Leadership: spanning the technical and institutional dimensions of organizations

This article brings together the issues of leadership and organization. We begin by discussing the concept of leadership, emphasizing the importance of the context in which leadership occurs. Because the type of leadership addressed in this paper occurs in the context of formal organizations, we revisit the concept of “loose‐coupling”, which reveals the rational and institutional dimensions of organization, explaining how each dimension provides a different form of determinacy on and through which leadership can act. We end by drawing on a study in which we are currently engaged to examine the forms that leadership may take in the rational and institutional dimensions of organizations.