Zombie or Cyborg? Exploring How Communities Navigate Tensions between Agile and Hierarchical Organizing

This study investigates how communities navigate the tensions that arise when agile and hierarchical organizing intersect within a financial organization. Drawing on an ethnographic study, we explore how communities navigate the contradictory demands of maintaining hierarchical consistency while pursuing agile adaptability. The paper argues that such tensions can produce organizational zombification, in which autonomy and self-organizing are gradually constrained by demands for control and predictability. In such situations, agile organizing remains visible in form but loses much of its collective and adaptive potential. Complexity leadership theory is used to understand how communities mitigate these tensions through shared coordination routines and visualization practices. The study describes how these practices connect actors and communities, structuring and facilitating interactions to reconcile needs for both alignment and autonomy. This balancing process is conceptualized as cyborgification, an organizational state where structural consistency merges with collective agency to ensure both predictability and adaptability. In doing so, the paper contributes to discussions of collective leadership by emphasizing how organizations can sustain collective agency by attending to both structural design and the social dynamics of power. MAD statement In this paper, we align with the Anti-Zombie Leadership Alliance (Haslam et al., 2024), which argues that leadership must first and foremost be considered a collective endeavour. However, leadership is also a messy, ambiguous, and contested process, where responsibilities, capabilities, and interests in ‘making leadership happen’ are strongly shaped by specific actors. Our research shows how additional actors and communities can and should be involved in leadership practices to avoid leader-centricity that may zombify and stifle the organization. The study contends that communities have the potential to contribute considerably to collective leadership processes if we are willing to attend to recurring power imbalances, embrace organizational contradictions, and promote structures that enable collectivity.