When the boat comes in. An empirical study of leadership as emerging activities at Greenlandic fish factories

Based on empirical work at Greenlandic fish factories this article develops a more nuanced view on middle management activities. The empirical findings suggests that the leadership practice of middle managers invokes problematization as a collective achievement, based on experience and sensitivity. At the fish factory the middle management activities stand out as a bricolage practice happening as processual activities enacted in an interplay between many organizational actors. The processes where leadership emerges involves different perspectives that support appropriate problematization of the mundane activities as they unfold. Thus, the discussion of leadership is concerned with how middle managers emerge themselves in daily sensitivity work. This contrasts with conventional leadership research, much of which is turning leadership into an “it” assuming stable relations. The concepts of experience and sensitivity contributes to a more complex understanding of the mundane everyday leadership practice that unfold among various organizational actors.

Blackboxing leadership: Methodological practices leading to manager-centrism

The scholarly literature on leadership has long been characterized by leader-centrism, in the sense of a focus on individual leaders, their characteristics and actions. This tendency has been strongly criticized, not least by scholars with a critical perspective. However, we still see a strong emphasis on leaders and managers in empirical studies of leadership. In this article, we suggest that this tendency is at least in part a consequence of common methodological blackboxing practices within leadership studies. We identify two such blackboxing practices: delegation, where identification of the core phenomenon is left to informants, and proxying, when more easily defined phenomena are taken to stand for leadership. We suggest that a consequence of such practices is an unintended focus on managers, and attempts to avoid leader-centrism that rely on these blackboxing practices therefore paradoxically might result in manager-centrism.

Making leadership as practice development visible: Learning from Activity Theory

Across the globe, organisations are facing significant challenges and operating in increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environments. In the context of such complexity, effective leadership is ever more important. Recently, a body of work known as ‘Leadership as practice’ and leadership as practice development has been developed as a useful way of thinking about leadership that is shared across organisational members as opposed to being inherent in the traits of individual leaders. At present methodological approaches for capturing and exploring leadership as practice remain in their infancy. This article contributes to leadership learning by arguing that we can learn a great deal about how leadership unfolds and is developed in practice by utilising a theoretical framework called Cultural Historical Activity Theory. Data from two leadership workshops are drawn upon to demonstrate the value of Cultural Historical Activity Theory for making visible the specificities of leadership that emerge collectively and collaboratively in practice. The article concludes with a critical discussion of what we can learn from the Cultural Historical Activity Theory approach and how this can be applied to the study of leadership, leadership learning and leadership development.

Twitter as a leadership actor — A communication as constitutive of organizing perspective on a ‘leaderless’ social movement

We applied a communication as constitutive of organizing (CCO) perspective in a case study to examine Twitter’s influence on the leadership dynamics in the 2019 Hong Kong Protests. We argue that Twitter is a powerful nonhuman leadership actor by demonstrating how it coordinates a plenum of co-participating agencies to construct meaningful narratives. In addition, we show that while many social movements call themselves leaderless, because of Twitter’s co-participation, they are not leadership-less. Using digital methods, we first harvested movement-relevant tweets based on hashtags and retweet counts from a key event of the protests, and then analysed the video content in the three most-retweeted tweets. Our analysis shows that Twitter’s various mechanisms dictate how online conversations unfold, and that Twitter therefore influences how “authoritative text” is established. Our study contributes to the literature in three ways. First, we contribute to critical leadership studies by showing that Twitter is a leadership actor that enacts sociomaterial leadership, which further challenges the dominant human-centric and masculine views of leadership. In doing so, we reveal that the persistent leaderless movement narrative is a fantasy. Second, by illustrating how Twitter’s authorship mechanisms generate authority and polarity, we contribute to a stream of CCO studies showing that platforms influence power dynamics. Third, by attending to multivocality and dissensus, where a myriad of voices could speak up against the established and perceived injustice, we assert that Twitter as a leadership actor dictates specific modes of communication with performative effects.

Multilevel and multisite leadership development from a leadership-as-practice perspective: an integrative literature review

Purpose

This paper reviews what has been written on leadership development from the leadership-as-practice (L-A-P) perspective, which views leadership as emerging in everyday activities and interactions of a collective in a specific context. This paper aims to deepen the theoretical understanding of how leadership can be learned and developed from the L-A-P perspective.

