Innovation in Environmental Leadership

Critical Perspectives

Benjamin W. Redekop, Deborah Rigling Gallagher, Rian Satterwhite, Benjamin W. Redekop, Deborah Rigling Gallagher, Rian Satterwhite

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138636606
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351795388
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Innovation in Environmental Leadership offers innovative approaches to leadership from a post-industrial and ecological vantage point. Chapters in this collection are written by leading scholars and practitioners of environmental leadership from around the globe, and are informed by a variety of critical perspectives, including post-heroic approaches, systems thinking, and the emerging insights of Critical Leadership Studies (CLS).

By taking the natural environment seriously as a foundational context for leadership, Innovation in Environmental Leadership offers fresh insights and compelling visions of leadership pertinent to 21st century environmental and social challenges. Concepts and understandings of leadership emerged as part of an extractive industrial system; this work asks its readers to re-think what leadership looks like in an ecologically sustainable biological system.

This book provides fresh insights and critical perspectives on the vibrant and growing field of environmental leadership. It shows the latest state of knowledge on the topic and will be of interest both to students at an advanced level, academics and reflective practitioners. It addresses the topics with regard to leadership theory and environmental leadership and will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of sustainability, environmental ethics, natural resource management, environmental studies, business management, public policy, and environmental management.

1 The Seven Unsustainabilities of Mainstream Leadership

Jem Bendell, Richard Little, Neil Sutherland

Introduction

In the face of limited progress on a range of social and environmental issues, many proponents and analysts of corporate action on sustainable development issues are calling for more leadership for sustainability – a call to which this book responds (Redekop, 2010; Adams et al., 2011; Evans, 2011; Gallagher, 2012; Metcalf & Benn, 2013; Shriberg & MacDonald, 2013). Such calls for leadership reflect a desire for greater and swifter change. In that context, researchers and educators can explore what is useful knowledge to enable such change. In this chapter, we suggest that some assumptions about the meaning of the term “leadership” may hinder, not help, that process of change.

We demonstrate this limiting effect by placing the concept of leadership under the scope of an analysis based on the primacy of discourse. We draw upon Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which starts from an awareness that the abuse, dominance, and inequality of power relations can be enacted, reproduced, and, ultimately, resisted by text and talk (Fairclough, 1995). We argue that the prevailing leadership imaginary, so far from supporting the transition to a sustainable society and economy, may actually hinder it and be itself unsustainable, in the sense that it depends on the discoursal maintenance of power relations and a narrow range of organizing possibilities (Gemmil & Oakley, 1992). Further, we suggest that it may thus discourage or disable more collective, collaborative, or distributed forms of leadership, deliberation, organizing, and problem-solving (Hurlow, 2008; Denis et al., 2012). If this is the case, more of the same “leadership” will not help the goal of sustainability.

We share with Evans (2011) and Western (2008) the view that dominant paradigms of leadership are part of the cause of the current crisis of unsustainability and will develop that argument in this chapter. Therefore, precisely because we are interested in sustainability, we address leadership per se rather than limit analysis to leadership on environmental or social topics. Though scholarship in this field may be expected to focus on those persons who have responsibility for topics explicitly to do with “sustainability,” given the state of conceptual development, we think that doing so could leave untenable concepts to be imported from those who analyze and promote conventional approaches to leadership. For instance, in much of the still scarce scholarship on leadership for sustainability, some of which is cited in our opening sentence, leaders and leadership have sometimes been described in terms that emphasize exceptionalism, personal “authenticity,” an individual locus of action, and a generalized other that is the object of leadership. There is also evidence of sustainability-infused leadership development programs uncritically incorporating assumptions about leadership (see for instance Peterlin, 2016).

Even those theorists who propose to break with mainstream notions of leadership may still repeat what Bolden and Gosling (2006) call the “refrain” of the mainstream competency approach to leadership. For example, the following statement may seem at first to reflect an inclusive and collectivist approach, but on another reading, may be thought to identify leadership with a special individual who acts upon an unreflecting group: “[leadership is] a form of community praxis in which one coalesces and directs the energies of the group” (Evans, 2011, p. 2). Impressive and helpful people do exist, but with this chapter we wish to show that the prevailing discourse on leadership can limit our understanding of the potential for creating the greater change that inspires the calls for more “environmental leadership” or “leadership for sustainability.”

Therefore, rather than a detailed deconstruction of existing texts on leadership for sustainability, in this chapter we offer a broad synthesis of relevant literatures that either use, or can inform, a more critical approach, drawing on the field of “Critical Leadership Studies” (CLS). We integrate these critiques by outlining “seven unsustainabilities” of mainstream leadership thinking, and the antidotes that are relevant to sustainability. At that point we offer a definition of “sustainable leadership” and conclude by outlining some potential implications for the future of research, practice, and education.

