A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Studying Leadership

Brad Jackson, Ken Parry

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526451057
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

An engaging guide through the cacophony of competing perspectives and models of leadership, the new edition includes an expanded discussion of contemporary topics like followership, gender, ethics, authenticity, and leadership and the arts, set against the backdrop of the global financial crisis.

Conceived by Chris Grey as an antidote to conventional textbooks, each book in the 'Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap' series takes a core area of the curriculum and turns it on its head by providing a critical and sophisticated overview of the key issues and debates in an informal, conversational and often humorous way.

Suitable for students of leadership, professionals working in organizations and anyone curious about the workings of leadership.

1 Introduction

I believe that we are more likely to secure responsible leadership in the future if we can demystify its constituent processes. In that sense, enhanced knowledge about leadership may go hand-in-hand with more morally desirable forms of leadership.

(Howard Gardner, 1995: 3)

On studying leadership

The Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘study’ variously as ‘a thing to be secured by pains or attention’, ‘devotion of time and thought to acquiring information, especially from books’, ‘be on the watch, try constantly to manage’, ‘a thing that deserves to be investigated’ and the definition we particularly enjoy, ‘a fit of musing, reverie’ – something that we hope this book might invoke for you. There are broadly five ways that one can go about studying leadership. You can actually attempt to lead, you can observe leadership in action, you can talk about leadership, you can read about it and you can write about it.

Given that we are both professors, it won’t surprise anyone to learn that we find it easiest to talk about leadership. After all, we do this every day in our lectures, seminars and workshops. We are greatly assisted in this regard by the fact that everyone has a fundamental interest in leaders and leadership. It’s certainly true that everybody we have ever talked with has developed some kind of opinion on what constitutes good and bad leadership. Whether it’s teenagers’ views on the adequacy of their parents’ or teachers’ leadership skills or a colleague questioning the wisdom of promoting someone at work or the election of a new political leader, leadership tends to be something that is high on a lot of people’s agendas – and invariably it’s a powerful way of dividing people into those who support a particular leader and those who do not. The most authoritative sources regarding matters of global as well as local leadership are, of course, taxi drivers. They should be consulted at every opportunity. In a rudimentary ethnographic sort of way, these are all sources of data if you are studying leadership.

We tend to value our leaders primarily for their abilities as orators. However, many of them use the written word through the medium of their diaries and memoirs to make sense of and to work through the dilemmas, doubts and frustrations associated with their leadership positions. Nelson Mandela’s magnificent autobiographical bestseller Long Walk to Freedom is an exemplar of this form of leadership communication. It’s not surprising, then, that these documents attract so much interest when they are made public. People are naturally curious to see what lurks backstage in the theatre of leadership.

Seeing leadership, if done superficially, is not difficult at all. It’s something we all do day in and day out. To quote a well-worn epithet, leadership is like beauty – it is difficult to describe, but we certainly know it when we experience it. Most of the time we rely on the conventional and social media to guide us, and make it easy for us to understand and judge.

However, we believe it is important to see leadership through our own eyes. Having the discipline to observe leadership properly requires time, patience, imagination and the willingness to question constantly what one is observing and to look for new and perhaps disconfirming evidence. Most importantly, one needs to see beyond the obvious, to be critical, and occasionally be willing to become unpopular because of one’s views. Indeed this is the hallmark of highly effective leadership. In this book we want to develop and foster a multidimensional, a broader, and even an empathetic view of leaders and leadership.

A great source for developing critical ways of seeing leadership can be found in movies and TV shows. While we do not wish to undermine any welcome relief from the worries of the world that you may derive from watching films, we do hope that, like us, you will never be able to watch a movie or a TV show again without thinking that it is about leadership! To give you some guidance, we’ve provided you with our list of all-time favourite leadership movies and series in the Appendix. We have used them successfully for teaching for many years now. Movies frequently are dramatic re-creations of leadership contexts that people are faced with all the time.

Every year students in our classes say, ‘I will never be able to just watch a movie again. Now I look for the leadership everywhere.’ Movies like Remember the Titans, Shackleton, The Blind Side and Apollo 13 are based on real events. The leadership stories and messages are thinly disguised, if not blatant. Movies like When We Were Kings are documentaries or show actual events. Groundhog Day is a great movie about leadership development – it turns out it is a leadership story, not a love story. These are as close as we can come to being there, especially if we cannot actually be in the boardroom to see leadership in action, for instance.

There is a great article in the Academy of Management Learning & Education (Bartunek, 2013) about how a great movie might help us appreciate great research. The movie in question is Thelma and Louise, but it is just an example. The point is made well that we should investigate research that moves us affectively. It might inspire and anger us, and give us the impetus to act in response. By using a movie for research, we can dramatize and empathize with the message that the researchers are sending to us. Each movie can have a tagline; in the case of Thelma and Louise, Ashford (2013) posits that the tagline is ‘you get what you settle for’. In leadership studies we could call this the sensemaking that comes from the leadership.

