Symphonic dances: A grounded theory of leader-stakeholder relationships in orchestral decision making.

A critical relationship in organizational decision making is that which exists between leaders and their stakeholders. Despite the importance of this relationship, and the considerable organizational theory and research that addresses issues of leadership and stakeholder management, there has been relatively little work which investigates the perceptions and behaviors of both parties simultaneously. In this paper, I develop a grounded theory of leader-stakeholder relationships in decision making, based on an intensive, longitudinal, two-year study of three British symphony orchestras.The paper addresses two specific research questions: 1) What are the core dimensions of leader-stakeholder relationships in decision making? and 2) What factors influence these dimensions, and how do they do so? Two key dimensions -- stakeholder involvement and leader proactivity -- are identified which parsimoniously describe the patterns of leader-stakeholder interaction both within and between the three orchestras. For each of these dimensions, a theoretical model is proposed which specifies the factors that influence them and the ways in which they do so. The paper concludes with the development of a typology of leader-stakeholder relationships in organizational decision making, based on the integration of these two core dimensions.