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Dedication
In the valley it was like a destroyed earth,
It was like war, struggling wild manic chaos,
Water bubbling made by man,
Silent moving made by birds and waterfalls,
The fungi was like a thyroid,
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A tangling fight winding up a tree.
It was like a supply of nature breaking through.
By Fynn, aged 8
I dedicate this book to Fynn, who continues to inspire me
and who I miss so much.
Also to Agata, with big love and huge thanks for the joy shared,
encouragement and support during the writing of this book. This book will
always evoke such happy memories of writing and walking in the woods
and hillsides around Krynica, Poland, summer 2012.
To all friends and colleagues who share my journey.
To all I work with. My consulting and coaching work gives me privileged
access to engage with people at all levels in organizations, who share with
me their strengths, vulnerabilities and struggles. I work in diverse spaces
and places, where I observe, listen and intervene, learning and feeding my
insatiable curiosity, and putting theory into
practice, and practice into theory. This book could not be written without their full engagement.
Thank you all.
Finally, to distributed leaders everywhere, often unrecognized and
unacknowledged, who share the ethos of this book; striving for emancipation
and to create a better world.
© Simon Western 2008, 2013
First published 2008. Reprinted 2010
This second edition published 2013
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the
prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences
issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
All photographs by the author
Artwork at beginning of discourse chapters by Maia Kirchkheli
All other graphic design by Martyna Adamska
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012954157
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-4462-6989-3
ISBN 978-1-4462-6990-9 (pbk)
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Why a Critical Theory Approach to Leadership?
1
Chapter Structure
•
•
•
•
•
Introduction
Critical Thinking and Critical Theory (CT)
Why Critical Theory Is Marginalized
A Critical Framework: Four Frames of Critical Inquiry
Conclusion: Critical Theory and Leadership
Introduction
This book takes a critical theory (CT) approach to leadership for four core reasons:
1 To establish a critical theoretical framework, supporting an individual’s process of inquiry into the theory
and practice of leadership.
2 To contribute an accessible critical account of leadership, challenging ‘taken-for-granted’ (normative)
assumptions and offering new insights into the underlying discourses and dynamics of leadership.
3 To contribute to the task of improving and rethinking leadership practice, taking into account
contemporary social change, to benefit our organizations and institutions.
4 To situate leadership within an ethical and emancipatory framework, with the greater aim of creating the
‘Good Society’.
Critical theoretical approaches work in two ways, the first being to scrutinize leadership, to offer an analysis
of the deeper, less obvious ways in which leadership is theorized, practised and utilized to attain
organizational aims. Secondly, CT has progressive intentions: it aims to create a better society by rethinking,
rediscovering and reinventing leadership; bringing new theoretical resources to the challenges revealed
through its critique. Critical theory can sometimes veer towards the first aspect, the scrutiny and
deconstruction, with too little attention given to the reconstruction and rethinking of leadership. To be critical
in popular terms has inferences of being negative, and in academia, where critical takes a different meaning,
critiquing and applying critical theory can easily become focused on finding the flaws and revealing the
oppressive forces within mainstream leadership. Adler et al. (2007: 14) write, ‘As with most countermovements, CMS1 proponents have been more articulate about what they are against than what they are for’.
Critical theory then becomes a pathologizing activity rather than an emancipatory theory. This book is firmly
placed in the emancipatory camp of critical theory, believing that critique is important when used to promote a
progressive agenda, or, as Cunliffe (2008: 937) writes, ‘I believe the central thread is our interest in the
critique of contemporary forms of knowledge, social and institutional processes and in generating radical
alternatives’. To repeat Marx’s famous quote in his ‘Theses on Feuerbach’: ‘The philosophers have only
interpreted the world, the point is to change it’ (Marx, 1845/1978: 45).
CT is a diverse body, as I will explore later. Some believe that only a radical critique is worthwhile, and that
attempting to improve the workplace through a reformist agenda is ‘selling out’ to a capitalist system that is
inherently unfair. This polarization of views strikes me as dualistic thinking that critical scholars themselves
condemn. The CT task is both a progressive and a radical agenda. A reformist engagement with contemporary
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managers and leaders achieves two things; firstly it can improve the situation on the ground (microemancipation); secondly it can work towards structural and radical change (macro-emancipation) by (a)
educating and engaging practitioners in new possibilities beyond their current vision, thereby building a
greater consensus for more radical possibilities of change, and (b) reformist engagement can also be used by
critical theorists as action-research, to better understand the system in order to work out what a radical agenda
might look like.
This chapter will initially discuss what it means to take a critical approach, and then offer a critical
framework that informs this book and can be used by practitioners to support their own critical inquiry.
Finally, it addresses applying critical theory to leadership itself, acknowledging some of the challenges that
are encountered.
Critical Thinking and Critical Theory (CT)
Critical thinking and critical theory are overlapping terms that require differentiating and clarifying for the
purpose of this book. Critical thinking or a critical approach are generic terms which are often used loosely
and at times indiscriminately and interchangeably with critical theory, but as Johnson and Duberley identify,
there is more to critical theory than being reflective and critical:
Whilst many researchers of management may consider themselves to be critical, in that they attempt to stand back
from their work and interrogate their findings with a critical eye, this does not mean they are operating within a
critical theory perspective. (2000: 124)
To be critical is to take a more radical, reflective and questioning stance that doesn’t accept at face value, what
is ‘taken for granted’ in a mainstream, positivistic or rationalistic perspectives. Fulop and Linstead (1999)
write in the opening of their book Management: A Critical Text:
This introduction outlines a critical approach to management that enables us to reflect on how we learn about
management. It is designed to help us develop the intellectual rigour and knowledge to deal with the complex and
multifaceted issues that arise in everyday work situations. (1999: 4)
Their approach focuses on being reflective and developing a rigor of inquiry, which is one element of a CT
stance but there are more. Calhoun (1995: 35) offers his perspective on CT:
1
CT critiques the contemporary social world looking for new possibilities, and positive implications for
social action.
2
CT gives a critical account of historical and cultural conditions.
3
CT gives a continuous critical re-examination of the conceptual frameworks used (including the
historical construction of these frameworks).
4
CT confronts other works of social explanation, analyzing their strengths and weaknesses, as well as
their blind spots, but then demonstrates the capacity to incorporate their insights for stronger
foundations.
These examples illustrate a use of CT which brings into play critical thinking from a social, historical and
cultural perspective, taking a social constructionist and a discursive approach, i.e. questioning how reality is
constructed and made sense of through processes of socialization, the use of language and historical
influences. Finally, there is another tradition in CT that aims to use its insights to take an explicitly ethical
position.
Good Leadership and Ethical Leadership
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Perhaps the greatest differentiating point is that mainstream approaches (rational/positivist) attempt to
improve leadership with the aim of making organizations more effective and productive, without reference to
broader social and ethical concerns. Good leadership in mainstream thinking means effective leadership,
usually with a ‘values perspective’, as an additional extra. For example, Bass (1998) says transformational
leadership is also about ‘doing good’, yet without looking at structural power issues, and the systemic
violence (Žižek, 2008) that occurs through corporate activity, whilst they take an individualist morality, ‘doing
good’ is nothing more than a hollow claim. For example, transformational leadership claims to empower
followers, yet under the scrutiny of CT transformational leaders aiming to create strong ‘cultures’ can end up
with ‘cult-like cultures’ as a new form of organizational control, aiming to maximize productivity from these
employees (see Chapters 7 and 12).
Some mainstream scholars do take a more sceptical stance to leadership, but critical scholars Alvesson and
Willmott (1996) claim that this sceptical approach has serious limitations because whilst it examines aspects
such as power, it does so from an intraorganizational context, ignoring a broader social and political context.
Individualistic leadership theories focusing on special personal traits such as charisma inherently support
the idea of ‘special leaders’ who can motivate ‘followers’, thereby increasing productivity, and these leaders
are rewarded with ‘special’ remuneration packages. This idea of leadership has led to chief executives’ pay
rising in astronomical terms in the past 20 years. As Mintzberg (2012) points out, ‘Any CEO who allows
himself to be paid 400 or 500 times more than the workers is not a leader but an exploiter’. These ‘super’
leaders receive huge bonuses rewarding them for short-term success and growth, following the neo-liberal
agenda of ever-increasing productivity within liberal markets, decreasing regulation, increasing financial and
trade liberalization, and reducing protection for the labour force. Short-term profiteering ignores developing
more sustainable business growth, or ethical concerns such as humanizing the workplace and taking
responsibility for a sustainable natural environment. Is this good leadership?
There are many covert vested interests at stake in organizational life, such as power, identity and economic
benefit, which is one reason why critical theory is marginalized. Bhaskar (2010: 107) explains:
The oppressed have an interest in explanatory knowledge of the structures that oppress them. But their oppressors do
not need to have that explanatory knowledge and it might be better for them if they do not. The sort of knowledge
they need to have is best not called knowledge, but rather information or even data, and that is about how to
manipulate events and circumstances and discourses.
Good leadership in the workplace must mean more than increasing short-term share prices, and growth. Good
leadership should also mean ethical leadership, and this is not just for altruistic reasons, it is also to promote
sustainable success. One of the key points I wish to make is that critical theory is not an abstract construction
useful only in academic circles, it is fundamental to successful organizational and social functioning, creating
more humane institutions and a sustainable world.
