Reflexive Leadership

Organising in an imperfect world

Mats Alvesson, Martin Blom, Stefan Sveningsson

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781473994362
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Verwaltung

Making a case for a reflexive approach to leadership, the authors draw upon decades of carrying out in-depth studies of professionals trying to "do" leadership. Through interviews with managers and their subordinates, getting a good understanding of organizational context, and critically interpreting their observations considering both leadership theories and a wealth of other perspectives, their celebration of reflexivity is used to question dominant leadership thinking. Considering and challenging various departures from lines of reasoning results in a book that draws upon rich empirical material and which has a number of new, provocative, critical and constructive ideas that help to develop sharper and more thoughtful thinking and practice - both in academic and practical contexts. Suitable for leadership and organisation courses at upper-level undergraduate and upwards (including MBA-classes and Executive Education) and a thought provoking read for practitioners and management development professionals interested in leadership thought.

1 Leadership: The Need for a Reflexive Approach

In terms of what is presented as crucial for the success of contemporary organizations, there is hardly anything that outranks leadership. The ambition of improving leadership to address and fix individual, organizational or societal problems seems almost endless. Here for example is a voice about the perceived leadership crisis in British healthcare:

It is for the achievement of the common goal that we all seek (and pray for) a good leadership in our country, clubs, societies and … organizations. We crave for leaders who will bring out the best in us. We seek a visionary leadership that can see beyond the limitations of today. We seek a leadership that can organize and deploy the available human and material resources for the benefit of all. (The Guardian, 2014)

No doubt, leadership can make a difference. Visionary and inspirational leadership can provide purpose and broader meaning to work tasks that might otherwise be seen as repetitive and boring. Leadership may boost morale and ethos in organizations. A leader showing high ethical standards may set a good example and contribute to reciprocity, trust and goodwill among people who identify with him or her. Leadership can also contribute to emotional well-being by recognizing that people are humans rather than simply instrumental resources. Leadership can contribute to the social atmosphere in the workplace, for example by making people feel happy, included and important. Leadership can also contribute to learning and development in various ways – both on an individual and an organizational level.

But successful leadership as described above is also quite complex and calls for reflexivity and thoughtfulness rather than just following fashionable trends and popular recipes about how to act. An illustration and inspirational example could be Jan Wallander, the former chairman of Svenska Handelsbanken (one of Sweden’s major and most successful commercial banks). On entering office at the beginning of the 1970s – at a time when the bank was in a severe crisis – Wallander initiated a reduction of costs at the bank’s headquarters while at the same time trying to maintain and increase motivation, identification and commitment among employees (Svenska Dagbladet, 2010). This included a range of reforms, the most significant of which were a strong decentralization to more independent regional branches and a decision to abandon budgeting and formal organizational charts as well as the introduction of a unique profit-sharing model that offered employees the possibility of becoming part-owners of the bank via a newly formed foundation. Wallander intended to change not only behaviour but primarily how people understood and related to work, saying that:

It is not certain that a change in the outer behaviour also is a change of the inner behaviour, i.e. that people don’t just act because they have to but also because they want to … (Wallander, 2003, p. 17)

A key idea behind the changes was to create an organizational context – including culture, norms, and identity – that boosted motivation, commitment and a sense of belonging among the employees. A particular part of this was Wallander’s decision to decline the higher salary offered to him on joining the bank, saying that:

If you require from the employees that they should participate in radical changes and accept cost savings it is not a good idea to start raising your own salary. I managed very well on what I had. Also ethical considerations played a role in my case. (Wallander, 2003, p. 95)

While clearly recognizing the sometimes important role of leadership as described above, it is important to be careful about over-relying on leadership as a panacea for all kinds of organizational challenges and problems. Although leadership, in one sense or another, often plays an important role, the effectiveness and results of organizations are normally an outcome of a variety of organizational and environmental contingencies as well as pure luck. For example, fans and directors of football clubs demand the replacement of coaches once the team exhibits poor performance. However, the success of a football team may be an outcome of a ball going two inches in the right or wrong direction, a key player becoming sick at a critical time or a referee’s mistake. If a company’s profit is below expectation, the perception is that leadership needs to change (usually by replacing the CEO). A company may however improve its results due to the oil price unexpectedly going down, or the exchange rate becoming more favourable, or a competitor facing a scandal. A CEO may be credited with good results, but might only be benefiting from wise decisions made much earlier in the corporate history that pay off at the time when the CEO is in office.

The idea that leadership is an answer to all sorts of societal and organizational problems is not without its problems. More often than not it is unclear what leadership means or actually entails in different situations. Often leadership talk is vague, naive and idealistic. ‘Leadership’ could mean almost everything since it is seldom defined or used in a precise or careful manner. Rather it is treated in very broad and positive terms and can refer to diverse things: from management, managerial work, collaboration and vision preaching to simply influencing, showing some initiative, massage egos or technical problem solving. The problems of the vagueness of leadership and the difficulties in sorting out its significance in relation to everything else that affects organizations does not prevent most groups from holding and expressing an almost religious belief in it. We need more leadership (leaders) and less management (managers) is a safe statement, likely to lead to agreement, praise and applause. To suggest that we need less leadership in organizations would probably raise eyebrows and be seen as a less serious view – perhaps even a joke – in many contexts. Particularly in a book on leadership – such as the one you are reading right now.