Our definition will be purposely tentative. Rather than offer a systematic construction of a new concept of “sustainable leadership,” we are placing existing concepts of leadership in the context of dominant narratives of “managerialism” (Enteman, 1993) that limit an assessment of the potential types and locations of action on sustainability. This process of tilling the conceptual earth will allow new ideas to bloom, including those that deploy structured approaches to define “sustainable leadership” or “sustainability leadership” concepts and theories. Without such insights from CDA, attempts at rigorous concept development in the organizational sciences (Podsakoff et al., 2016) may be limited by assumptions that reflect dominant discourse.

While we are reticent to suggest that it is unnecessary to focus on the behavior of senior role holders, such as chief executives or politicians, we argue that the assumptions that leadership is theirs alone to express and that leadership by special individuals is the most salient matter in organizational or social change are both unhelpful and yet widely promoted, with major implications for sustainable development.

Defining Leadership and Sustainability

“Sustainability” is often used as a shorthand for the term Sustainable Development. Since the adoption of the Brundtland Report by the UN General Assembly in 1987, “sustainable development” has been promoted by many as an integrated way to address diverse dilemmas, such as poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, disease, discrimination, environmental degradation, crime, conflict, and limited human rights or justice (WCED, 1987). That “sustainable development” seems to offer all good things to all people has been one reason for its popularity and, some say, a reason for it leading to largely ineffectual activities on those dilemmas (Perez-Carmona, 2013).

Such an “ambiguous compromise” (Purvis & Grainger, 2004, p. 6) has proven to be a resilient one. The adoption of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the United Nations in 2015 marks a renewed interest in the hope that governments, cities, firms, and other organizations can achieve progress on social and economic factors while not degrading the environment.

In this chapter, we term the sustainability issues that people are working on as shared “dilemmas,” rather than challenges or problems, to reflect both their complexity and a growing worldview that no longer regards them as problems to solve but situations to cope with. We call them “shared” because they involve collective causation, affect the many (albeit differentially), and will need collective action to address or adapt to them.

Just as the terms “sustainability” and “sustainable development” are deployed in quite different contexts and with different implied exclusions and inclusions, so the word “leadership” is used to mean or imply quite different things (Jackson & Parry, 2008) while seeming to represent a common, monolithic, understanding. Unpacking such usages may not have direct value in deliberation or action, but can help prepare the ground for people to navigate the plurality of possibilities for leadership and sustainability. Among the many definitions of leadership in management studies, we will use the following to begin our discussion: “Leadership is any behavior that has the effect of helping groups of people achieve something that the majority of them are pleased with and which [observers] assess as significant and what they would not have otherwise achieved” (Bendell & Little, 2015, p. 15).

The notion of leadership being a behavior rather than a position of authority is inherent in this definition. In addition, it reflects the relational quality of leadership so that acts need to be welcomed by a majority of those in a group. Moreover, the external observer plays a key role when categorising acts as leadership. Specifically:

Leadership involves the ascription of significance to an act by us, the observer, where significance usually involves our assumptions or propositions about values and theories of change. If our theory of change is that the CEO has freedom of action and can impose change, then we would naturally look for leadership to be exhibited at that level. If our values are that profit-maximising for shareholders in the near term is a good goal, then we would not question a CEO’s “leadership” in achieving such goals. We should note that these are rather big “Ifs.”

(ibid.)

Utilizing this definition allows us to break free from some of the mainstream assumptions in management and leadership scholarship and training, including the idea that leadership is a individualistic quality. In this chapter, we explore how deep the criticisms go and the implications for enabling action on sustainable development.

Insights from Critical Leadership Studies

While mainstream approaches to leadership and management continue to permeate academic and practitioner interest, the last decade has seen a counter-trend of scholars who seek to unpack what they consider unhelpful assumptions and directions in “mainstream” approaches to leadership. While it is difficult to summarize all of the work conducted in this field, Collinson notes that the aim of Critical Leadership Studies (CLS) is to investigate “what is neglected, absent or deficient in mainstream leadership research” (2011, p. 181). This involves understanding and exposing the negative consequences of leadership by examining patterns of power and domination enabled by overly hierarchical social relations, questioning these “exclusionary and privileged” discourses, and investigating the problematic effects that this has on organizational functioning and individual well-being (Ford, 2010).

“Critical Theory” has a significant part to play here – a motivation toward emancipatory projects and empowering grassroots and oppressed groups against dominant discourses promoted by elites. Such research challenges the field of management and leadership that may be distorted in favor of capital and the owners of capital, gender exclusion and other forms of social violence, and unsustainable forms of commerce and industry (Blunt & Jones, 1996; Nkomo, 2011). A key theme in such work is the critique of a set of ideas called “Managerialism,” which value professional managers and their forms of analysis, authority, and control, and their tendency to bring ever more aspects of life into the orbit of management (Enteman, 1993; Parker, 2002). There are parallels here with some critiques of international “development” that influence approaches to sustainability, which we will return to below. Before that, we next summarize some of the main elements of the critique made by CLS – converging around a problematization of an overly individualistic understanding of leadership. We then outline some implications for leadership scholarship and leadership development work that is motivated by concern for various shared dilemmas.

