relationships and connectedness as crucial (Morse, 2010; Ospina & Foldy, 2010; Silvia & McGuire, 2010). Others see Integrative Public Leaders as potentially conflictual but also transformational (Redekop, 2010). There is strong overlap between collaborative leadership and integrative leadership, particularly in Crosby & Bryson (2010b) and Page (2010). By ‘twisting the kaleidoscope’ to focus on the private sector in an emerging democracy, South Africa, this study develops the concept in two important understudied contexts.

There is a consistent gap with regards to the private sector in much of the work on cross-sector or integrative leadership (Selsky & Smith, 1994; Huxham & Vangen, 2000). But private-sector leaders increasingly want to operate across (Moss Kanter, 2005) or need to operate across sector boundaries (Ernst & Chrobot-Mason, 2011; Crane & Seitanidi, 2014). Some attention in the private-sector leadership literature has focused on the importance of multi-stakeholder contexts (Freeman, 1984; Moss Kanter, 1994; Porter & Kramer, 2011; Crane et al., 2014). These come at the issue from the perspective of business strategy. From this perspective, competitive pressures between firms make systemic change difficult (Hamann et al., 2011). Because of these constraints there have been calls for new possibilities for corporate involvement in society, beyond tinkering at the edges towards a more fundamental or systemic shift (Hamann, 2006). Even though this new public role may be difficult (Pittinsky & Messiter, 2007), business leaders acting in their individual capacity may contribute towards such a shift and an ‘even bigger change’ to society (Moss Kanter, 2005).

This study is not meant to highlight business leaders above the civic leadership work within other sectors (Ballard et al., 2006). Public-sector leaders, for example, may face similar boundary-crossing challenges and opportunities. The Minister of Health, Aaron Motsoaledi, has to work with – and sometimes against – business interests to achieve the goals of the National Health Insurance (Bauer, 2011). The focus on business leaders simply seeks to extend the concept of Integrative Public Leadership from these very sectors where so much integrative leadership is enacted and studied. There are important debates as to the role of the private sector in development in South Africa. These debates focus on a number of issues including the historical role of business, the substantive impacts the private sector makes and the differing perceptual lenses that are brought to the issue (Hamann, 2006). These debates contextualise this study.

There is a history of business-led societal initiatives in South Africa, many of these during and soon after the democratic transition. These include the Dakar Conference (New History, 2013), the Consultative Business Movement, the National Peace Accord (Nelson Mandela Foundation, 2013) and a variety of scenario planning processes (Kahane, 2012). This study explores the experience of a small number of business leaders who, acting in their individual capacity, have reached across sector boundaries to work with government and other stakeholders. They have done this work over an extended period, primarily wearing their ‘citizen hat’. This study draws on interviews with 16 of these leaders. By understanding their experience, this study seeks firstly to understand the relational context of their boundary spanning work; and secondly confirms and extends the concept of Integrative Public Leadership.

In addition to the the value of a study in the private sector, the exploration of Integrative Public Leadership can be extended beyond the United States where much of its development emerged. Other contexts and different democracies, like South Africa, are filled with higher levels of uncertainty and ambiguity. They may require a different mental model for business leaders (Dhanaraj & Khanna, 2011) where the character of the state can determine the effectiveness of collaborative effort (Hamann, 2014). Peng (2003) argues for the value of theory extension in contexts of such institutional change. South Africa's democratic transition in 1994 is praised, but there are some questions about its character today (Jeffery, 2010). Politically, Lipton (2014) sees South Africa as a ‘messy', increasingly open society where threats to this openness are constrained by a variety of norms and institutions. Economically it is characterised by long-term inequality and poverty even though it is now characterised as a middle-income country (Frye & Kirsten, 2012).

In turning to South Africa, there is also an opportunity to consider how the indigenous African concept of Ubuntu may enrich the theory and practice of Integrative Public Leadership. The concept of Ubuntu has been linked to management and leadership scholarship, especially in response to the individual-oriented leadership frameworks with a more western frame. Ubuntu is both a uniquely African and universal concept. Its literal translation is close to ‘collective personhood’ but it can also be expressed through the Xhosa proverb ‘umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu’ (‘I am because we are') (Mbigi, 1997). Khoza (2011) speaks of Ubuntu-inspired African governance ‘under a tree’. Ubuntu inspired leadership is connected to community respect for all people and relationships, community-building, healing, meaning-making and organisational cooperation. These are ideas strongly associated with the values of Integrative Public Leadership. This may be a slower approach but is more consensual and highlights the value of strengthening bonds and the dignity of those involved. Unless leadership theory connects with African subjective and shared experience, it risks being ‘topsoil lacking firm foundation’ as opposed to a bedrock upon which practices are based (Adonisi, 1993:310).