Nevertheless, this book suggests that we should be open to other options. Sometimes we might actually benefit from less emphasis, hope and investment (time and money) in leadership in favour of other ways of organizing work. Being aware of different options and thinking carefully about having more or less of leadership or other ways of organizing are vital. Of course this is not to say that we shouldn’t also work hard to improve leadership. This book makes a strong case for reflexive leadership, which means that people – senior and junior – think carefully about how to organize work and how to use both leadership and other ways of organizing to make workplaces function well.

The Case for Reflexive Leadership

It is important to acknowledge the often legitimate and important role of leadership. When we refer to leadership in this book we mean influencing ideas, meanings, understandings and identities of others within an asymmetrical (unequal) relational context (we will come back to this). Our point in this book is that we need to carefully consider what we mean by leadership, what it can and cannot do, when it might work, when it is not the best option and the alternative ways of organizing work. Sometimes leadership may be central, but so might management, the use of power and less hierarchical modes of organizing, including people being supported by teams, autonomy and professional networks rather than a leader. All this may be indirectly influenced by leadership that is, for example, focused on developing teams or encouraging people to use a broad set of contacts, but various modes of organizing often grow organically and are influenced by cultures, groups and individuals other than leaders.

As with ‘non-leadership’ approaches of organizing (e.g. bureaucracy, performance management, quality systems, entrepreneurship and professionalism) there are advantages and disadvantages to leadership. Take bureaucracy as an example – and in this context we are talking about the reliance on plans, rules, standard procedures which dominates in most organizations over a specific size and not red tape and rigidity. Bureaucracy often works well in standardized contexts; think of ‘machine bureaucracies’ such as McDonald’s and airline companies (Mintzberg, 1983). It normally leads to efficiency and reliability and to alienation and a low degree of initiative and creativity. Professionalism is also often a good thing: there is expertise, autonomy and a common identity amongst professionals such as physicians, dentists and social workers. But there is also a monopolization of certain types of work and experts tend to be inward oriented, focused on status and group privilege and can avoid healthy competition from other groups. There is often a guild mentality, with limited openness and eagerness to distance the group from others. It is, at least sometimes, a mixed blessing.

In some contexts and in some respects leadership works well, sometimes less so. A simple example of the latter is a knowledge-intensive context where most employees are well educated and experienced, rely heavily on their judgement and work independently and/or with peers. Here the idea of emphasizing leadership is often unhelpful. People may not like it or view it as irrelevant. Leadership efforts – the boss trying to turn people into devoted followers – are often counter-productive in such situations, at least under normal conditions. Sure, there is a need for qualified administration and coordination and sometimes for a dose of policing, but this concerns management more than leadership.

So, thinking about leadership and its alternatives is important. Within leadership there are also alternatives. Later we will explore the meaning(s) of leadership and come back to alternatives. For the moment, we offer the reader an appetizer: we suggest the consideration of leadership in terms of the prophet, preacher, psychotherapist, party host and pedagogue, that is, the ‘5Ps’ of doing leadership. These perhaps slightly playful labels draw attention to key activities of leadership: vision, values and morals, emotional support, a positive work climate, and learning and cognitive development. But more on this in Chapter 8.

Our idea is to avoid the inclination to adopt a sweeping view of leadership which equates it with everything ‘good’ and sees it as representing the solution to all kinds of problems. It is important to think about and use leadership ideas, but equally important to avoid being fixated on these – something that our contemporary leadership-worshipping age and the enormous leadership industry tend to seduce us into. But as the saying goes, if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything tends to be treated as a nail. If leadership is the key concept you are in love with and use then all relationships tend to be turned into leader/follower ones, which may create as much trouble and confusion as the hammer-carrier chasing nails all the time.

This leads us to the case for reflexivity. Like leadership, reflexivity is a buzzword – who does not want to be reflective (and most believe they are)?¹ But here we aim to take the concept seriously and will also discuss it (self-)critically. Being reflective essentially means that you are willing to consider what might be wrong with established ideas and beliefs, including your own. Thinking critically and considering alternatives are key. This will be more thoroughly discussed in the next chapter.

We aim to counter the habit of simply putting the good against the bad, even if we realize that many readers will not appreciate complicated messages. A simple, straightforward message is the key to all bestsellers in leadership. It is, however, also a reason for many problems. The simple solution – the supposedly superior, seductive leadership model – tends to foster unreflective mindlessness: simplistic, naive, over-optimistic beliefs. This is not typically what we need, although we do realize that we should not complicate things too much either.

Leadership: Covering (Almost) Everything, