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.

Dialectics of distributed leadership in an interorganizational entrepreneurship hub

In this study, we widen the understanding of how the dialectics of distributed leadership develop as part of discursive interactions in an interorganizational setting directed at renewal. Using a dialectical perspective, we analyzed developmental meetings of an entrepreneurship hub and identified three dialectics, namely disagreement versus encouragement, organizational dependency versus interorganizational engagement and status quo versus transformation, by which the discussion reached the resolution. Our study widens the current understanding of distributed leadership and offers a nuanced account of how dissent and consent act as equally important forces for the development of the distributed leadership practice, as well as for reaching the collective resolution directed at organizational renewal. Our study also highlights the significance of co-created visual representations for converting complex discursive dialectics into a more tangible form. More generally, our study opens an approach in leadership to study tension-laden organizational dynamics in discursive and processual terms, especially in complex interorganizational contexts.

Post-heroic heroism: Embedded masculinities in media framing of Australian business leadership

Over time, the relevance of heroic leadership to contemporary corporate environments has been questioned, with media coverage arguing there is a need for alternate, post-heroic forms of leadership. Using a multimodal media analysis, we show how two leading Australian business magazines frame leadership in response to this debate, identifying three distinct frames of leadership. The first frame emphasizes masculinized heroic leadership as normative which reinforces gendered assumptions through differential framing of men and women’s leadership. We then argue media (re)frames post-heroic leadership as a variation of heroic leadership through two further frames; by subsuming feminized attributes into the repertoire of heroic leadership as ‘softer masculinities’ and through the construction of a masculinized post-heroic hero, both applied exclusively to men’s leadership. This (re)framing of heroic leadership has significant implications for perceptions of credible contemporary business leadership.

Fifty-five years of managerial shared leadership research: A review of an empirical field

Managerial shared leadership is a practice that goes beyond traditional ways of organising leadership functions. It is an organisational phenomenon where a few individuals share responsibility for the tasks of a managerial position. This paper reviews 67 empirical papers published in scientific journals. The review covers 55 years (1965–2019). The aim is to contribute knowledge about managerial shared leadership as a research field and offer some relevant theoretical concepts. No review to date has specifically focused on managerial shared leadership, and this paper intends to close this knowledge gap. The paper details the start of managerial shared leadership as a research field, presents a bibliometric analysis and the methodological approaches used, and describes the structural characteristics of managerial shared leadership. The paper includes a thematic content analysis of necessary and enabling antecedents and outcomes. Historically, the imprecise use of concepts has hampered managerial shared leadership’s development into a cohesive research field, so this paper develops and uses theoretical concepts to form a theoretical construct for the entire field. This construct is briefly discussed in relation to general shared leadership theory and critical leadership studies. In practice, managerial shared leadership may provide leadership solutions where there is an imbalance between demands and resources while managing complex situations.

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.

Collective Leadership Dynamics among Professional Peers: Co-constructing an unstable equilibrium

Professional service firms (PSFs) are characterized by contingent and contested power relations among an extended group of professional peers. Studies of such firms can therefore yield important insights for the literatures on collective leadership and leader–follower relations. Yet to date PSF scholars have neglected the topic of leadership, and leadership scholars have neglected the context of PSFs. Based on 102 interviews across the consulting, accounting and legal sectors, we identify three relational processes through which professional peers co-construct collective leadership: legitimizing, negotiating and manoeuvring. We demonstrate how the relational processes taken together constitute an unstable equilibrium, both in the moment and over time, emphasizing how leadership in PSFs is inherently contested and fragile. Our model contributes to theories of collective leadership and leader–follower relations by foregrounding the power and politics that underlie collective leadership. We highlight the significance of the individual leader within the collective. We challenge assumptions concerning the binary nature of leadership and followership, by showing how colleagues may grant leadership identities to their peers without necessarily granting them leadership authority, and without claiming follower identities for themselves.