3. Approach

The research explored the views of 16 business leaders who have reached out across sector boundaries to work with government and others to raise and resolve key societal issues. The interviewees have achieved this integrative leadership in their individual capacity and are largely prominent South African business leaders who had dedicated a significant portion of their late careers towards this work.

Two phases of research were undertaken. In this first phase, a group of five experienced individuals were purposively interviewed to determine who they considered to be the more prominent business leaders who fit the criteria. A list of leaders and associated initiatives was developed and potential respondents were compared against two questions to determine the sample for phase two. These questions were: was the leader and associated initiative cross-sector; and was it about improving the country and society as a whole? Based on these purposive selection criteria (Eisenhardt, 1989; Locke, 2008; Silverman, 2011), 13 respondents for phase two were selected from this qualifying list. Two of the people in phase one qualified for phase two. All interviews from phase one and phase two were analysed to determine the findings.

Respondents selected were senior business leaders either running a large company or leading an entity tasked with bridging divides between sectors, including between business and government. The kinds of roles that were occupied by the sample include Board Chairman, Board Member, CEO and Intermediary Director. Nine of the respondents were actual business leaders whilst five of the respondents were heads of private-sector-associated initiatives, one was the head of a business school and one was a participant in a high-level cross-sector initiative.

Six of the leaders were associated with the finance industry, one with retail, one with the automotive sector, one with mining and one with education, whilst six could not be associated with a particular industry. Three of the 16 respondents were women, and three of the respondents were black Africans.

Initiatives that these leaders were involved in included: a business platform that brings together the larger companies to lobby and partner with government and civil society; an initiative started by business partnering with government to reduce crime; an organisation set up to fight the implementation of toll roads; a national-level initiative to bring together unions, business and government to increase the performance of the public education system; an initiative to bring together large employers to open the doors to disadvantaged youth; and an organisation set up to manage corporate social investment funds and partnerships.

Phase two interviews were open ended before being more directed towards phenomena associated with that particular context. Transcribed interviews were then coded to reveal key themes and patterns (Neuman, 1994; Locke, 2008).

4. Three relationships and the context facing business leaders

There were diverse views across the interviews but a central pattern emerged, especially in relationship to the government. Integrative leadership required the management of three key relationships: the relationship with government, with one's own company and with multi-company partners (Figure 1).

Figure 1. The three relationships and the historical context facing business leaders.

At the centre of the figure is the business leader who is reaching ‘forward’ towards government in collaborative and/or conflictual ways. There is a crucial ‘backward’ relationship with the leader's own company. There is a need to ensure that the company supports the leader and understands what he or she is doing. The boundary-crossing strategy may then require collective work and a broader team including people from other companies. This is described as a ‘lateral’ movement. These three different but crucial relationships are all underpinned by a context that is shaped by a divided history. Business leaders need to understand this history and context as they begin to operate outside the narrower company frame. These relationships and the context underpinning them are briefly described in the following.

4.1. The ‘forward’ relationship with the government

There was an expression voiced by many respondents that the relationship with government has significant unrealised potential. Much more could be achieved and there is even concern over a normal cross-sectoral boundary becoming a larger divide. As Respondent 7 stated: ‘one of the major problems in the country is that there is a gulf between business and government'. Respondents bridged this divide through collaboration and/or through conflict. Collaboration often requires joining an existing public–private initiative or starting one. Conflict occurs through the raising of important issues in the press or on a public platform and then potentially facing criticism for doing so, sometimes with real or rhetoric threats against the individual and company.

Business leaders acknowledge that some elements of business are partly responsible for the divide, as Respondent 9 stated, ‘I think the effort should have been more on businesses’ side to actually win the trust of the, of the politician', or as Respondent 3 said: ‘It's a difficult one because the divide is caused by mistrust on both sides. You have government that feels business cannot be trusted … I just look at for example the recent findings around the construction industry.’

