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What is collective leadership and how is it developed? Despite growing interest in collective leadership its definition, and understandings of the contextually situated process through which it develops, are limited. We draw on a five‐year longitudinal study to explain how collective leadership develops through ongoing negotiations between strategic ambiguity and reification. We delineate between directed work, collective work, and collective leadership to bring conceptual and definitional clarity to the field. We develop a process model to explain how contextual conditions influence the development of collective leadership. Introducing the concepts of accommodated divergence, directed convergence, and unified divergence we show how interorganizational collaborations can move from collective work to collective leadership. We argue that ‘unified divergence’ enables us to provide a more precise conceptual definition of collective leadership, which we define as: the interaction of strategic ambiguity and inward‐ and outward‐facing reification practices, resulting in agreed collective aims, alignment and coordination of activities, commitment to collective success, and the maintenance of divergent perspectives.

Employing a configurational approach we explore how ‘hybrid context’ shapes organizations’ adoption, and performance implications, of management practice. We do because hybrid contexts have been a policy aim of many governments seeking to blurr the distinction between the public, private and not‐for‐profit sectors. To conceptualize hybrid contexts we employ the dimensions of market authority and (the multiple) political authority. Employing data from UK care homes, our findings suggest that: (i) the adoption, and performance effects, of management practices are conditioned by dimensions of hybrid context; (ii) there is significant variation across the configurations in terms of the mix of management practices that lead to high and low performance; and (iii) there is a high degree of symmetry between high and low performance, with good management practices being a necessary condition for high performing as compared to low performing organizations.