Why Critical Theory Is Marginalized
To critique means to look at deeper, underlying questions, not just at the challenges raised by a particular
problem.
Business Schools, Management Science and the Corporate Agenda
The basic assumptions behind much of leadership and organizational thinking emanate from business schools
(Grey, 2004), which operate with two combined, underpinning biases:
1
The purpose of business is to maximize productivity and profit: Business schools take the position that
is most likely to align with their key stakeholder, the corporate client, whose agenda is ‘more productivity
and growth, with ever-greater efficiency, to maximize profit’.
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Management science: Business schools were founded on the premise of using scientific knowledge to
improve productivity more efficiently, and this continues today, i.e. ‘management science’, dominated by
technocratic values (Adler et al., 2007; MacIntyre, 1985).
Business schools produce knowledge about leadership and organizations, training leaders to use this
knowledge. Privileging management science as the method, (positivism) works on the assumptions that this
knowledge is value-neutral, free from bias, factual and scientific. Yet the knowledge they produce is heavily
biased towards a single focus, ‘instrumentalism’.
In the instrumentalist approach to management and organization, the goal of profitability – or, in the not-for-profit
sectors, performance targets – takes on a fetishized, naturalized quality. All action is then evaluated under the norms
of instrumental means–ends rationality. Ethical and political questions concerning the value of such ends are
excluded, suppressed, or assumed to be resolved. (Adler et al., 2007: 127)
The corporate agenda aligns itself with the management science agenda, both aiming for the same results –
greater efficiency and productivity – without questioning the wider implications for stakeholders and wider
society.
CT challenges both of these underlying premises, claiming that an organization has a social as well as a
business purpose. Neither does it accept the premise that science (positivism) is neutral and free from bias. It
questions political interests in any research being undertaken, it asks why certain questions are being asked
and others not, questioning the taken-for-granted assumptions behind the research. Positivism claims to
measure a world that simply exists:
…people are taught to accept the world ‘as it is’, thus unthinkingly perpetuating it. CT thus sees positivism as pivotal
in an ideology of adjustment, undermining our power to imagine a radically better world. (Adler et al., 2007: 138)
CT responds by saying that the world is socially constructed, and shaped by discourse, and we must ask
questions about what kind of world we are perpetuating, and what kind of world we can create. The task of
critical theory is to study power and knowledge relations, to challenge dominating structures, and also to
prevent leadership becoming another instrumental project, serving only to promote greater efficiency,
productivity, profit, with little reflection on its wider impact on society.
Critical theory has been successful in terms of theoretical influence, but remains marginalized, and there are
concerns about its lack of impact on practice. Cooke (2008: 914) cites that only 1.7% of papers at the
Academy of Management meeting were in the Critical Management programme.
In a 2008 edition of the journal Organization the editors invited critical scholars to reflect on the future of
CMS (Critical Management Studies – which includes organizational and leadership theory), and the results
were interesting. Three dominant challenges stood out that contributed to the marginalization of critical
theory.
1. An Elitist CMS
Stookey (2008: 922) summed up this view, writing that critical studies challenge elitism whilst paradoxically
being part of an ‘elitist enterprise’ itself, i.e. academia. She notes with concern that ‘a society dominated by
elitism is fundamentally delusional and self-destructive’. The divide between critical theory and practice is a
false dichotomy, perhaps one that is perversely enjoyed and perpetuated by critical scholars, making them an
‘elite’ group, who benefit from the status, comfort and salaries of the academy, whilst retaining an outsider
‘maverick’ status (Parker, 2002). CT scholars exclude practitioners with an (often unnecessary) post-structural
and academic jargon, yet critical thinking is not in opposition to leadership but a prerequisite for competent
leadership that promotes strategic, successful, sustainable and progressive change within organizations.
2. A Cloistered CMS: Theory before Practice
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There was wide acknowledgement that CMS was also becoming a cloistered and self-referential entity that
was consumed by theory at the expense of engaging with and having an impact on practice. Svensson (2010:
3) writes in Ephemera:
Critical management scholars have been highly successful in publishing excellent articles, and many of them are
amazingly productive … The hyper-productivity of critical management scholars, targeted at excellent journals, has
turned critical management into an excellent institution, and many critically oriented scholars are employed because
of this mastery in publishing excellent papers.
This success in the academic and theoretical realm is contrasted with CMS’s impact on what happens in
practice:
CMS has had little or no impact on what organizations actually do ... there are some serious and fascinating issues
being discussed within CMS, but they tend to stay within the cloistered boundaries of academic work and find little
echo outside those who are already converted. (Parker, 2002: 115-16)
Addressing the dissonance between theory and practice is a major concern for CMS scholars if they are
serious about having emancipatory concerns, and contributing to social transformation as well as publication.
3. Diversity of Critical Studies
Scholars sometimes speak of CMS as a singular, homogeneous entity, speaking with one voice, when it is
actually a very diverse body. Adler (2008: 925) challenges the idea that there is a singular body of theory for
CMS:
In reality, there is a buzzing confusion and profusion, running the gamut from post-structuralism to labour process
theory, from Derrida to Marx, from radical postcolonial feminism to moderate social democratic liberalism, from
positivism to critical realism to social constructivism.
This diversity needs to be recognized, in order to maximize the benefits of the potential breadth of theory and
research that is available as a resource to understand leadership and organizational dynamics.
Reversing the Marginalization of CMS
These three factors add to the marginalization of critical theory. Critical studies therefore needs to find a new
engagement with non-critical scholars and practitioners. Voronov (2008: 943) suggests four possibilities for
critical scholars to increase their engagement with practitioners:
• Focused critique – issue-based critiques focused on specific issues that speak to managers and leaders
because they relate to real challenges. This offers critical theorists the opportunity to shape new
discourses.
• Engaged scholarship – creating knowledge that is both theoretically rich and practically useful,
exemplified by participatory research.
• Consulting – although objectionable to some CMS scholars, consulting can be an excellent way to gain
and deliver critical insights into leadership practice’.
• Critical action learning – ‘introducing critical elements into the action learning tradition’ (Reynolds and
Vince, 2004).
I would add business school executive education to this list. University-led training and development
programmes are currently the domain of mainstream scholars, yet they offer many opportunities for critical
scholars to engage and disseminate critical theory to practitioners, and to utilize practitioner knowledge and
insight to inform their theorizing. Having worked in executive education, I believe it offers the potential to
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work through normative assumptions, and some (though not all) executives will thrive and grow in such an
atmosphere. Critical thinking and practice should not be alien bedfellows!
A Critical Framework: Four Frames of Critical Inquiry
These four frames of critical inquiry underpin the thinking in this book and offer a tangible framework to
guide both practitioners and scholars:
•
Emancipation
•
Depth analysis
•
Looking awry
•
Network analysis
Emancipation
Ethics, Liberation, Autonomy, Sustainability, Equality and Justice
The lens of emancipation is concerned with promoting justice, equality, ethics, a sustainable environment,
liberation and autonomy. Leadership has a mixed reception in emancipatory movements; traditional social
movements herald heroic leaders such as Martin Luther King, Ghandi, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky and Lenin
(following populist notions of leadership), whilst new social movements such as feminism and the green
movement often treat leadership with suspicion. This is for two reasons: (1) because the word leadership
infers hierarchy and elitism and challenges the idea of autonomy and equality, and (2) leadership past and
present has often distorted and created unjust power relationships that marginalize some and benefit others.
For example, patriarchal and class-based leadership are still very present; male networks perpetuate the male
leadership that dominates corporate/political life, and class opportunities offer resources and networks that
keep an elite, wealthy class in leadership positions across society, thereby undermining meritocracy and social
mobility. In the UK at the time of writing the political elite is dominated by males who went to expensive
private schools:
Cameron, Clegg and Osborne all went to private schools with fees now higher than the average annual wage. Half the
cabinet went to fee-paying schools – versus only 7% of the country – as did a third of all MPs. (BBC News, 2011)
In the USA, leadership also reflects social inequality. There has never been a female president, and, according
to Stille (2011), ‘more than half the presidents over the past 110 years attended Harvard, Yale or Princeton and
graduates of Harvard and Yale have had a lock on the White House for the last 23 years, across four
presidencies’.
These biases are being better addressed in some countries. Norway, for example, has been described by the
UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women as ‘a haven for gender equality’,
legislating to increase female representation in parliament and boardrooms.
Taking a critical emancipatory stance is to try to increase representation at senior political and business
levels (a reformist perspective) and also to offer radical leadership ideas that will address the wider social
issues. In utilizing new social movement and feminist theory for example, CT aims to expand distributed and
grass-roots leadership, drawing on different readings of what traditional leadership means, and mobilizing
leadership in unexpected places.
Theoretical Resources
The emancipatory approach taken in this book draws upon eclectic ideas from diverse sources, including new
social movement theorists, post-Marxist thinkers, e.g. the Frankfurt School, Habermas and Adorno, Alain
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Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and autonomous Marxists such as ‘Biffo’ Beradi. Post-structuralists, such as Michel
Foucault and the feminist Judith Butler, have also developed emancipatory agendas through their work:
Foucault … taught us to be wary of the institutions through which we are governed. We must always beware of the
possibilities that our own institutional arrangements will encourage the rise of new destructive forces inimical to the
possibilities of our being free. (Dumm, 1996: 153)
Post-structuralists help us understand that leadership, like power, is everywhere, not just residing at the top of
a hierarchy. The CT task is not to condemn or remove leadership or power, but to scrutinize them, offering
alternatives to autocratic and elitist leadership. Post-structuralist and discourse theory reveals how social
conditions produce certain leadership approaches, and how leadership approaches reproduce social conditions.