A lack of understanding for public-sector pressures is equally constraining on the bridging of the sector boundary. As respondent 12 said: ‘So, there's a lot of arrogance, and there's a total lack of understanding of … how their world works. You've really got to get your head around that, if you want to start having relationships.'

Realignments within national and provincial government make the bridging of the sector boundary more difficult. Incoming leaders sometimes do not want to continue with existing initiatives. Interviewees voiced their observation that there has also been increased contestation as to the role of business. As Respondent 12 said about one administrative transition, ‘the relationship with government died hundred percent … they didn't want anything to do with business leadership or anybody else … ’

4.2. The ‘backward’ relationship with their own company

As the business leader engages with government, a set of issues emerges in their relationship with their own company. This could be conflicts around how much time is needed, the direction being taken or the risks for the company (real or perceived).

A business leader is always connected to the company even when acting in their individual capacity. One respondent described how, even though he was acting in his individual capacity on a social initiative, the media would often use pictures of him with a company shirt on. As Respondent 5 described his experience:

we had a long discussion and I said … this is going to take a lot of my time … I have to do this and it's going to take pressure and I am not asking to alleviate anything on my role but I am just asking for some understanding.

Managing this relationship is essential for the boundary-crossing leadership to be effective and sustainable.

4.3. The ‘lateral’ relationship with multi-company partners

The third ‘lateral’ relationship is with other companies who participate in a collective initiative. This relationship is the commonly understood component of collaborative work and has been well researched. It can be challenging for some business leaders more used to having a clear mandate from the board and clear expectations of their role. As Respondent 2 indicates around a large initiative: ‘ … the problem there has been in trying to mobilise, or should I say, find consensus among eighty business leaders who really have relatively disparate business interests’. Many of the leaders interviewed are used to making decisions and then seeing some direct action. But multi-company relationships are slower and potentially frustrating. This is a shared power reality different to leading in a hierarchical context. Respondents stated that to be effective in this they needed more humility than normal, a more inclusive vision, personal (rather than role-linked) credibility and the ability to frame the issues so that people can align themselves and their institutions.

4.4. History and context

Whilst in the 1980s ‘ … you could put South-African business around a ten or twelve seated table … ’ (Respondent 7), in the democratic era business is much more divided along sector interests, political orientation and personal values and more fluid in terms of race. This is a positive change, but it highlights the way in which historical context changes the issues boundary-crossing leaders need to manage. Leaders working across a sector boundary bring their history and mental models into the initiative. There is significant potential for misunderstanding. Even where understanding is possible, people may operate with different ideas about how best to resolve an issue. This is heightened in a society like South Africa where there is a history of conflict. A sense of historical context and how others perceive one's actions is essential. One way in which this plays out practically in this study is in the need for higher levels of competency in interpersonal and intergroup communication. As Respondent 6 stated: ‘It remains something that I approach with due care when I'm making statements that might be regarded as coming from … a corporate background and maybe over the years … I've learnt to adapt my own way of thinking’.

5. Alignment with Integrative Public Leadership

When the findings here are compared with the concept of Integrative Public Leadership, three elements align whilst three elements offer new lines of inquiry (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Aligning and extending the Integrative Public Leadership (IPL) concept.

Of the three relationships and the historical context, the collaborative relationship with the government and with multi-company partners is most closely aligned with existing work on Integrative Public Leadership.

5.1. Alignment 1: business leaders face a new shared power world

Integrative Public Leadership is defined as ‘bringing diverse groups and organisations together in semi-permanent ways, and typically across sector boundaries, to remedy complex public problems and achieve the common good’ (Crosby & Bryson, 2010a:211). This work requires working in a situation of shared power where no-one is in charge and the leadership context looks more like a network than a hierarchy.

Business leaders cannot achieve results through their normal power to reward staff members and control resources. As Respondent 1 puts it:

… when you are here (in business), if you make a decision and you want it implemented … the ship's engine picks up and you can feel it under your feet. In the political arena, you don't even feel a shudder. So it's a very difficult environment.

5.2. Alignment 2: business leaders need to align and structure coalitions of diverse constituencies

Page (2010) summarised the collaboration literature to develop three broad tactics for leading collaborative governance initiatives: framing the agenda, convening stakeholders and structuring deliberation. These three tactics align well with the findings here. Business leaders spoke often of the difficulty of getting unaligned constituencies around the table and of building coalitions and developing mandates. As Respondent 3 states:

There are differences … For starters, the mandate that you have in a company you have very clearly defined. You are a CEO and you have certain responsibilities that are defined. You have a government structure and framework within which you operate and so on. That's very clear. When you are involved in putting together different stakeholders, you start without any mandate.

