Organizational Visioning: From a Leader-Centric Approach to a Participative Process

Organizational vision is traditionally viewed through a leader-centric lens, where a "heroic" figure crafts and transmits an idealized future state to followers. However, in increasingly volatile environments, this top-down approach often fails to achieve deep alignment or execution. This paper explores the transition from individualistic to collective leadership in the visioning process. Relying on a single-case study of an Italian family business—an "extreme case" due to its inherent tension between founder-driven centralization and the need for multigenerational continuity—we investigate how visioning evolves into a dynamic, multistakeholder process. Adopting a collective leadership framework, we identify the drivers and mechanisms that shift visioning from a founder-centric approach to a pluralistic process involving different actors in the formation, communication, assimilation, and implementation phases. Our findings contribute to the literature on visionary and collective leadership by illustrating how organizational configurations influence the emergence of shared ownership of the visioning process and the dynamics of multiple actors enacting its different phases.