For Habermas (1984), communication is a key tool of emancipation or oppression, and Foucault’s body of
work shows how discourses and language create a power–knowledge link (Foucault, 1980), revealing how our
subjective selves are formed and governed by discourses which entrap us (Rose, 1990). Judith Butler shows
how gender and identity are not as fixed as modernity led us to believe (Butler, 1990), and relating this to
leadership, we see how fluid the concepts of leadership are, with new links being developed between
leadership and identity formation.
Habermas observed that increasingly the public sphere is administered remotely from individual citizens,
diminishing their freedom and agency, and describing the ‘colonisation of the lifeworld’ (Habermas, 1984),
where the individual subject is penetrated by bureaucracy, using the ideology of efficiency and rationality to
justify this. Corporate leadership becomes part of this ‘colonising force’ and is most apparent when culture
control is used rather than more obvious transactional or coercive controls (discussed in Chapter 11 on
Messiah leadership). The Habermasian goal of critical theory is ‘a form of life free from unnecessary
domination in all of its forms’ (McCarthy, 1978: 273).
To summarize the emancipatory lens of CT:
•
Rationalism and knowledge must be linked to values and interest, if they are to be used as a force for
emancipation.
•
Emancipatory CT challenges relativism, the postmodern claim that all points of view are of equal value.
Leaders from elitist groups reproduce their hold on power, making their views privileged whilst less
privileged groups are silenced. These hidden power relations ensure that not all views are of equal value.
CT links politics, values and interests to knowledge to undermine relativism.
•
CT aims to reveal the power relations that exist within social structures, discourses and symbolic
practices. It then focuses on how to change the practices that undermine liberty and how to find new ways
to promote human agency and freedom.
Depth Analysis
Revealing Hidden Dynamics: Hermeneutics, Psychosocial Approaches, Discourse Analysis
Depth analysis is derived from the methods of psychoanalysis and discourse analysis that look beneath-thesurface to discover underlying patterns, structures and influences that are not immediately obvious or easy to
discern. Depth analysis challenges the dominant rational assumptions of leadership and organizational studies,
and clearly makes a case for including the irrational forces of the unconscious: the emotions, herd-behaviours,
group-think and other hidden forces that influence social dynamics. These human factors are not accounted
for in computer-generated data-banks, or scientific rationalist accounts of organizational behaviour; yet the
2007 financial collapse shows that we must account for human factors such as greed, mania and herd instincts
(Sievers, 2011; Stein and Pinto, 2011).
Psychoanalytic Approaches
Johnson and Duberley claim that psychoanalysis is perhaps the earliest example of a critical theorist method:
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Perhaps the prototype for critical science is psychoanalysis because it involves ‘depth-hermeneutics’ [Habermas,
1972: 218] in which the distorted texts of the patient’s behaviour become intelligible to them through self-reflection.
In this fashion emancipation occurs as the patient becomes liberated from the terror of their own unconscious as
previously suppressed and latent determinants of behaviour are revealed and thereby lose their power. (Johnson and
Duberley, 2000: 120)
Depth analysis is clearly linked to an emancipatory agenda through making the unconscious conscious, and
revealing other hidden knowledge and power sources such as how discourses are created and influence us.
The aim of depth analysis is to gain insight in order to disempower hidden forces, and enable us to form
strategies to create change.
This book draws on psychoanalytic theorists such as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein,
Wilfred Bion and Slavoj Žižek. There is also a long tradition of applying psychoanalytic thinking to
organizations and leadership studies, emanating from the Tavistock Institute, utilizing object relations theory
(Kleinian approaches), and now strongly represented by ISPSO (the International Society of Psychoanalytic
Study of Organization). Scholars such as Manfred Kets de Vries, Larry Hirschhorn, Mark Stein, Burkard
Sievers, Susan Long and Gabriel Yannis, amongst others, offer important contributions to the field. This work
applies a clinical perspective to organizations/leadership; for example Schwartz (1990) and Stein (2003) apply
a psychoanalytic understanding of narcissism to corporate culture, whilst Kets de Vries’ book The Leader on
the Couch (2006) uses clinical psychoanalytic insights to study leadership and is probably the best known
work in this field.
However these authors do not always take a critical approach, and sometimes the work takes an
intrapersonal and relational perspective at the expense of addressing wider social perspectives. The strong
contribution they make is to reveal how depth perspectives of a leader’s personality and interpersonal
relationships inform their leadership approach. Leaders can become dysfunctionally grandiose and omnipotent
when followers treat them unconsciously like a saviour. Psychoanalytic concepts such as projection help
explain how followers can idealize (or denigrate) leaders, projecting their repressed desires onto them.
Leaders represent authority figures and can replicate ‘good mummy/daddy or bad mummy/daddy’ in the
minds of followers, and this has implications when followers can become dependent on the leader rather than
autonomous, thinking employees (Miller, 1993).
To make interpretations from a psychoanalytic perspective means to draw upon our emotions and our
subjectivity as researchers and observers. Drawing on the ‘self’ to make sense of one’s feelings in relation to
another, or to a social situation, is off limits for positivist and rational approaches. These psychosocial
methodologies are under-used and under-developed, and offer a complementary lens to positivistic research.
There is a small but growing interest in psychosocial research. Professor Sasha Roseneil writes of her
psychosocial research:
…the psychosocial-analysis I carried out drew on principles from clinical psychoanalysis, in its concern to explore
interviewees’ psychic reality, the non-rational, unarticulated, unconscious dimensions of the experiences they
narrated, as well as the emotions and affects that they were able to formulate expressly in discourse. (Roseneil, 2006:
864)
My training and background are in psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice. I spent many years as a
psychotherapist and recently directed a Master’s programme in Organizational Consultancy at the Tavistock
Clinic, studying the unconscious and emotional dynamics in organizational life, and the insights gained
through this experience strongly influence this book. Lacanian psychoanalysis has become a popular
academic resource in critical theory, drawing on linguistic and post-structural readings of Freud. Using
psychoanalytic theory without reference to practice or the clinical method is, however, problematic. Bhaskar
claims that he could ‘not use psychoanalysis as a potential science of emancipation without actually having
experienced it’ (2010: 94).
Freud’s theories went beyond individual analysis and he considered his most important contribution was to
deepen an understanding of society and culture. In his book Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930/2002)
Freud identified the frustrations of being part of a social group:
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noting that the human animal, with its insatiable needs, must always remain an enemy to organized society, which
exists largely to tamp down sexual and aggressive desires. At best, civilized living is a compromise between wishes
and repression – not a comfortable doctrine. It ensures that Freud, taken straight, will never become truly popular,
even if today we all speak Freud. (Gay, 1999)
Freud’s work influences society today, Philip Rieff announced in The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966), and
we find the ‘talking cure’ everywhere, in mutated forms such as counselling, therapy, coaching, social work,
psychology. ‘Therapeutic culture’ (Furedi, 2003) has been pervasive in the past 50 years and this culture has
also infiltrated leadership theory and practice (see Chapter 10 on the leader as therapist). Advertising and
marketing campaigns now have integrated Freudian concepts into their thinking by relying on the unconscious
to attract new customers through linking their brands to individual identity (Klein, 2000). Subliminal
advertising is commonplace, drawing on Freud’s links between sex and power and his understanding of
unconscious fantasy, hence the stereotypical advert of fast cars being linked to glamorous women, to appeal to
the male desires and fantasies of having more phallic power. Turkle (2011) applies psychoanalytic insights as
part of her analysis of humans and technology that provides rich data to try to understand social dynamics in
hi-tech and virtual surroundings.
Psychoanalysis, however, remains marginal within leadership, management and organizational studies,
partly due to the positivistic and rationalist bias in management, which discounts complex understandings in
favour of measurable outcomes.
Discourse Approaches
Depth analysis draws upon other critical theory methods, which investigate what happens beneath the surface
in organizational life, e.g. discourse analysis, narrative analysis. Religious hermeneutic interpretation offers
ancient methods of depth analysis, trying to uncover the meaning within holy texts. Foucault (1980) teaches
us that power and knowledge are closely related, and that power is exerted through normative control: ‘the
way things are done around here’. Rose (1990) draws on Foucault to show how our intimate selves are
governed by social discourses, and this has many implications for leadership and workplace dynamics. To see
beyond the established ‘natural order of things’ means to ‘unmask’ what is hidden. For example, many
cultural assumptions are made about heterosexuality and marriage, and whilst these seem normal to many,
from gay or queer perspectives, they are oppressive. Power is performed through Westernized ideals of the
hetero-normative nuclear family, and those outside this framework are disciplined by social rules, either
explicitly or implicitly (Butler, 2004). In this book four discourses reveal how normative expectations of
leadership have changed over the past century.
Discourse approaches to depth analysis are very popular in critical theory today; in leadership studies new
insights through discourse analysis and discursive approaches come from scholars such as Fairclough (1995)
and Collinson (2003).