Design/methodology/approach

An integrative literature review was undertaken to review and synthesise what has been written on the topic in journal articles and scholarly books.

Findings

The importance of the context and the practices that are embedded in it is the most central aspect affecting leadership development from the L-A-P perspective. This places workplace leadership development centre stage, but several papers also showed that leadership programmes have an important role. Not only collective capacity building is emphasised in the papers, but the importance of individual-level leader development is also recognised.

Originality/value

The contribution of this study is twofold: First, it brings the currently fractured information on L-A-P development together to enhance theory building by providing a synthesis of the literature. Second, a conceptual framework is constructed to show how the L-A-P perspective on leadership development can take both leadership development at the collective and individual levels into account, as well as the learning that takes place either inside or outside the workplace. This study’s results and framework show that the development has its own specific purpose and suggested methods in both levels, in both learning sites.

Exposing and re-placing leadership through workers inquiry

The literature on leadership place and space offers us an understanding of how the built environment, geography of location and socio-economic forces can coalesce to shape (and be shaped) by leadership practices. Missing thus far, however, is an account that constitutes leadership space and place through antagonism and struggle, crucial if we are to acknowledge the agency of workers in leadership practice. We therefore outline a workers inquiry approach that seeks to learn directly from the struggles of workers as they enact place and space through their particular, geographically situated practices. We do so through reading leadership studies, Marxist accounts of space and place, and workers’ inquiries dialectically to draw out two practices that can offer a framework for both understanding the contribution of workers inquiry approaches to leadership but also to inform future studies. Our first practice of exposing is the drawing to the surface by workers inquiry of the oppressiveness, contradictions and absurdities of leadership discourse and practices of capital as they shape the places and spaces within which workers are exploited. Re-placing, on the other hand, offers workers’ movements potentially emancipatory alternative forms of leadership, which re-shape and re-appropriate place and space.

Challenging humanist leadership: Toward an embodied, ethical, and effective neo-humanist, enlightenment approach

It can be argued that a humanistic enlightenment approach to leadership emerged as a counter to the historical prevalence of totalitarian elitism where leaders were often autocratic and authoritarian, demanding obedience through command and control. Although beginning with the ancient Greeks, this kind of leadership has continued through classical periods from early medieval times up until the industrial revolution, and also into our modern era. Since the 18th century, philosophies of enlightened humanism have been the face of leadership thinking if not always what might be seen as its embodied practice. Beneath the surface, there lurks a controlling and demanding imposition of self-discipline that can be seen as equally if not more, repressive than the elitism it replaces. This article is concerned to challenge such repression by developing a neo-humanist enlightenment approach to leadership and its development. It departs from those studies that reflect and thereby reproduce individualized preoccupations with, and attachments to, identity on the part of leaders and the so-called followers. The focus, instead, is on an embodied leadership that encourages an ethical engagement with the community, institutions, organizations, and society.

The construction of leadership practice: Making sense of leader competencies

The notion of leadership competencies is a much-debated issue. In this article, we propose that how the leader makes sense of his or her competencies is key to leadership practice. Specifically, we look at how leaders reconcile discrepancies between the self-perceived proficiency of various competencies and their corresponding importance. Empirically, we study leaders within the music domain – how choral conductors make sense of their competencies in the shaping of their professional practice. We investigated how choral leaders in Scandinavia ( N = 638) made sense of their competencies in the face of demands in their working situations. A mixed methodology was used, comprising a quantitative survey with qualitative comments and in-depth interviews with a selection of the respondents. The results show that when choral leaders shape their practice, they frequently face competency gaps that compel them to act or adjust their identity. The key to this sensemaking process is how they move competency elements they master to the foreground and wanting elements to the background. The concept of ‘sensemaking affordance’ is introduced to account for how various leader competency categories are negotiated to safeguard overall efficacy.