Page (2010) also found that convening skill was correlated with the way in which an initiative was seen as legitimate and therefore successful. The convening capacity of business leaders depends on who they and what they have done. As Respondent 8 states:

So even in the public domain you've got to keep earning credit. You can't just be at war all the time. You've got to be seen to do things that are constructive, effective and that's the way people build up credibility.

This aligns with Page's (2010) third tactic, structuring deliberation, and with Morse (2010) in his focus on people, processes and structure. It overlaps with Ospina & Foldy (2010) in their fourth practice of ‘creating equitable governance mechanisms’ and with Crosby & Bryson (2010b) in terms of ‘structure and governance’. Respondent 13 said that:

… it doesn't necessarily require engagement from a whole range of different stakeholders, but all of it does require a process and a structure … So the dialogue is important as an initial step, but it's how you take that forward.

5.3. Alignment 3: integrative public business leaders must focus on relationships

The leaders interviewed spoke extensively about building relationships with other stakeholders. They spoke of the importance of informal meeting settings rather than formal plenary-style engagements.

Respondent 7 stated that ‘a huge amount of time is interfacing with you various stakeholders, and this requires much more than the technical managerial skills that you might take to run a company. It requires lots of people skills.’ Respondent 12 said: ‘The other thing that's very important is that you have relationships with the politicians and the officials. Because the officials stay, the politicians change … whatever happens, the officials are still gonna be there’. This aligns with the importance of ‘relationship capital’ (Morse, 2010) and focusing on people-oriented behaviours (Silvia & McGuire, 2010). Ospina & Foldy (2010) highlight the importance of building personal relationships.

The findings strengthen existing literature on Integrative Public Leadership around three alignments: shared power, collaborative leadership tactics and relationships. There was less alignment in three other crucial areas. This deserves further discussion.

6. Extending the frame of Integrative Public Leadership

6.1. Extension 1: include the management of one's own organisation

There are three areas where Integrative Public Leadership needs to be extended. Firstly, Integrative Public Leadership has focused more on ‘forward’ and ‘lateral’ actions to connect across boundaries with others. Own-company management is essential for the private-sector leaders studied but the dynamics of ‘backward’ stakeholder management with a leader's own institution and constituency is hardly mentioned. Ospina & Foldy (2010), for example, are almost exclusively concerned with forward and lateral bridging work. Crosby & Bryson touch on internal work in their 11th proposition:

Leaders of cross-sector collaborations are more likely to succeed if they establish with both internal and external stakeholders the legitimacy of collaboration as a form of organising, as a separate entity, and as a source of trusted interaction among members. (2010b:223)

Redekop (2010) best describes this dynamic when sharing how Helen Caldicott, the anti-nuclear war activist of the 1980s, was forced to resign from the main body that she led. She felt under attack ‘from my own people, my surrogate family’ (Redekop, 2010:288). She insufficiently managed the dynamics of her own organisation. Most respondents were employed by large public corporations with boards and shareholders who may have mixed views of the leader's boundary-crossing public work. As Respondent 8 said: ‘ … it's so difficult to develop both skill sets and the risk is that in becoming an activist they forget the day job’.

One avenue for extension is through the ‘Adaptive leadership’ concept (Heifetz el al., 2009) because of its focus on limits and scope of authorisation and leading change within one's own constituency. Another avenue to explore would be to extend the scholarship on framing to include one's own constituency. Framing has been well studied and is strongly correlated with multi-stakeholder buy-in and movement building (Selsky & Smith 1994; Payne, 2001). Social identity and leadership (Hogg, 2009) also offers the potential for insight. It is important to state that not all respondents believed the risks to their own company were as important as they were made out to be.

