Modern social movements present a compelling paradox: while explicitly rejecting traditional leadership structures, they require sophisticated coordination to achieve their goals. This theoretical paper examines how movements maintain effective organization while opposing formal leadership, introducing a novel framework for understanding distributed coordination in "leaderless" movements. Drawing on social movement theory, network analysis, and critical leadership studies, we propose that these movements develop alternative coordination systems through three key mechanisms: shared mental models enabling distributed decision-making, reframed informal power structures maintaining ideological legitimacy, and rotating situation-specific expertise roles. We develop seven propositions examining how influence patterns, coordination effectiveness, and movement sustainability interact within anti-hierarchical contexts. Our framework contributes to leadership theory by expanding understanding of how coordination functions without formal authority, identifying specific mechanisms that fulfill leadership functions in anti-leadership contexts, and theorizing how movements resolve tensions between ideological opposition to leadership and practical coordination needs. The findings challenge traditional assumptions about the necessity of formal leadership structures and suggest important implications for both social movement organization and the future of organizational leadership in networked societies.
