Organizational psychologist doing scientific research on Decentralized Autonomous Organizations with talentDAO (talentDAO.io)

Educator. Strategist. Speaker.

I help people create more options for their future.

Perpetual student of leadership development and DAOs.

https://mirror.xyz/wPHKzcPIgJsjISaopD_x1PKHoPN-JZftJ-D6mJq6y_o

DAO Leadership: Building on the shoulders of giants

Introducing core DAO leadership \[long read\]

## tl;dr

* Distributed organizing makes research on DAO leadership a priority
* DAOs can benefit from succinct roll-ups of what research has taught us about leadership over decades
* Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are highly efficient ways to examine large bodies of research and derive implications for practice
* This essay contains the juice of leadership research to ground future research on DAO leadership upon a solid foundation
* DAO leadership involves self, people, task, and change leadership behaviors that members share responsibility to perform to drive DAO outcomes

## Contents

 1. **What can DAOs learn from decades of leadership research?**
    1. Building on «research of research»
 2. **Preliminary perspective on DAO leadership**
    * Leadership and DAOs
    * Working definition of DAO leadership
 3. **Introducing core DAO leadership**
    * DAO leadership is shared
    * What are the conditions for shared leadership to emerge?
    * What is «shared» in leadership?
    * Leadership behaviors that drive outcomes
 4. **On leading**
    * Leaders are made, not born
    * Are you motivated to lead?
    * No noise, just signals
 5. **Leading self**
    * Self-leadership
 6. **Leading people**
    * Transformational leadership
    * Empowering leadership
    * Servant leadership
 7. **Leading tasks**
    * Initiating structure
    * Transactional leadership
    * Boundary spanning
    * Laissez-faire leadership
 8. **Leading change**
    1. Charismatic leadership
    2. Instrumental leadership
    3. Intellectual stimulation
 9. **Wrapping up: core DAO leadership**
10. **DAO Leadership NFT Editions**
11. Acknowledgements
12. Disclaimer
13. About us
14. References

## 1. What can DAOs learn from decades of leadership research?

### Building on «research of research»

At talentDAO we set out to study [leadership in the decentralized world of work](https://mirror.xyz/lisawocken.eth/xg8mIDuvOcForq9ZkM2rhA_HdEwb-uF5UzFE_rVvdaI). We are building our point of view on high-quality, high-applicability leadership research. Our research protocol consists of:

* **Step 1:** Build on «*research of research*» conducting rapid reviews of meta-analysis or systematic reviews to leverage the best scientific research on leadership
* **Step 2:** Consolidate, summarize, and share existing leadership research and potential DAO implications
* **Step 3:** Conduct primary quali-quantitative research within DAOs informed by our prior research, hence «*building on the shoulders of giants*»

This essay is the output of step 1 and 2. We reviewed 40 studies that used meta-analytic or systematic review methods, conducted over the last 25 years. These studies pool together quantitative results on specific research questions using the whole body of scientific evidence to date. Hence, the 40 studies represent around 5400 primary leadership studies with a total sample size of hundreds of thousands of leaders across a wide range of organizational settings. Given the characteristics of this evidence base, we expect the findings to generalize to different contexts, including decentralized autonomous organizations.

You can find more details about our research project [here](https://talentdao.notion.site/Decentralized-Leadership-94eddc73f9da4a50b1f20469ea56b1df).

## 2. Preliminary perspective on DAO leadership

### Leadership and DAOs

Leadership enables organizations to function effectively, directing, inspiring, and coordinating the efforts of individuals, teams, and organizations toward the realization of collective goals (Carter, 2015). Leadership research started getting attention after World War II. Over the past 70 years the field has grown exponentially through multiple «*waves*» of research: from simple behavioral theories, to more sophisticated cognitive explanations, to the emergence of leadership in complex, dynamic networks (Lord, 2017).

Leadership is conceptualized as a «*dyadic, shared, r