Movies can be used as data, as method, or as findings from research. Thelma and Louise might have been the data with which we try to understand about the inappropriate use of personalized power and the challenges and opportunities of generating identity. It could be used as method. As we examine data on power and identity from a case study, we can make sense of what we are finding by looking at our data through the ‘Thelma and Louise lens’. We can make sense of what we find by comparing it with what happened in the plausible dramatization of the same phenomena in this movie. A movie can also be the outcomes of the research. By researching the phenomena, researchers can create their own movie about leadership. This has been happening at Deakin University in the innovative Master of Leadership programme. Many PhD programmes, although admittedly not yet in the field of leadership studies, produce creative artistic outcomes form the research.

Of course, we can all think of some leaders with whom we have worked who, in common with the infamous David Brent character from TV’s The Office, and his American counterpart Michael Scott, appear to be incapable of learning anything from their efforts at leading or from their followers. Thankfully, most leaders we work with are keen to learn and improve their abilities. The experience of leading seems to sharpen their desire to learn and to change.

When we talk about ‘studying’ leadership we are thinking of all five of these activities: doing, seeing, talking, reading and writing. We not only need to learn to become better at doing all of these but, most significantly, we also need to recognize it is vital for us to learn how to better link and integrate these activities into a cohesive philosophical whole – so that what we read influences what we see about leadership and what we talk about helps us to write about leadership, which, in turn, helps us to do better leadership. This is by no means a linear process. In fact, you could easily reverse the sequence described above or use various combinations and the process would be equally valid. Though the primary task of this book is to help you learn more about leadership by reading about it, it is our hope that the process of reading about leadership will duly impact on and shape what and how you choose to see, talk, write and do leadership.

The interdisciplinary and applied nature of leadership

Those who work in the leadership research field have always made a point of recognizing its applied and interdisciplinary nature. We research leadership primarily because we want to make a difference by promoting a better understanding of leadership, which we hope will lead to better leadership in practice. While this rationale hangs together in theory, in practice we have probably not been as applied in our efforts as we would have liked to be or perhaps should have been. As John Storey noted, ‘the accumulation of weighty and extensive reports to date tends, in the main, to regurgitate a now familiar thesis – but it is a thesis which remains incomplete, insufficiently tested, inadequately debated and not properly scrutinised’ (2004: 6). Things have not necessarily improved in the past decade. For example, Dennis Tourish has recently characterized the leadership studies field as one dominated by ‘sterile preoccupations’ that give rise to many works of ‘unrelenting triviality’ (2015: 13–78) which avoid addressing important questions and offer results of little intellectual or practical value. One key implication of the Tourish critique is that an excess of compliant following, rather than vibrant leading, characterizes the leadership studies field. In response, Wilson et al. (2017) in their book Revitalising Leadership have challenged their colleagues in leadership studies to begin practising what they preach and begin to show some leadership not only within business schools but within academe in general. The bottom line here is that there is still plenty of work yet to do – you are most definitely not too late.

Moreover, we have not been as interdisciplinary as we probably should have been in terms of the approaches that we draw upon to conduct leadership research and also in terms of the kinds of question that various disciplines might inspire if applied to the study of leadership. Psychology and, to a lesser extent, sociology still tend to dominate the field. There have been, however, some encouraging signs that the leadership field increasingly is branching out and becoming more receptive to a wider range of quantitative as well as qualitative methodologies. For example, political psychology is making an impact. This is the psychology of the lived experience of the individual politician, as derived from biography and historical interrogation, rather than the psychology of a population, as derived from questionnaires and experiments. Anthropology has a long history of research into cultures via the means of ethnography. Now with autoethnography, or hyper-reflexivity, researchers are standing back and looking at their own experiences, warts and all, and learning about leadership from them.

The predominant journal in the field and still its ultimate arbiter, The Leadership Quarterly, has noticeably expanded its agenda since its inception in 1989 to encompass articles with disciplinary and methodological perspectives that would have had only a slim chance of being published in earlier years. Nonetheless, an article published in The Leadership Quarterly in 2014 (Dinh et al., 2014) about leadership theory and research in the new millennium cited leadership research from ten top-tier academic publishing outlets. All these outlets were North American and all were psychology-based. There was no mention of the journals Leadership, Organization Studies, Organization or Human Relations. All of the latter are ‘European’ or ‘UK’ journals that publish a generally wider range of methodologies and content areas associated with leadership. The message for anyone studying leadership is to consult a wide range of publishing sources so as to not limit your scope of coverage.