6.2. Extension 2: the macro-historical context is more important

The second proposed extension of Integrative Public Leadership is an invitation for scholars to pay more attention to the macro-historical context. Whilst context always matters in collaborative work, in more established democratic settings the issues that matter may be narrowed to the relationships of particular stakeholders. In democracies in transition, the bigger drivers and macro-history matters as much or more than particular relationships. Collaboration is potentially more fraught. Crosby & Bryson identify some parts of this idea in their first proposition:

Like all inter-organisational relationships, cross-sector collaborations are more likely to form in turbulent environments. Leaders will have more success at launching these collaborations when they take advantage of opportunities opened up by driving forces (including helping create or favourably altering them), while remaining attuned to constraining forces. (2010b:217)

They describe studies of cross-sector collaboration that emphasise ‘system disturbances’ and ‘contextual givens’ (Crosby & Bryson, 2005). System disturbances help create the conditions for cross-sector collaboration. An example might be the ways in which people came together across difference to ensure the first democratic elections were successful. But this study finds that system disturbances also constrain cross-sector leadership. One way in which this happens is through the potential to misjudge how an initiative might be perceived, as Respondent 10 stated: ‘Look if I had to have that again, I wouldn't have done it in that way. I mean, it apparently wasn't the right way to do it.' This finding strengthens the argument of Müller-Seitz (2012) for a further ‘field-level’. Whilst context matters in all collaboration, macro-historical dynamics may be more salient in transitioning democracies.

6.3. Extension 3: some forms of conflict can be ‘integrative’

One question emerging here is whether forms of boundary spanning that are not obviously collaborative should be considered ‘integrative’. For example, scholars of Integrative Public Leadership need to clarify whether conflict, without collaboration, can be ‘integrative’ and what ‘integrative’ conflict may look like. This is the third proposed extension. Business leaders reaching out to raise and resolve issues were sometimes placed in conflict with government. Current work on Integrative Public Leadership sees conflict as generally contained within the collaborative initiative (Crosby & Bryson, 2010b) and emerging in the resolution of differences of opinion across flat structures (Ospina & Foldy, 2010). But what about conflict outside and independent of collaborative structures? There seems to be a collapsing of all integrative public action into the work of collaboration. Direct action or movement building in opposition to another stakeholder could be considered ‘integrative’ in the sense that it seeks to reach out across a boundary on behalf of the common good. It is, however, not strictly collaborative – although it may be an antecedent (Gray & Purdy, 2014) to collaboration. Or it may happen in parallel. In South Africa, for example, the Treatment Action Campaign sometimes took an adversarial or cooperative position depending on circumstance (Ballard et al., 2006).

7. Implications for scholarship and practitioners

This study confirms the value of the Integrative Public Leadership concept for understanding what it takes to bring diverse groups together typically across sector boundaries, to remedy complex public problems and achieve the common good. The work of Crosby & Bryson (2010b), Ospina & Foldy (2010), Silvia & McGuire (2010) and Page (2010) are found to align most closely with the integrative leadership of private-sector leaders in South Africa.

This study also finds there is a need for three extensions to existing work on the concept. Firstly, the concept is missing an exploration of the crucial relationship with one's own institution. Integration changes one's identity and shifts the system. This creates disturbance and the possibility of pressure on one's own constituency. Secondly additional scholarly work is needed to elaborate on the historical issues that constrain or enable integrative leadership, especially in transitioning societies and new democracies where institutions may be lacking, different or in flux (Peng, 2003; Hamann, 2014). Thirdly, if Integrative Public Leadership is to be positioned differently from the public collaboration literature which has been so formative, then it would be helpful to explore the idea ‘integrative’ conflict inside, but more importantly outside, collaboration.

In closing, it is worth returning to the shared subjective and cultural context of leadership in South Africa. It is worth asking whether a more strongly shared concept of leadership could help Integrative Public Leaders. Different concepts of leadership across different groups make connecting difficult. Ubuntu is potentially such a bridging and connecting concept. It is philosophically robust in linking individuals to their communal context and therefore provides firm ground for connecting work. Ubuntu is also widely understood across different cultures, and this allows for diverse groups to align with the concept. Integrative leaders and practitioners can draw on the literature on Ubuntu (Adonisi, 1993; Mbigi, 1997; Khoza, 2011) to gain insight into how to work together. But it would also help if future research on Ubuntu and leadership explicitly looked outside the organisational boundary. There is space for scholars to extend Ubuntu's relevance into public boundary-spanning work. Concepts like Ubuntu and other non- western ethical and leadership philosophies can enrich theory of Integrative Public Leadership. Some work has been carried out, for example, on understanding Servant Leadership through an extensive global lens (Winston & Ryan 2008). Scholars of Integrative Public Leadership and of Ubuntu are encouraged to make these links.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.