Study title

Professional service firms (PSFs) have been largely neglected by leadership scholars yet they pose many distinctive leadership challenges. In PSFs (such as accounting and law firms) the typically contingent nature of managerial authority and the need to build consensus among senior professionals means that conventional hierarchical relationships between leaders and followers are replaced by more ambiguous relationships amongst professional peers. The study proposes that four main groups of stakeholders are fundamental to leadership dynamics in a PSF: the senior executive dyad, heads of businesses, heads of business services, and key influencers (who exist outside the formal governance structure). The study conceptualises these groups, and the dynamics of their interactions, as the PSF "leadership constellation". The study will examine the leadership constellation in several PSFs in multiple sectors, analysing informal processes of influence, embedded in the roles and relationships of the leadership constellation, alongside formal processes of governance, embedded in the organisations' systems and structures. In addition to contributing to an emerging body of research about what is variously called the collective, shared or distributed model of leadership, the study also seeks to make a significant practitioner contribution by analysing factors associated with effective and ineffective leadership processes in PSFs.