The world has been shaken up by the COVID-19 pandemic, affecting all businesses, including scaling start-ups. Not only have the lives of individuals been globally upended with intertwined boundaries between work and home, but also unexpected challenges have threatened daily operations of scaling start-ups. COVID-19 can be considered as a wicked problem. Even though individuals must cope with COVID-19 on their own, contemporary leadership studies claim that it requires collective action to alleviate the derived challenges. In fact, researchers argue that individuals’ experience and knowledge is insufficient, and that it takes collective intelligence and leadership to achieve short-term objectives and maintain long-term flexibility.

Besides insufficient literature that considers collective leadership as a practice, a definitional paradox of collective leadership exists.

The purpose of this thesis is to (1) identify enablers and preventers of collective leadership practices, and to (2) investigate how COVID-19 has changed leadership practices in scaling start-ups.

What are enablers and preventers of collective leadership in scaling start-ups? How has COVID-19 changed leadership practices in scaling start-ups?

Ontology - relativism; Epistemology - social constructionism; Methodology - grounded theory by Strauss & Corbin (1998); Data collection - 20 semi- structured interviews; Sampling - mixed sampling approach: purposive, snowball and convenience sampling; Data analysis - Grounded analysis.

The authors developed a framework for enablers and preventers of collective leadership practices in scaling start-ups. Additionally, the authors provide empirical insights about how COVID-19 has changed leadership practices in scaling start-ups. Thus, the authors contribute to practice theory by critically questioning core assumptions of collective leadership from a practice perspective as well as extending contemporary critical leadership studies by investigating collective leadership as a social-relational phenomenon.