From ‘I’ to ‘We’ - Conceptualising the work and experiences of managers in fostering collective leadership

Despite a growing interest in collective and distributed forms of leadership to meet the current challenges in healthcare organisations, little empirical research has focused on the manager role in studies with a collectivistic leadership ontology. To address this gap, we applied the concept of relatedness from Self-Determination Theory to analyse the work of managers across various organisational levels in a high-performing Swedish healthcare region. The analysis showed how the managers performed three types of work (contribution-, unconditionality-, and connection-work) that enabled autonomous motivation by supporting the basic psychological need for relatedness and, in turn, experienced that others were supporting their basic psychological need for relatedness. Thus, the study highlights the recursive nature of relatedness and the mutuality between organisational members. In addition, it reintroduces the role of managers into the collective leadership discourse by showing how they actively coordinate leadership towards the purpose of the organisation. The combination of Self-determination theory and collective leadership contributes to an alteration of the crucial question that managers should ask themselves, according to the Self-determination theory. Rather than asking, how can I, as a manager, create a work environment in which individuals motivate themselves, we propose the question of importance to be: How can we, as managers and employees, in this organisation, together create a work environment in which we can motivate ourselves?.