The Individualist Mistake

Mainstream approaches to leadership are keenly focussed on the development of permanent, stable, and hierarchically positioned individuals, rather than to the development of collective, relational, or dialogical leadership. Leaders are routinely described as needing to be authentic, visionary, driven, and emotionally intelligent. The image of the leader that emerges from what Gosling and Bolden (2006) call the “repeating refrain” of leadership competencies is of a deracinated superman (or, in a feminized variant that emphasizes collaboration, intuition, and nurturing, a superwoman). This “hero-focus” has received criticism over the past 15 years from mainstream management literature (Palus et al., 2012). However, even explicitly “post-heroic” or egalitarian accounts of leadership as bottom-up or, variously, as distributed (Woods et al., 2004), transformational (Bass, 1998), or “servant” (Greenleaf, 1977) may not fully address the degree to which these ideas are undermined by lingering positional metaphors of hierarchy, or by their failure to address questions of gender or, worse, are co-opted by hierarchical, instrumentalist managerialism (Fletcher, 2004). The CLS analysis of the implicit hero focus of leadership studies provides a deeper critique in at least four key areas.

First, the “dark side” of leadership practice is a key interest. Thus, various CLS theorists have explored issues such as domination, conformity, abuse of power, blind commitment, over-dependence, and seduction (Khoo & Burch, 2007; Schyns & Schilling, 2013; Sheard et al., 2013). They have coined terms including “toxic leadership” (Benson & Hogan, 2008; Lipman-Blumen, 2006); “destructive leadership” (Einarsen et al., 2007); “leadership derailment” (Tepper, 2000); and, “aversive leadership” (Bligh et al., 2007). Other scholars have discovered tendencies for narcissism and psychopathy amongst senior role holders and how that can be encouraged by popular discourses about leaders being special and powerful (de Vries & Miller, 1985; Gudmundsson & Southey, 2011). Evans (2011) characterizes the prevailing model as “exploitive leadership” and argues that such masculinized, hierarchical leadership reproduces the domination of nature by humanity. For scholars interested in the social dimension of sustainability, including matters of fairness, rights, and well-being, these dark sides will be of concern.

Rather than responding through a deepened critique, mainstream leadership scholars proclaim problems can be solved through mitigating qualities like humility, authenticity, emotional intelligence, or self-knowledge, while leaving unchallenged the assumption that “leaders” pursue exclusively corporate goals by largely instrumental means (Kouzes & Posner, 2003). Characteristically, this literature keeps up the search for an ideal trait description of the leader: lists of qualities, propensities, behaviors and habits proliferate, often including “character” and “authenticity” (Gardner et al., 2011).

The second turn in CLS aims in part to reveal the flaws of this traits focus, and of secondary efforts to promote values and authenticity among leaders. We do not have space here to rehearse this argument in detail, but in summary: leadership trait lists tend merely to describe competent human beings, emphasizing, for example, honesty and intelligence (Zingheim et al., 1996). The effort to identify traits might itself be seen as serving the very bureaucratic impulse to which leadership, with its implied freedom of moral action, is the remedy. The reliability, stability, and predictive value of trait descriptions are all in any case contested. The most telling critique of traits suggests that their pursuit is a circular process in which socially constructed discourses of leadership are interrogated from within the constraining assumptions of those same discourses (Burr, 1995). Indeed, it is not unreasonable to argue that leadership is idiographic, episodic, and situationally inflected, to the extent that no imaginable set of descriptors could apply to all potential leaders (Fairhurst & Grant, 2010). Traits are, from this view, not internal personal structures but “social processes realised on the site of the personal” (Gergen, 1994, p. 210).

Rather than focusing directly on traits, another response has been to help senior individuals to reflect upon, clarify, articulate, and live by their most important values, and, ostensibly,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1. The Seven Unsustainabilities of Mainstream Leadership
• 2. A Case for Universal Contexts: Intersections of the Biosphere, Systems, and Justice Using a Critical Constructionist Lens
• 3. The Eco-Leadership Paradox
• 4. Sustainable Leadership: Toward Restoring the Human and Natural Worlds
• 5. Eco-Leadership, Complexity Science, and 21st-Century Organizations: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis
• 6. Toward an Understanding of the Relationship Between the Study of Leadership and the Natural World
• 7. The Unseen Revolution: Leadership for Sustainability in the Tropical Biosphere
• 8. Heroes No More: Businesses Practice Collaborative Leadership to Confront Climate Change
• 9. Climate Change Leadership: From Tragic to Comic Discourse
• 10. Followers’ Self-Perception of Their Role in Addressing Climate Change: A Cultural Comparison
• 11. Ending the Drought: Nurturing Environmental Leadership in Ethiopia
• 12. We Don’t Conquer Mountains, We Understand Them: Embedding Indigenous Education in Australian Outdoor Education
• 13. Critical Internal Shifts for Sustainable Leadership
• 14. From Peril to Possibility: Restorative Leadership for a Sustainable Future
• Conclusion
• Index