In summary, psychoanalysis, discourse analysis and other depth analysis techniques are employed in this
text as a core CT method to help reveal how social and unconscious processes become internalized, embodied
and enacted by individuals, social groups and organizations, and how language shapes our world. Leadership
raises issues of the individual and the group; leadership and followership, power and authority, manipulation
and control, and therefore depth analysis is vital to understand the processes that help develop models of
successful leadership.
Looking Awry
Reframing, Short-circuiting, Disrupting the Normative
Looking awry encourages leadership researchers and practitioners to disrupt the taken-for-granted, and look
from a different place. To see something differently we have to look differently. If a critical approach is to
offer a radical critique, and to find radical solutions, then looking awry is an essential frame from which to
discover something new.
Ž
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Žižek (1992, 2003) claims that a frontal view of an object or text offers a distorted and a limited
perspective, rather than what is traditionally regarded as a clear view. To really see what is happening, he
suggests the need to look awry and paradoxically take a ‘distorted’ view:
The object assumes clear and distinctive features only if we look ‘at an angle’, i.e. with an interested view, supported
permeated, and ‘distorted’ by desire. (Žižek, 1992: 12; emphasis added)
Žižek (1992) describes how a change in the angle of a camera during film making can give a whole different
perspective on the scene, and claims the observer also needs to bring their desire and subjectivity to the
viewing rather than to try to take an objective neutral stance. This challenges rational approaches, and the
Cartesian dualism (the subject–object, observer–observed, knower–known dichotomy). We become overfamiliar with the normative discourses which surround us; our individual and cultural scripts make the world
familiar and recognizable, yet often we cannot ‘see the wood for the trees’. When we are ‘liberated’ from a
particular way of seeing, new options then become available. This is not only an intellectual exercise but can
also be a powerful change agent. When working as a family therapist ‘reframing’ proved a useful way for
individuals and families to find new options to change patterns of behaving that they found destructive:
In Family Therapy, Reframing is a technique developed by the Palo Alto Group. The therapist offers a description
that gives the client a different way to look at their actions, hoping that this will enable them to see their problem
differently and develop new options for actions as a result. (Weakland et al., 1974)
Likewise within leadership training, reframing opens up new options for leaders so that they view their role
and can see different options and ways to act or intervene.
Short-Circuiting
Žižek describes ‘short-circuiting’ as a process that brings new resources from different traditions, in order to
see something new or hidden:
Is not short-circuiting, therefore, one of the best metaphors for a critical reading? Is it not one of the most effective
critical procedures to cross wires that do not usually touch: to take a major text and read it in a short-circuiting way,
through the lens of a minor (marginalized) author, text or conceptual apparatus? … such a procedure can lead to
insights which completely shatter and undermine our common perceptions. … The aim is to illuminate a standard
text or ideological formation, making it readable in a totally new way. (Žižek, 2003: Foreword)
To see beyond the obvious requires both new resources and also the ability to look and observe in new ways.
This dual process of short-circuiting and looking awry provides options to reveal what was previously
concealed within a dominant discourse.
In this text I use theoretical, historical and experiential resources to short-circuit common perceptions; for
example, drawing on theological resources and exploring religious fundamentalism as a lens to look awry at
leadership (Chapter 7). Bringing my own subjectivity and desire to my work with leaders, as a coach and
consultant, also provides me with rich data that I have used in this text. I make ‘disruptive interventions’ in
my leadership development work; for example, asking leaders to undertake unusual observation exercises at
airports or busy streets; to stop and observe the outside world like a video camera, recording everything they
have seen, then to be like a mirror, observing their bodies, feelings, emotions and thoughts as they observe the
outer world. I then coach and debrief them (sometimes individually or in groups) and offer interpretations
about what they saw and also what they didn’t see, what their focus was. This exercise reveals feelings and
insights, and tells them something different about their leadership and followership experiences, often
something profound. For example, one leader observed pairs all the time: couples in love, couples arguing,
two children, and on exploration he realized that he avoided teamwork, and needed to develop his team
leadership capability if he was to develop his career. Another leader observed the technical apparatus of an
airport flight announcing system, and reflected on how his focus at work was technical rather than on people;
yet when we discussed his feelings, he revealed deep feelings of loss and sadness at the amount of time he
spent away from family, on work assignments, and how he had to change roles to rebalance a dysfunctional
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life–work balance. These interventions help leaders look awry at their work, put them sharply in touch with
something that is not immediately obvious, and can have a powerful impact on their working lives.
In this text I have also drawn from New Social Movement (NSM) theorists such as Alberto Melucci and
Alain Touraine and other anthropologists, ethnographers and sociologists, who theorize how NSMs form and
how they differ from traditional social movements. NSM theory provides new ways to look at leadership, as
in these movements traditional leadership is not accepted, and de-centralized movements focus on ‘identity’
rather than on fighting for material gains. NSMs offer new ways to understand leadership in new
organizational forms, such as developing networked and dispersed leadership or organizational matrix
structures, for example. Leadership theorists have largely neglected this particular sociological and
anthropological literature.
Looking awry is to draw on new resources, to short-circuit them, and to place oneself as a reader/researcher
or practitioner in a different place so that something new can perhaps be discovered.
Network Analysis
Actor-Networks, Ecosystems, Systems Thinking
Manuel Castells (2000) describes the ‘Information Age’ and the ‘Network Society’, addressing how
technology has impacted on contemporary society. Network analysis accounts for the ‘network society’ in
which we live and work, and ensures that critical theory takes a systemic view of activity and leadership.
Leadership is fundamentally an influencing activity, and to understand leadership we have to try also to
understand what we are influencing. Many mainstream leadership perspectives are firmly rooted in
modernity’s vision of the world, one of structures, hierarchies, clear divisions and boundaries. Yet in the
postmodern/post-industrial world there is instability, fluidity and fast change, so that organizations are no
longer clearly boundaried and ordered, if they ever were (Latour, 2005).
Manual labour has largely migrated, and is surpassed in the West by cognitive or digital labour (Beradi,
2009). Global networks produce new forms of organizing and new organizational forms. Global flows create
virtual worlds which are no longer peripheral but run our finance systems and global brands. The real and the
virtual entwine in hybrid networks, and the contemporary workplace is interconnected and interdependent;
Actor Network scholars (Latour, 2005; Law, 1993) inform us how organizations and the social world are
better understood as networks of actors that are fluid and always changing. Actor Network scholars make the
radical claim that both human and non-humans actors have agency in our networks, that we cannot understand
the social world from a purely human-centric position. To understand leadership we must first try to
understand how change takes place in organizations, and we achieve this only if we take a network and a
systems perspective.
Systems theory takes a holistic perspective and ecological view (Bateson, 1972; Churchman, 1968, 1979;
Maturana and Varela, 1980, 1987; Naess, 1989; Von Bertalanffy, 1968). In the contemporary leadership and
management literature Peter Senge (1994) is best known for his use of systems thinking and influential texts
have also come from complexity theorists and integrative theorists such as Wilber (2000). Wheately (2006)
wrote an informative account of ‘leadership and these new science’ incorporating these concepts and taking a
network perspective:
Our zeitgeist is a new (and ancient) awareness that we participate in a world of exquisite interconnectedness. We are
learning to see systems rather than isolated parts and players. ... We can see the webs of inter-connections that weave
the world together. (Wheatley, 2006: 158)
One challenge to systemic, ecological, holistic and integrative theorists is that they often lack a power
critique, and see systems thinking in terms of communication feedback loops without accounting for the real
and discursive power issues that impact on any system (see Chapter 12, Eco-Leadership).
Critical theorists refer to context as being hugely important, and argue that we must take account of power
in networks, yet the bridge between theory and practice is very problematic. I draw upon my experience as a
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family therapist and systemically informed consultant to apply systems thinking to the practice of leadership.
The professional expertise developed through ‘clinical practice’ by family therapists offers a transferable and
adaptable knowledge base to further develop the bridge between systemic theory and leadership practice.2
Leadership theory must develop a greater vigilance of the wider impact of leadership interventions taken.
Network analysis attempts to address the complex social, political, economic and environmental challenges
which are present in our organizations. Chapter 12 on Eco-leadership helps us to rethink organizations as
‘ecosystems within ecosystems’ and describes the new forms of leadership developing for 21st century
organizations.
Workplace networks are fluid, and employees are increasingly nomadic, moving between roles, project
teams and virtual and real working spaces and places. The global and networked world offers new challenges
and new opportunities; I coach and consult leaders using network analysis as a frame to help them think more
strategically and more emergently. To be strategic, to think about the big picture, to understand change and the
resistance to change, and to decipher how to influence organizations, leaders must first locate themselves in
their own networks.
Frames Summary
These four frames, Emancipation, Depth Analysis, Looking Awry and Network Analysis, provide the basis for
a critical approach to leadership and they also provide the four critical lenses from which leadership is viewed
within this book.
Box 3 Summary of Critical Frames
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Conclusion: Critical Theory and Leadership
Applying critical theory to leadership demands that we identify some of the undercurrents, the historical and
social trends that inform how leadership is thought about and practised. To achieve this we must look beyond
the management and organizational leadership literature that draws too heavily on an ‘insider view’ and is
saturated with rationalistic and individualist ‘heroic’ accounts of leadership. Box 4 offers some working
assumptions on a critical approach to leadership.