Accomplishing leadership-in-interaction by mobilizing available information and communication technology objects in a virtual context

Leadership-in-interaction is a somewhat underdeveloped area of research which to date has concentrated on talk-in-interaction to the detriment of other modalities. Consequently, this paper seeks to illustrate how social actors make use of different modalities to accomplish leadership, which we conceptualize as the creation of direction, alignment, and commitment. Through multimodal conversation analysis this paper explores interactions between actors in virtual contexts, a particularly interesting empirical setting as the context offers specific constraints on everyday workplace interaction. By zooming in on the interaction using transcripts of naturally occurring interaction, we find that the accomplishment of leadership, direction, alignment, and commitment, in a constrained virtual context can appear mundane. However, at the same time the accomplishment of leadership calls for the mobilization of several multimodal resources (both talk and information and communication technology objects). The analysis makes it evident that the actors mobilize objects to draw on their situated affordances, in the accomplishment of direction, alignment, and commitment. With a fine-grained analysis of naturally occurring data, we illustrate that leadership is a collective achievement. We also expand the understanding of leadership in practice, especially in virtual contexts, by demonstrating how actors utilize objects and verbal resources in the co-production of leadership.

When ‘Good’ Leadership Backfires: Dynamics of the leader/follower relation

This paper contributes to the understanding of relational aspects of leadership and followership. Our in-depth empirical study of the leader/follower relation uncovers how and why assigning team members into ‘leader’ and ‘follower’ positions may sometimes be a double-edged sword and lead to unintended consequences undermining both the team’s potential and member satisfaction. We report on a multi-voiced story of one team that at first looked like a well-performing one with effective, ‘good’ leadership and satisfied team members. However, a closer investigation revealed frictional understandings, unresponsiveness and dynamics of immaturization as the followers overly relied on the elected leader. Leadership seen as ‘good’ may indeed backfire and encourage satisfied, trustful followers to relax and focus on limited roles. Our study further shows the need to conduct rich empirical studies that capture views of all parties in a relation.

Toward a methodology for studying leadership-as-practice

This article is intended as a conceptual and practical foundation for those who wish to conduct research in the area of leadership-as-practice. Rather than offer a single methodology for studying how social and leadership activity is carried out in everyday life, it details a pluralistic set of methods and presents a series of theoretical guidelines through its phenomenological form of inquiry. In particular, it endorses discursive, narrative, ethnographic, aesthetic, and multimodal methods to attempt to capture concurrent, collective, and dialogical social practices. After providing an overview of praxis-oriented research as the methodological basis of leadership-as-practice, the article turns to the conceptual building blocks that can provide some guidance in selecting an appropriate methodology for study. These building blocks incorporate issues of agency, identity, materiality, context, power, and dialogue. The author hopes that researchers will take up the challenge of examining leadership dynamics “from within” to co-participate in working with actors engaged in projects of significance advance their mutual endeavors.

Room for communitas: Exploring sociomaterial construction of leadership in liminal and dominant spaces

This article analyzes the sociomaterial construction of plural and hierarchical leadership in liminal and dominant spaces. Combining insights from, first, the emerging body of studies exploring the role of spaces in sociomaterial construction of leadership; second, spatial management and organization research focusing on liminal spaces; and third, Victor Turner’s social structure–anti-structure framework, it is argued that dominant spaces actively participate in a sociomaterial construction of leadership that reflects the social structure of an organization. Liminal spaces as places fostering the experience of communitas, then, actively participate in the sociomaterial construction of plural leadership if collectively used.

The absent follower: Identity construction within organisationally assigned leader–follower relations

This article seeks to add to our understanding of processes of identity construction within organisationally assigned leader–follower relations through an exploration of the role of the absent, feminised follower. We situate our work within critical and psychoanalytic contributions to leader/ship and follower/ship and use Lacan’s writings on identification and lack to illuminate the imaginary, failing nature of identity construction. This aims to challenge the social realist foundations of writing on leader–follower constellations in organisational life. We examine our philosophical discussion through a reflective reading of a workplace example and question the possibility of a subject’s identity construction as a follower. If a subject is unable to identify him/herself as follower, he/she cannot validate others as leaders, rendering the leader–follower relationship not only fragile but phantasmic. We highlight implications of our exploration of the absence of follower/ship and endless, unfulfilled desire for leader/ship for future research and practice.