Leadership and risk: a review of the literature

Purpose

Even though every decision a leader makes carries an element of risk, no review on the topic of leadership and risk has appeared in highly-ranked management journals in the past 20 years. This is in contrast to the discipline of psychology in which leadership and risk receives considerable attention, particularly in the field of heroism studies. In the context of the established body of research on the topic of leadership and risk in the discipline of psychology, this review therefore explores the research on leadership and risk in highly-ranked management studies’ journals.

Design/methodology/approach

The review was conducted in five stages. During phase 1, journal rankings were used as basis to determine which highly-ranked journals to include in the review. Phase 2 focused on identifying all relevant articles in the journals included in our review. We searched for articles published from 2000 to 2021 with the words “risk” or “danger” and “leader” or “leadership” in their abstracts. In phase 3, the author analysed the abstracts of the articles in depth to determine whether the keywords were included on the basis of an explicit scholarly reflection or research on leadership and risk. Phase 4 focused on analysing articles' treatment of leadership and risk, and assigning key words and key phrases. Finally, during phase 5 key words and key phrases were clustered together thematically.

Findings

This study analysis yielded six thematic clusters. The first two clusters – on risk appetite of followers and leaders – are closely related. In total, 12 journal articles explored these themes. The remaining thematic clusters contain four and seven articles each. These clusters are risk, creativity and innovation; risk and failure; risk in dangerous contexts; and risk and gender. Nine of the selected articles did not fit in any of the thematic clusters.

Originality/value

The review reveals a significant lack of research on leadership and risk in highly-ranked management studies’ journals. The author found that the topic of leadership and risk is approached in a binary fashion: successful leaders are viewed as using risk to drive innovation and unsuccessful leaders fail because of risk. The author argues that the heroic bias in leadership research could be partly blamed for this binarism. In practical terms, the author highlights that the growing importance of chief risk officers – leaders appointed to deal with company risk – indicates a clear need for research on leadership and risk in general management studies’ journals.

Public Service Logic: An Appropriate Recipe for Improving Serviceness in the Public Sector?

Researchers have made efforts to combine service management theory with public administration theory to develop an enhanced model of public service logic and help the public sector to develop services through co-creation with service users. This study considered the appropriateness of public service logic for improving serviceness in the public sector, examining the question through a literature review regarding the main elements of service management in which public service logic is anchored. We found no correspondences between this approach and theories on street-level bureaucracy, despite both perspectives aiming to understand the interactions between users and public service providers, and we wanted to explore this gap. We argue that public sector logic neglects important contextual factors, such as the role of public value and politics. Moreover, street-level bureaucrats have a legitimate responsibility not only to provide user-friendly services (creating value for users) but also, occasionally, to overrule citizens’ wishes and needs (following political decisions). We conclude that public service logic does not support the development of more serviceness in the public sector context, because it needs to consider the justification for having a public sector. Further research should consider users as collective citizens rather than individuals.

Can you be a follower even when you do not follow the leader? Yes, you can

In the ongoing debate in the area of critical leadership studies, the nature of leader–follower relationships is a thorny issue. The nature of followership has been questioned, especially whether followers can display resistance behaviours while maintaining their follower position. Addressing this issue requires a dialectical approach in which followers and leaders alike are primary elements in leadership co-production. Followers who face destructive leaders are of special interest when leadership is studied as a co-creational process. This context favours the emergence of a full range of behavioural profiles in which passives and colluders will illustrate the destructive leadership co-production process, and those who resist demonstrate that followers may not follow the leader and still keep a followership purpose. A two-step data analysis procedure was conducted based on the behaviour descriptions of 123 followers having a destructive leader. A qualitative analysis (i.e. content analysis) showed a set of behaviours and their antecedents that suggest three main groups of followers: resisters, obedient and mixed behaviour. Treating these data quantitatively (i.e. latent class analysis), six followers’ profiles emerged: active resistance, passive resistance, passive obedience, conflict avoidance, support and mixed. Our findings provide evidence that followers who resist may do it for the sake of the organisation. We discuss our findings in light of followership theory, whereby joining role-based and constructionist approaches allows us to argue that followers may still be followers even when they do not invariably follow their leader.

Caring leadership as Nietzschean slave morality

In this paper, I respond to calls for more critical reflection on the power dynamics of caring leadership. I consider how a combination of care and impotence might unfold as Nietzsche’s ‘slave morality’, crystallised in the phenomenon of ressentiment. At the heart of slave morality is an inversion of values in which everything represented by the Other is denigrated so that the slave can find meaning and solace in his own place in the world. The Nietzschean inversion transforms impotence, inferiority and submission into virtue, identity and accomplishment. In contrast to recent elaborations of ressentiment in followers, I argue that slave morality is something to which leaders, especially caring leaders, are also vulnerable. When caring leadership awakens or exposes the slave-within, we are unable to take charge of – or responsibility for – ourselves, because we have ceded control of the self to forces beyond the self. This is the risk of ‘care ethics’ as a systemic inversion of values which constructs an ideology out of letting others define who and what we are. It creates a breeding ground for ressentiment, feeding off unspoken and unspeakable grievances about the injustices of one’s lot, especially those involving a clash between the rhetoric of empowerment and the experience of impotence. The Nietzschean warning is: Be wary of leadership models which might look and even feel nice, but which turn self-sacrifice into virtue and silence into necessity.