Box 4 Critical Theory and Leadership: Working Assumptions
1
Leadership exists within all forms of organization, whether this is overtly or covertly recognized. It is
therefore important to understand how leadership works in practice. The task is to look beyond and
beneath the norms and assumptions espoused about leadership in popular culture and the mainstream
organizational literature.
2
Mainstream leadership assumptions and discourses reproduce the organizational power structures
that already exist. Critical theorists pay particular attention to the discursive, systemic and structural
aspects of leadership that privilege some and marginalize others. There is a tendency for
organizations to drift blindly and unknowingly towards seductive but dangerous totalizing cultures.
Revealing the role leadership plays within these processes and then to transform negative powerrelations is the task.
3
There is no leadership without followership and no leadership without power, influence and
authority. Individual and communal autonomy and liberty therefore rely on organizations with nonauthoritarian leadership approaches. It is possible to take up leadership authority without being
authoritarian. It is a utopian error to try to eliminate power relations. Critical theory attempts to make
transparent and address (rather than eradicate) the relations between leadership and followership,
authority and power.
4
Contemporary workplaces are increasingly important sites of social activity and community,
replacing traditional communal structures such as the church. What happens in the workplace has a
reflexive relationship with the wider environment. Understanding and improving the dynamics of
leadership in the workplace is therefore essential to society in general. Reflexive learning between
workplace leadership and socio-political leadership will have a systemic impact on governance and
leadership across all social structures.
5
Critical theory, as well as offering a critique, strives to offer reformist and radical options that can
create more humane workplaces, and contribute to building the good society.
It is the task of this book to create theoretical frames to identify ways in which ‘leadership in practice’ can
minimize power-relations that rely on control and coercion, and maximize the potential for emancipatory
workplaces. Leadership is not inherently good or bad, it is potentially both. Ricoeur claims that Ethical
Selfhood means ‘aiming for the good life with and for others in just institutions’ (Marsh, 2002: 224).
Ricoeur’s statement guides us: leadership from a critical theory perspective is underpinned by an ethical
stance. Leadership is to aim for the good life, to work with and for others to create the good society, and to
lead and co-create just institutions. I will add a further ethical aim: leadership should also work towards
protecting the natural environment.
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Suggested Readings
• Alvesson, M. and Wilmott, H. (1992) Critical Management Studies. London: Sage.
•
Bhaskar, R. (2010) The Formation of Critical Realism: A Personal Perspective. Oxford/New York:
Routledge.
Reflection Points
• What does it mean to be entrapped by ‘normative assumptions’?
• Why is it important to take an emancipatory position when adopting a critical stance?
•
Reflect on the key challenges critical theory faces when influencing leadership practice.
Sample Assignment Question
Briefly describe the four frames of critical inquiry, and choose one or more of these to explore an example of
leadership practice you have encountered (this may be in the workplace, a social setting, or political
leadership).
1 CMS – Critical Management Studies – a grouping of academics using critical theory to study management, leadership
and all aspects of organizations and work.
2 Western (2008) offers an account of a systemic consultation to an organization, utilizing family therapy and other
systemic techniques with the aim to distribute leadership and ‘democratize strategy’.
What Is Leadership?
2
Chapter Structure
•
•
•
•
Introduction
The Idea of Leadership
The Meaning of Leadership
Conclusion: The Experience of Leadership
Introduction
Leadership is a contested term with multiple meanings and diverse practical applications. This chapter offers a
brief overview, initially exploring ‘the idea of leadership’, and then explores the meanings we attribute to
leadership, briefly scoping the main themes in leadership studies. There are many excellent resources that
offer overviews of leadership but this book is particularly interested in placing leadership in its broader
context, so I ‘begin at the beginning’, which is to explore our individual and collective ambivalent feelings
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towards leadership. Exploring the idea of leadership from a psychosocial perspective reflects on our
individual and collective emotional experience of leadership, showing how our feelings shape, how we
theorize, perceive and enact leadership and followership.
There is a deep longing and desire for leadership, symbolically played out in popular culture. Hollywood
films and best-selling books mythologize leaders and are forever finding new leadership characters to feed our
insatiable desire for heroic figures. The popularity of leadership is based on a desire to be led, to be saved, to
be looked after, to be given meaning, and with the attractive subtext that seduces our egos:‘you too could be
like them’. We have deep attachments to the idea of leadership, yet so often we also feel let down,
overpowered, anxious, envious, distrustful, or even afraid of our leaders. We interpret and create leaders and
leadership, depending on our ambivalent feelings towards the ‘object’ inside ourselves that relates to
leadership. To ‘begin at the beginning’ is to acknowledge these strong emotional and ambivalent responses
within ourselves as individuals, and collectively as social groups. Leadership cannot escape these emotional
and unconscious responses, however rational we try to make it, because leadership sits at the heart of human
desire and fear. From our infancy to our deathbeds, there is ambivalence: we desire to be led and also to be
leaders. This ambivalence is expressed by Jacques Lacan in a story of psychoanalysis with a patient.
• The psychoanalyst asks the patient on the couch: ‘What do you desire?’
•
Patient replies: ‘I desire a master.’
•
Psychoanalyst asks: ‘What kind of master?’
•
Patient responds: ‘A master I can dominate.’
We desire to be looked after, cared for, and guided and nourished (to be loved and cherished, to find the
perfect parent), and we fear losing our individuality and autonomy, or worse we fear being mistreated or
coerced by others with power and influence. Our parents, teachers, bosses, religious and political leaders, all
signify forms of leadership that carry these real hopes, dangers and emotional anxieties. History and personal
experience teach us that leadership can be uplifting, benevolent and tyrannical; sometimes all three together.
This chapter begins with psychosocial insights, exploring our conscious and unconscious ‘ideas of
leadership’, because only with this understanding can we begin to make sense of the key meanings attributed
to leadership in contemporary society.
The Idea of Leadership
Psychosocial Insights
Leadership is created in our minds (individually and collectively), converted into social roles and positions,
and internalized into identities. Leadership is a constant flux of psychosocial dynamics, enacted on the stage
of life; power dynamics, individual feelings, collective identifications, herd behaviours, autonomy and
dependency issues, courage and fear, unconscious fantasies, virtual communications, kindness and love, abuse
and terror, politics and negotiations, the use and control of resources, manipulation and the strategic use of
communications, influencing language and discourse, creating symbolic events, all and much more underpin
the psychosocial dynamics of leadership. A mistake is to reduce leadership to the property of a heroic
individual, to a set of skills or competencies or to a particular way of being.
Leadership begins with an idea in our minds, and even when it becomes a social role, a reality so to speak,
it remains essentially an idea that we are constantly and dynamically reworking, acting out and performing.
Leadership is an idea we are constantly at work with, and play with.
The Splitting of Leadership
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Leadership is often constructed as an ‘idealized’ form of human endeavour, in a tone that suggests a heroic
beauty. The popular idea of leaders in the workplace is represented by key words such as strategic, future,
change, passion, charisma, courage, integrity, authenticity and vision (this contrasts with a more mundane idea
about management).
Alvesson and Svenginsson (2003: 4) sum up the leadership literature:
Contemporary writings usually frame leadership in terms of the visionary and heroic aspects, it is the leader’s
abilities to address [by talking and persuading] the many through the use of charisma, symbols and other strongly
emotional devices, the ambition being to arouse and encourage people to embark upon organizational projects.
Hirschhorn (1999: 146) writes:
A leader’s major role is to give us a dream. Without the dream there is no basis for us to mobilise the extra effort,
attention and skill we need to achieve a goal fraught with risks. Many of us, perhaps most of us, would rather sit on
the sidelines, do our daily work and hope that we can participate in the gains that others have sweated for. The dream,
by contrast, excites us all.
Leadership is often portrayed as a golden chalice, a most sought after object, yet on the other hand we take
pleasure in decrying and bemoaning our leaders too. This idea of leadership as a ‘good object’ also has a
shadow side, leadership as a ‘bad object’ that creates a splitting of leadership, reflecting our ambivalent
feelings about leaders. Freud presented us with our conflicted selves, with the ambivalence that’s sits within
us, revealing that we can have conscious feelings: ‘l love my Mother’ conflicted with unconscious feelings of
‘I hate my Mother’, and the latter is often repressed into our unconscious, as it is socially and personally
unacceptable.
The Return of the Repressed
Psychoanalysis reveals that repressed unconscious material returns to haunt us. Leaders who are idealized
beyond their capacity for goodness, with their shadow side being repressed, can end up self-destructing, either
through becoming narcissistic and grandiose and behaving irrationally, or by simply making bad judgements
based on their feelings of omnipotence and invincibility.
Repression means that we experience our feelings, yet we are not fully aware of them and act on them in
distorted ways. For example, if I repress feelings of envy and anger towards a ‘good leader’ I may
unconsciously sabotage her at important meetings; alternatively, these feelings may make me overcompensate and become overly compliant, and super-positive about her, ignoring misjudgements and unable
to offer constructive criticism. This latter state of being ‘super-positive’ is commonplace in leadership studies,
where the ‘good object’ transformational leader is desired and acclaimed, yet the shadow side of leadership is
either hidden or exported to others such as ‘boring managers’ (explored later on in the chapter). This splitting
is not always obvious.
