Léadership Sans Frontières: Exploring Leadership in Philanthropy

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Short Description

Leaders in philanthropy receive significant public attention but the process of philanthropic leadership is largely unexplored. This roundtable will discuss a research project that addresses two questions: How is leadership practiced in philanthropic communities and by whom? How do leaders influence others to embrace philanthropy?

Detailed Abstract

As government spending is reduced in many industries such as higher education, scientific research and significantly, the arts, organisations are increasingly relying on philanthropy to fund their efforts. However there is little understanding of how leadership is practised within the philanthropic community. However there has been, to date, no studies that examine the process of philanthropic leadership. As such, the two questions we seek to address are: How is leadership practiced in philanthropic communities and by whom? How do leaders influence towards others to embrace philanthropy?

A more in-depth exploration of structured giving in Australia specifically pointed to leadership as key for understanding the motivations behind philanthropy. The report by Scaife and colleagues (2012) looked events, people, choices and influences as motivators. The two most important themes were influence by advisors and intermediaries, and peer leaders. The participants all spoke about being influenced by philanthropic role models, how speaking with ‘a friend of a friend’ or having informal referrals and casual conversations really impacted on how and why they engaged in philanthropic endeavours. What is most telling is that they all said there was a lack of overt peer leaders and champions is highlighted as an area needing change.

Pursuing this line of inquiry addresses two important concerns. First, while research on leadership within and across organisations is significant and long-standing, there has been a lack of attention to how leaders emerge and develop followers outside of formal organisational structures. Looking at Bedeian and Hunt’s (2006) discussion of the distinction and relationships between leadership and management, there is a need to explore the phenomenon that is leadership without conflating it with management. We argue that the most effective way to do this is to examine how leadership emerges and is practiced outside of structural constraints where ‘management’ is not part of the process, thereby progressing our understanding of leadership.

Indeed, the attention to progressive and collective forms of leadership has waned. Examining how philanthropic leadership is practiced across a network of donors and benefactors allows a more in-depth investigation of collective leadership. We conceptualise leadership within the philanthropic community as relational but pluralistic. Denis and colleagues (2012) undertook a review of ‘leadership in the plural’ and defined it as ‘leadership not as a property of individuals and their behaviors, but as a collective phenomenon that is distributed or shared among different people, potentially fluid, and constructed in interaction.’ (Denis, et al. 2012: 212). This is approach can offer a better understanding into how or why individuals become philanthropic leaders and in turn, either intentionally or unwittingly, inspire others to follow their lead and become philanthropists. Such an understanding can provide important insight into ways in which relationships and influence shape giving rather than formal mechanisms and structures and thus provide the capacity for more micro-level strategies for practicing leadership which may lead to increasing giving at an individual level.

We draw from economics to inform our understanding of the goal of philanthropy. Economists are concerned about the allocation of scarce resources to competing ends. If the present allocation is not ‘optimal’ it can be changed either through direct (non-market) measures, OR by using the market. ‘Externalities’ in economics implies that there are consequences for some parties in the economy that are not reflected in the market price. The traditional example in the economic literature is pollution, but education is considered to be a positive externality, that is, we all benefit from living in an educated community, even if we do not all contribute to the cost of education). If there are benefits from positive externalities (e.g. the arts) then we can try and change the market price (and hence increase consumption of the arts). If one is very wealthy, it can be done through structured means (e.g. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) or unstructured, with individuals having the capacity to form groups. We aim to address how leadership is practiced through both structured and unstructured giving, that is both formally and informally.

We focus on arts philanthropy as it is subjected less to dynamic environmental forces and be more stable over time. For example, philanthropic activity for social justice causes is often in response to a particular event or crisis. We undertook semi in-depth interviews with individuals who have been active philanthropists in the arts community in Melbourne during the past 5 years; this included not just philanthropists but donor managers within arts organisations. Since we are not examining a formal network and our participants include very wealthy individuals who could be expected to want a degree of privacy, we anticipated that a survey would have a very low response rate. Furthermore, a qualitative survey is not as effective as an interview where answers can be probed and explored for clarification and illumination, important factors given that philanthropic leadership has received little attention.

The interview transcripts were uploaded into Nvivo software for computer-aided qualitative data analysis, using open coding by sentence or paragraph. Coding nodes were adapted from the conceptual framework of pluralistic leadership. Initial coding of the interviews pointed to individuals to not be actively influenced by others in their philanthropic efforts, nor seeking to lead other. Therefore to more effectively examine the nature of the relationships between philanthropists and the communities they serve, a grounded theory approach was taken. We draw from Kan and Parry (2004) to inform our analysis, whose research illustrated the significance of identifying paradox when multiple realities emerge from data; their hierarchy of abstraction model guided our data analysis. The results of this analysis raises questions about how and why philanthropists engage in leadership and the implications this has for fundraising activities.

Participants

• Andrea North-Samardzic, Deakin University

• Michael Brian Cohen, Deakin University