| This qualitative study was designed to research an emerging anatomy of collaborative leadership in the framework of the prevention of the destruction of the Southwest forests by catastrophic wildfires. Leaders of the constituencies forming the collaborative partnership engaged in the landscape-scale ecological restoration of the public forests of Northern Arizona to a fire-adapted ecology were interviewed using the phenomenological approach. Data was analyzed using Moustakas' modified van Kaam method to identify how these leaders experience collaborative leadership, and whether their experience could lead to progress in understanding collaborative leadership by integrating the existing theories of managerial or political leadership into a new construct of holistic leadership adapted to the exercise of collaborative leadership in an environment essentially devoid of hierarchical authority between the various constituencies. The research results support the research thesis that the four classic approaches of leaders' traits, leaders' behaviors, leaders' power and influence techniques, situational contingency, and the new approach of leaders' and followers' reciprocal influence, traditionally opposed in the leadership research by a logic of exclusion and substitution, actually merge synergistically in a logic of accumulation and integration into an emerging anatomy of holistic collaborative leadership. |