Bass offers an example:
Leaders are authentically transformational when they increase awareness of what is right, good, important and
beautiful, when they help to elevate followers’ needs for achievement and self-actualization, when they foster in
followers higher moral maturity and when they move followers to go beyond their self interests for the good of their
group, organization or society. (Bass, 1990b: 171)
This statement at face value seems uplifting and helpful, yet it reproduces the classic split between ‘idealized
leader’ and ‘disempowered followers’. The leader has the charisma and influence to elevate followers, to
move them beyond themselves, to foster in them a higher morality. The follower is the passive recipient,
awaiting the charismatic leader to spark them into becoming a higher being (like the leader themselves). As a
colleague whispered to me recently during a keynote speech by such a transformational leader, ‘It’s like being
at church!’
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Leadership splitting occurs between leaders and followers, managers and leaders, and between good and
bad leaders. When leadership is spilt, we are either powerful leaders with agency or disempowered followers.
Our leaders become saviours or villains (sometimes this is modified to become less polemic: ‘She’s a really
good leader’ or ‘He’s hopeless but a nice guy’). Splitting leadership between good and bad can focus on a
single leader who carries both parts of the split in our minds, or two characters can be involved; all the good
projected into one leader, and all the bad into another.
I observed Tony Blair’s leadership with great interest over a number of years, and noticed how he always
had an alter-ego, a ‘disliked’ shadow, who took many of the negative projections leaving him to take the
positive ones (Alistair Campbell, Gordon Brown, and Peter Mandelson all fulfilled this role for him).
In a 2012 banking mis-selling scandal at Barclays bank, the reaction was a classic case of splitting: (a)
demonize bad leaders, (b) call for new saviour leaders. Simon Walker, head of the Institute of Directors, was
infuriated by the abusive treatment of small business in the banking scandal, saying ‘There is a serious failure
of leadership of many banks and there should be a clearout of the leaders who created this mess’, while Sir
Mervin King, Governor of the Bank of England, said ‘What I hope is that everyone – everyone – understands
that something went very wrong with the UK banking industry and we have to put it right’; he then called for
‘leadership of an unusually high order’ (Pratley, 2012).
In this case the CEO of Barclays, Bob Diamond, was pushed to resign only to be replaced by another senior
insider from the bank, who self-evidently must have been part of the culture that caused the problem in the
first place. A leader becomes a ‘bad object’ overnight, and is replaced by a ‘good object’ who immediately
claims he will clean up the culture of the bank. The good sheriff rides into town as his corrupt predecessor is
chased by the posse into the distant hills … our leadership narratives from Hollywood get played out in our
corporations far too often!
Leadership is written about objectively in rational, and scholarly, terms yet leadership stimulates primal
emotions that are both conscious and unconscious, individual and collective.
Cultural Leadership Scripts
Each of us has personal conscious and unconscious reactions to individual leaders and we also have cultural
scripts that we embody and act out collectively. In the USA the cultural script has strong resonance with the
heroic, individual leader, striving to better themselves, to strive for a ‘free’ society, to fulfil the American
Dream. This cultural script is seen in social movements (Martin Luther King), in media stars (Oprah
Winfrey), in corporate settings (Steve Jobs), and it is also reflected in leadership scholarship.
Transformational and charismatic exceptional leadership rhetoric emanates from and dominates the American
market. In Europe a greater scepticism and ambivalence exists about leadership, perhaps due to recent
catastrophes linked to despotic leaders such as Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Franco; and this also may be due
to cultural experiences: strong historical social and egalitarian inspired movements, such as socialism, the
French revolution with its legacy of ‘liberty, fraternity, equality’, the trade union movement, social religious
movements, and strong social democratic politics pursuing ideals such as the welfare state and public health
provision.
My personal observations are of a healthy scepticsm about leadership in Europe (critical theorists are much
more prevalent in Europe than in the USA), but also a less generous attitude and more envy of individual
success in the UK/Europe than in the USA. The pop star Morrissey from Manchester captures this in a song
entitled ‘We hate it when our friends become successful’, containing the line ‘if we can destroy them, you bet
your life we will destroy them’, and the UK press certainly relishes destroying leaders, whether political
figures or football managers. Beyond Europe and the USA, leadership has many diverse cultural and historical
narratives that inform how it is socially enacted, though with too much diversity to address here.
Box 5 Power Corrupts but Projections Corrupt More
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Leadership and projective identification
Psychoanalytic insights refer to regressed childhood experiences being acted out on the stage of adult
life, as one explanation for this splitting. It suggests we seek the idealized parent figures in our leaders:
we desire ‘a good mummy or daddy’ or conversely we transfer angry feelings onto leaders if we perceive
ill-treatment from parents or authority figures from our past. Melanie Klein (1959) explains the notion of
splitting and projection, how we take unwanted feelings and project them onto others. Our leaders are
excellent receptacles for these projected feelings due to their roles as authority figures. We see in our
leaders the aspects of ourselves we have projected into them, and we can feel very let down if a leader
fails to live up to our idealized desires. The leader themselves becomes shaped by these projections,
identifying with them, and so can feel persecuted by negative projections, by envious followers, or can
become grandiose and omnipotent if they identify with idealized projections about how wonderful they
are.
It is often said that ‘power corrupts’, which I am sure is a truism for some leaders, but in my
experience of working with leaders ‘projections corrupt’ more than power. How else can we explain the
number of leaders who reach high office, and then lose the plot, acting in ways that are beyond rational
understanding, and self-destruct. Bill Clinton in the White House, taking ridiculous sexual risks for
example: this was not just abusing his power, it was beyond rational explanation for such an intelligent
man to take such risks after all he had worked for. The only explanation is the unconscious one. My
hypothesis is that Clinton over-identified with the positive projections from his admiring followers,
internalizing these idealized projections, and became grandiose and omnipotent. Unconsciously
believing he was beyond ‘normal’ scrutiny, beyond normal codes of behaviour, he regressed to a
childlike and narcissistic state that led an inner voice to tell him, ‘I can do anything I want to and nobody
can stop me.’
A leader can often receive good and bad projections: ‘She’s such a big head and she thinks she knows
it all’ … ‘She’s fantastic, what she has achieved is amazing.’
Leaders attract and react to these projections, and one of the tasks of leaders is to try to take a mature
position, not to be seduced by good projections, becoming grandiose and omnipotent, or not to be
destroyed or dysfunctionally hurt by bad projections. To be a leader is to walk a tightrope, between two
poles created by social and unconscious forces.
‘Leadership as an Attractor and Container of Projections’
Most leadership texts, coaches and developmental processes focus on leadership behaviours and how a
leader projects their image outward, and less on how they attract and manage conscious and unconscious
projections from followers. One of the leadership development activities I work with as coach is
‘Leadership as an Attractor and Container of Projections’. Exploring these processes is deep work, but
vitally important for leaders and leadership teams.
Individual leaders have an advantage over group or collective leadership due to the capacity for individual
personalities to attract ‘good’ projections, where a ‘faceless’ collective body, for example a boardroom or
political party, find it much more difficult. This explains how even though collective leadership may be taking
place, a figurehead is chosen or is seen to be leading. Individual figureheads, even when they are not the most
gifted leaders, are sometimes selected as they can galvanize positive projections and identifications that lead
to a loyal followership (some claim that Ronald Regan was a classic example). This also explains how
individuals can falsely believe they are, and be experienced by others as, the sole ‘heroic’ change agent when
co-leaders are involved.
An individual leader’s role and personality will attract projections from individual and collective followers,
and it is these projections onto the leader that they then identify with. If they project ideas of intelligence onto
the leader for example, they may give up their own intelligent thoughts and wait for the ‘wise’ intelligent
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leader to come up with the answers. I have often facilitated boardroom meetings where this occurs. The leader
also projects unwanted parts of themselves onto others in order to protect and sustain their identity, exporting
negative elements onto others (Petriglieri and Stein, 2012).
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A leader’s ability to stimulate the positive projections of followers, to contain the negative ones, and not to be
seduced or overwhelmed by either, is an exceptional leadership quality.
Management vs Leadership
I will now explore both the split and the overlaps between management and leadership. The terms
‘management’ and ‘leadership’ are often used interchangeably and both evoke multiple meanings. Managers
demonstrate leadership and likewise leaders usually have managerial skills. Traditionally leadership is a
concept largely used in social and political settings yet in recent years is has become very prominent in the
workplace, taking an elevated status above management, as Bennis and Nanus (1985: 218) point out:
Management typically constitutes a set of contractual exchanges … What gets exchanged is not trivial: jobs, security,
and money. The result, at best, is compliance; at worst you get a spiteful obedience. The end result of leadership is
completely different: it is empowerment. Not just higher profits and wages … but an organizational culture that helps
employees generate a sense of meaning in their work and a desire to challenge themselves to experience success.
