James,
thanks for your inquiry!
About talentDAO
Our mission breaks down to two pieces: 1) Unlock talent. 2) Decentralize knowledge.
- Unlock talent. We do scientific research with the goal of discovering patters for effective distributed organizing to make DAOs a desirable alternative to traditional work arrangements.
- Decentralize knowledge. We are building the Journal of Decentralized Work (JoDW), the first on-chain peer-review publication in the field of organizational psychology. We are 100% invested in #DeSci.
So essentially we do research & development and the JoDW is the first product we are developing. Other research projects we are working on will likely end into product development with the goal to giving tools to DAOs to operate more effectively. For example, we recently developed the DAO Health Survey to measure the health of a DAO from “the eyes of contributors” and made it open source.
Re:DAO leadership
The rapid review focused on the existing leadership scholarship, including recent advancements in the field of shared/distributed/collective leadership.
The main difference between the two is that traditional leadership literature conceptualized leadership as a leader-centric, individual-level phenomenon, whereas “decentralized leadership” sees leadership as a dynamic and interactive group-emergent property.
So if trad leadership is downward influence, shared leadership involves interactive influence processes. If trad leadership involves formal appointment, shared leadership involves situational leader emergence; if trad leadership is centralized in the hands of a single person, shared leadership is distributed among a set of individuals. And so on.
Yet we are not throwing out the baby with the bathwater: trad leadership has contributed solid empirical theories about what individual leader behaviors drive individual-team-organizational outcomes. So in our analysis, traditional leadership behaviors (e.g., transformational leadership, transactional leadership, etc.) are the object being “shared” among multiple individuals.
Our essay is the result of what the scientific, peer-reviewed, leadership literature contributed to our knowledge of leadership. Our analysis did not include so called “practitioner literature” yet, that is, practical leadership knowledge coming from the the movement of distributed organizing. This literature will be one of the objects of focus in Phase 2 of our research where we will do qualitative research to understand "What is leadership in DAOs? with the goal of building a grounded theory.