Another bottom line for you, then, is that even if you feel your disciplinary training might not be directly relevant to studying leadership, it may prove to be a real asset in that it can help you see and conceptualize elements of the leadership process. A good example of this would be one of Brad’s former doctoral students, Ralph Bathurst, who drew on his training and experience as a musician (a violist to be precise) to create in his thesis what he described as an ‘aesthetic ethnography’ aimed at comprehending the ‘music of organizations’, which he applied to an empirical study of a symphony orchestra to revealing effect (Bathurst, 2006). Another student, David Zeitner, who trained as a dancer from an early age in the former German Democratic Republic, recently completed his thesis exploring how contemporary dance could be utilized to develop new ways of thinking and practicing leadership (Zeitner, 2016). There is plenty of room for you and your training.

In the first issue of Leadership journal, the father of modern leadership studies, James MacGregor Burns, noted two striking recent developments in the field of leadership studies. The first was the growing internationalization of the study of leadership: ‘theoretical work and practical application in non-American contexts will inevitably move leadership theory away from its overly American emphases and bias toward a more international perspective’ (2005: 11). The second major development that Burns pointed to was the role of leadership research as an interdisciplinary endeavour that could invigorate related disciplines. Obviously, leadership theory draws heavily from established disciplines, but it can also vitalize those disciplines. Burns notes, however,

leadership, in common parlance, is a ‘good’. When people call for leadership, or deplore the lack of leadership, they see it not as a needed spur to human progress but, as in itself, a moral and ethical entity and a necessary gauge of action. Leadership, in short, becomes an activity as well as an academic enterprise. (2005: 12)

Leadership scholars are not only growing in number, they are also starting to get better organized. In June 2017 the International Leadership Association (ILA) had 2,200 members from 70 countries. Its 2016 conference in Atlanta attracted 1,048 attenders, both ‘scholars’ and ‘practitioners’. In 2006, the Academy of Management (AOM) created a Network of Leadership Scholars which brings together several hundred leadership academics who are primarily based in universities. At the end of 2016, the University of Edinburgh played host to the 15th International Conference on Studying Leadership – a conference that regularly attracts critically oriented leadership researchers from throughout the world. A Global Consortium of Leadership Centres, under the auspices of Steve Kempster and Mary Uhl-Bien, was established in the past two years to create a network of 15 research centres who are committed to advancing socially responsible leadership practice that takes on a ‘big menu of concerns’ including: market capitalism and the unintended consequences of globalization; global societal challenges, such as climate change, displaced people, famine, poverty and modern slavery; the purposeless nature of much work interwoven with typical amoral expectations of business; and the need for a greater eye on the sustainability of organizations. We have provided contact details for these and other leadership study organizations in the Appendix for you to follow up on.

A way forward

In his pioneering book Leadership: Limits and Possibilities, Grint (2005a) suggests that leadership has traditionally been understood in four quite different ways:

• Leadership as Person: is it WHO ‘leaders’ are that makes them leaders?
• Leadership as Results: is it WHAT ‘leaders’ achieve that makes them leaders?
• Leadership as Position: is it WHERE ‘leaders’ operate that makes them leaders?
• Leadership as Process: is it HOW ‘leaders’ get things done that makes them leaders?

We have found this framework to be a deceptively simple yet very useful heuristic device that encourages us to think in a more multifaceted manner whether or not we are trying to teach, research or even practise leadership.

In the process of utilizing this framework we have made four adjustments that we believe improve its overall effectiveness. First, we have chosen to focus our primary attention on how leadership is created and not on how leaders are created. While the importance of the role of individual leaders tends to be overestimated, the significance of leadership itself should never be underestimated. As Grint (2005a) himself argued, we have become overly preoccupied with individual leaders when, in fact, we should have been focusing more on leadership which is a more complete process. As a result, he urges us to ‘put the ship back into leadership’.

Second, we have replaced the preposition ‘as’ with another preposition, ‘through’. A preposition is a word that governs a noun and expresses a relationship to another word or element in the clause. We are using ‘through’ to highlight how each of these elements is a means of creating leadership to help it move from one side or location to another. The preposition ‘as’, by contrast, emphasizes how these elements act as the end of leadership because it draws attention to a function or a character that someone or something has. We believe that this shift recognizes the active and dynamic character of leadership; it is something we are always working towards, as opposed to reaching a passive final state.

Third, we added two new lenses: ‘Place’ and ‘Purpose’. Place foregrounds the context within which leadership is created. It asks where leadership is created, encompassing both its geographic and its historic composition. Purpose focuses on the vital yet frequently unanswered question of why leadership is created. We note with interest that Grint et al. (2017) have recently added ‘Purp...