Business Innovation Through Holistic Leadership‐Developing Organizational Adaptability

Abstract

This paper offers new theoretical contributions and practical knowledge to existing leadership theories. Through a detailed study of the major corporation SoftBank, a Japanese company achieving business innovation at a global level in recent years, and insights gained on the leadership for organizational adaptability of practitioners driving strategic innovation, this paper presents a framework for ‘holistic leadership’ with a fractal nature as a complex adaptive system. In the three ‘practice layers’ of the ‘formal organizational layer’, ‘psychological boundary layer (adaptive space)’ and the ‘informal organizational layer’, practitioners (in the three management layers of top management, middle management and staff) dynamically use ‘centralized leadership’, ‘dialectical leadership’ and ‘distributed leadership’ and combine them depending on the situation, to achieve a balance between various contradictory elements such as the ‘tug‐of‐war between efficiency and creativity’, and demonstrate organizational adaptability. Through an in‐depth case study, this paper illustrates that holistic leadership in modern companies is a source of business innovation. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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