Leaders and leadership have become a very sought-after commodity. Bennis (1986: 45) states that many
American companies are ‘over-managed and under-led’, saying, ‘I tend to think of the differences between
leaders and managers as those who master the context and those who surrender to it’. Leadership has been
rediscovered in an attempt to address the contemporary social and economic conditions faced by
organizations. Leaders are thought to possess more of the qualities to address the contemporary organizational
challenges than managers. There are many articles discussing the managers versus leadership debate (Barker,
1997; Kotter, 1990; Zaleznik, 1992), but the general tone is similar: managers are more rational and
controlling, and they relate to structure, stability and bureaucracy, whereas leadership is about passion, vision,
inspiration, creativity and cooperation rather than control. Alvesson and Sveningsson (2003: 1436) note:
Leadership is often defined as being about ‘voluntary’ obedience. There are assumptions of harmony and
convergence of interest, and the leader seldom uses formal authority or reward/punishment in order to accomplish
compliance [Barker, 2001; Nicholls, 1987; Zaleznik, 1977].
Levy says ‘in each individual you need to have the mind of a manager and the soul of a leader’ (2004: 3; cited
in Jackson and Parry, 2011); management then becomes the earthly, material, rational aspect of organizing,
whereas leadership becomes the heartfelt, soulful, spiritual aspect. Zaleznik (1992) separates leadership and
management neatly, perhaps too neatly:
A managerial culture emphasizes rationality and control. Whether his or her energies are directed toward goals,
resources, organization structures, or people, a manager is a problem solver … It takes neither genius nor heroism to
be a manager, but rather persistence, tough-mindedness, hard work, intelligence, analytical ability and perhaps most
important, tolerance and goodwill. (1992: 126)
Whereas leaders:
Leaders work from high-risk positions; indeed, they are often temperamentally disposed to seek out risk and danger,
especially where the chance of opportunity and reward appears promising. (p. 126)
Others see the leaders as network builders, integrators and communicators, wedded to the ideas of cooperation
(Alvesson, 2002). Bryman (1996) says that leaders have an integrative role: creating change and
organizational culture through the transmission of cultural values. Much of the literature idealizes
contemporary leaders, claiming they seldom use formal authority or means of rewards/punishment to
accomplish compliance (Zaleznik, 1992). Yet in practice I observe that leaders use formal authority alongside
influencing skills, demonstrating the blurring between leadership and management.
Management as the ‘Other’ to Leadership
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Management has assumed the derogatory ‘other’ to leadership. The manager has been relegated to an
outdated, functionalist and mechanistic mode of operating more suited to the industrial age than the postindustrial workplace. Yet there is a fight-back, and Dubrin points to the need for management as well as
leadership: ‘Without being led as well as managed, organizations face the threat of extinction’ (2000: 4).
Mintzberg writes:
Leadership is supposed to be something bigger, more important. I reject this distinction, simply because managers
have to lead and leaders have to manage. Management without leadership is sterile; leadership without management
is disconnected and encourages hubris. (2004: 6)
Paul du Gay’s (2000) In Praise of Bureaucracy and Elliot Jaques’ (1990) article ‘In praise of hierarchy’ also
challenge this general trend, which puts leadership in front of management in contemporary organizational
life. Dubrin (2000) offers the following leader/manager dualisms: visionary as opposed to rational, passionate
vs consulting, creative vs persistent, inspiring vs tough-minded, innovative vs analytical, courageous vs
structured. Yukl critiques two-factor leadership examples – Task versus Relations, Autocratic versus
Participative, Leadership versus Management, and Transformational versus Transactional leadership – and
finds ‘These dichotomies provide some insights, but they also over-simplify a complex phenomenon and
encourage stereotyping of individual leaders’ (Yukl, 1999: 34).
Management is clearly the ‘other’ to leadership and helps define leadership by showing what it is not.
Leadership is very clearly in vogue and ‘sexy’, and the hopes are that it will provide answers to the new era
rather than manage the present.
A.K. Rice is very clear that a manager must also be a leader because ‘any institution whose managers do
not give leadership … is obviously in difficulty’ (Rice, 1965: 20). Rice, however, sees management as
essentially rational and conscious, whereas leadership can also be exercised unconsciously. Rice identifies two
tasks of leadership: a conscious task and an unconscious task. He is suggesting that leaders need to develop an
awareness of their own conscious and unconscious roles. This implies that the leader has a conscious and
manifest role relating to the work environment and task performance and an unconscious role to contain the
emotions and expectations they have placed on them by the group. In this book I will not attempt to separate
the manager and leader with surgical precision. I work on the assumption that managers will have some
leadership qualities and responsibilities and vice versa. The idea of leadership in our conscious and
unconscious minds underpins how we perceive and enact leadership.
The Meaning of Leadership
The next part of this chapter explores the different meanings we give to leadership. When listening to
discussions about leadership in workplaces, people rarely explore what they mean by the term, yet Dubrin
(2000) estimates there are 35,000 definitions of leadership in academic literature (Pye, 2005: 32). Kets de
Vries notes a rapid increase in articles in the leadership bible Stogdills Handbook of Leadership, yet describes
the contents as ‘plodding and detached, often far removed from the reality of day-to-day life’ (2006: 251).
Yet in spite of so much interest and research, leadership always seems just beyond our reach. Leadership
selection remains ad hoc and leadership development is subject to arbitrary methods and with ‘remarkable
little evidence of the impact of leadership or leadership development on organizational performance’ (Bolden
et al., 2011: 5). Annie Pye suggests:
The continuing search for the Holy Grail, which seems to characterize interest in leadership, implies that research
efforts are perhaps being directed at ‘solving the wrong problem’. (Pye, 2005: 31)
Definitions of Leadership
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Barnard (1938/1991: 81) identified that ‘lead’ is both a noun and a verb and therefore has a double meaning.
The noun could mean ‘to be a guide to others, to be the head of an organization’, whilst the verb could mean
‘to excel and to be in advance’. Likewise, ‘leadership’ is used to describe social interaction between people
and the term ‘leader’ is used to denote a person (or sometimes a group/company) who has influence over
others (Northouse, 2004; Yukl, 2002). The term ‘leadership’ is also used to describe personality traits and
behaviours and to denote the roles of individuals and collectives.
Box 6 sets out the definition that has emerged from researching this book.
Box 6 Definition of Leadership
Leadership is a psychosocial influencing dynamic
Leadership is not solely the property of individuals or groups, nor a set of competencies or skills, it more
accurately described as a psychosocial influencing dynamic.
• Psycho refers to the psychodynamics of leadership, referencing that it occurs both within and
between people. Leadership (and followership) stimulate intrapsychic, unconscious and emotional
responses within us, and inter-relational dynamics between us.
• Social refers to the social construction and social dynamics of leadership. Leadership is more than a
relational phenomena, it also references power and authority, control of material and symbolic
resources, use of knowledge and technology. Discourses, history, culture and politics, i.e. the social
field, must be accounted for in our understanding of leadership.
• Influencing: leadership signifies a specific agency, which is to influence others. Influencing is a
wide-ranging term, and leadership draws on a vast array of resources, from personality to coercive
power to influence others.
• Dynamic refers to the dynamic movement of leadership. It is never one thing, it is fluid not static,
and cannot be reduced to skills, competencies, or a way of being. Leadership cannot be fixed; it
moves between people as a dynamic social process.
Organizing Leadership
Different scholars have ordered leadership to try to help us organize it into categories. Northouse (2004: 3),
reviewing leadership theory, identified four common themes:
•
Leadership is a process
•
Leadership involves influence
•
Leadership occurs in a group context
•
Leadership involves goal attainment
Keith Grint (2005) identifies a similar four-fold leadership typology of leadership:
•
Person: who leads – traits and personality approaches
•
Results: what leaders achieve
•
Position: where they lead from – in front, alongside etc.
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Process: how leadership works
Jackson and Parry (2011) use five perspectives:
•
Leader-centred
•
Follower-centred
• Cultural perspectives
•
Critical/distributed perspectives
•
Leadership as a higher purpose
Leadership is framed in different ways and there are a multitude of leadership styles/approaches currently in
circulation. Box 7 offers a few of the approaches available.
Box 7 Leadership Approaches
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In this chapter I order leadership into the following perspectives and take a critical view of each:
•
Individual
•
Collective
•
Contextual
•
Followers
•
New leadership
Individual Leadership
Traits Competencies and Transformational Leadership
The main body of leadership literature focuses on leaders as individuals, taking behaviours, traits and
competencies approaches. These use a positivist theoretical framework and are critiqued as oversimplistic,
reductionist and offering unrealistic solutions to complex problems (Barley and Kunda, 1992; Calas and
Smircich, 1995; Casey, 1995; Tourish and Pinnington, 2002). Grint (2005: 14) claims we need to move
beyond individualistic approaches and ‘put the –ship back in leadership’.
Today the multi-million dollar business of leadership development tends to focus on developing leadership
traits and competencies. There has been a long search to try to define which aspects of the personality (i.e.
traits) make a good leader. Observations and studies of exceptional leaders try to identify which aspects of
their personality enabled them to be ‘great leaders’, and examples such as courage, charisma, vision, fortitude
were identified as traits to be exemplified. Another approach derived from cognitive behavioural psychology
attempts to identify what leaders do, rather than what their personalities consist of. This functionalist approach
aims to modify and develop a potential leader’s behaviour, in order to improve their leadership. Having
identified the traits and competencies that good leaders have, individuals are trained and tested against this list
to improve these behaviours or competencies. Manfred Kets de Vries finds the literature on leadership traits
overwhelming and confusing but identifies some commonality in the findings: ‘conscientiousness,
extroversion, dominance, self-confidence, energy, agreeableness, intelligence, openness to experience and
emotional stability’ (Kets de Vries, 1994). As Kets de Vries points out, these traits are very open-ended and,
when discussed, they open up a heated polemic as to the nature of what they really mean. The most common
criticism of the trait/competency approach is that they offer ‘one-size-fits-all’ approaches, defining universal
competencies or traits, which all individuals must have if they are to be successful leaders. For example, a
National Health Service Quality framework for leadership provided a competency framework for its leaders
(see www.nhsleadershipqualities.nhs.uk). Bolden and Gosling (2006) critique this competency approach,
pointing out that vast resources were spent on NHS quality and leadership competency frameworks. Sadly the
competencies leaders across the whole of the NHS were expected to attain had very little research validity or
linkage to practice as the competencies were derived from a small number of self-reported interviews from
chief executives. How these competencies can universally be relevant to clinical leaders in surgery, nurse
leaders, finance leaders and a multitude of others is a mystery. The most popular current individual leadership
approach is transformational leadership.
Transformational Leadership: ‘The Charisma Trait’
Gemmil and Oakley (1992) pointed to a resurgence in the 1990s of the ‘traitist’ approach, identifying
charisma as an embodiment of this approach: ‘Charisma is the leadership trait most often examined by
members of the “leadership mafia”’ (in Grint, 1997: 277). Gemmil and Oakley’s anti-leadership polemic
names Bennis and Nanus (1985), Zaleznik (1989) and Tichy and Devanna (1986) as part of the new wave of
leadership theorists drawing on the trait approach. Transactional leadership is often juxtaposed with
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transformational leadership, yet it still fits within the individualistic approach, but focuses on how leadership
takes place through transactional behaviours rather than influencing skills.
Collective Leadership
Collective leadership can refer to team leadership, leadership as a process, or distributed leadership. Senior
teams, project teams, and boards of directors work together in offering ‘collective leadership’; the process of
leadership occurs between collective groups of people; and finally distributed leadership disperses leadership
throughout organizations, creating a collective leadership approach. Pearce and Conger (2003: 1) describe
‘shared leadership’ as a dynamic interaction whereby the ‘objective is to lead one another to the achievement
of group or organizational goals’. Some claim that leadership is essentially collective and not individual.
Senge (1990) has defined leadership as ‘the collective capacity to create useful things’, and Collinson states,
‘In effect, leadership is the property and consequence of a community rather than the property and
consequence of an individual leader’ (2006: 183). The word ‘Ubuntu’ crops up in leadership studies
(Hickman, 2012); emanating from Africa, it relates to the interdependencies of the group and fits with the
ideas of collective leadership.
Team Leadership
Collective team leadership provides a different level of containment and confidence than an individual leader,
who is more likely to stimulate dependency responses from followers. Team leadership also provides more
balance and working well optimizes the diverse capabilities of the group.
Leadership as a Process
Critical theorists claim that leadership is a relational and social process, rather than being the property of an
individual or team (Collinson, 2006; Grint, 2005). This perspective shifts the emphasis away from elitism and
hierarchy, but doesn’t yet offer many practical insights as to how leadership as a process can be worked with
beyond a conceptual idea.
Distributed Leadership
Distributive or dispersed leadership are popular concepts and relate to the changing post-industrial work
conditions that cannot be managed in a top-down, expert, command and control structure. Chapter 12, EcoLeadership, offers an in-depth view of distributed leadership for post-industrial organizations. Raelin (2003)
argues that leaders should create environments that develop ‘leaderful’ organizations, where all are expected
to be leaders in a collective endeavour. Daniel Goleman describes this distributive leadership as ‘every person
at entry level who in one way or another, acts as a leader’ (2002: 14). Elmore agrees: ‘[in] knowledge
intensive enterprises like teaching and learning there is no way to perform these complex tasks without widely
distributing the responsibility for leadership among roles in the organization’ (2000: 14).
Collective leadership distributed across an organization requires democratization, connectivity and
collaboration. The advantages are a more alive, adaptive and energized organization; the disadvantages are
that many leadership voices compete for airtime, and if power and leadership are really distributed, it can
create a more conflictual organization than with a ‘dependent’ group of conformist followers. This latter point
is not often aired in the literature yet it needs addressing. A healthy democracy cannot operate without
opposition voices to those governing, and in organizations dissenting voices are vital for healthy and creative
organizations.
In my experience the gap between the rhetoric of distributed leadership and the actual practice of
distributing leadership is wide. Distributing leadership means distributing power and control from the centre
to the edges, and this creates huge anxiety, and real challenges at the top of organizational structures. Senior
leaders face a paradox: they can no longer control from the centre, yet to distribute influence and power can
feel highly risky, when they are accountable to the board and shareholders. Those companies and
organizations that achieve distributed leadership operate with higher levels of trust and with a general belief in
their shared goals than companies who wish to distribute leadership simply to gain market share or increase
productivity.
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Another paradox exists. Sometimes it requires a ‘Messiah leader’, a charismatic and visionary individual or
team, to drive change and create new collaborative cultures with distributed leadership. The challenge here is
for the Messiah leader to initiate, provoke and stimulate change and be prepared to let go of power when
successful: a difficult task!
Contextual Leadership
The Social Context of an Organization
The essence of contextual leadership approaches is the acknowledgement that it is foolish to try to apply
universal leadership approaches to non-universal, diverse contexts. Organizations have diverse structures and
cultures, depending on the wider environmental, social, cultural and political contexts, as well as their
product/outputs, client base etc. All have to be taken into account when reflecting on what leadership fits the
context.
Fred Fiedler’s Contingency approach (1967, 1974) attempted to rescue leadership theory from the
simplistic notion of the ‘one-best-fit’ leader for all situations. Fiedler proposed that the leadership style would
need to be different to fit different situations, i.e. it had to be situational and contingent. He attempted to find
the optimal match between leadership style and situation. Critics challenge his research claims of success on
the grounds that there has been a failure to replicate results and some of the results conflict with subordinates’
accounts of leaders (Bryman, 1986). Contingency approaches challenge the notion of the one-best-style leader
for different situations yet they focus on the two-factor model of relationship- or task-centred leader. Taskcentred leaders focus on the task rather than people and are more directive. This approach suits certain
situations, for example, in hierarchical organizations with unstructured tasks, whereas relationship-centred
leaders are favoured in the majority of situations as they focus on people and participation. Unfortunately this
offers yet another dualistic model, ‘relational or task’, that does not account for the complexity of
understanding relationships, power and leadership from multiple perspectives. Contingency leadership is also
critiqued for still treating followers passively, in spite of recognizing that different leadership approaches are
required for different follower situations. The contingency approach attempts to address some of the social
context issues faced by leaders but tries to package it into oversimplistic assumptions. Much more work is
required in this area as a one-best-fit leadership style or an over-simplified contingency approach to leadership
is still common practice. There are many factors to consider, such as functions and outputs. Within
organizations there is a diversity of outputs and functions depending on the department; as different skills,
training and cultures are required in different departments, so also are different leadership styles, structures
and processes. Other factors are product and meaning. The product or output of the organization is very
underestimated in the leadership literature, as it impacts on the leadership requirements and needs of that
organization. For example, leadership of a public sector hospital differs from leading McDonald’s food chain
or a global weapons manufacturer. Multinationals have found to their cost through the failure rate of mergers
and acquisitions that underestimating diverse cultures can have a huge impact on success and failure. The
output of the organization impacts on the technical and structural aspects of organizational life and also on the
psychosocial dynamics of the organization. Hospitals produce different outputs to supermarkets, and also
different meanings for workers, and user groups/customers: leaders must also address the question of meaning
in an organization.
Size Matters: Individuals, Teams and Mass Leadership
Can we talk about a single leadership approach and refer to a small start-up company and a global institution?
One leader requires an entrepreneurial mindset and the other, symbolic leadership skills, communicating to
mass employees, and their market and stakeholder groups. The leadership task of a national president is
different from that of a team leader. Showing leadership in a one-to-one mentoring session can be very
effective and influential, but differs from leading a virtual project team. Some leaders excel when utilizing
symbolic leadership to a mass audience, whilst their interpersonal leadership skills at a team level can be very
poor. When selecting and developing leaders context matters, and leadership must always be ‘local and
specific’. Certainly common features exist, and generic skills are useful, but leadership has to be considered
adaptable to its environment, otherwise it feels like an imposition.
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Followers
Without followership leadership doesn’t exist. Followership is symbiotic with leadership, and to understand
leadership is to recognize how leaders and followers co-produce and sustain each other (Ladkin, 2006).
Leaders and followers have tended to be seen as dualist opposites, with the main focus being on the leader.
Through this dualistic lens followers have been presented both individually and collectively as passive
objects, to be moulded, coerced and influenced by the leader. However, due to the rise in interest of dispersed
leadership and autonomous teams, with post-structuralists deconstructing leadership, followership has gained
importance and the dualistic approach is being challenged. Collinson (2006: Intro) cites a widening literature
that insists that followers are integral to the leadership process:
rejecting the common stereotype of followers as timid, docile sheep, these writers argue that in the contemporary
context of greater team working, ‘empowered, knowledge workers’, and ‘distributed’ and ‘shared’ leadership, ‘goo...
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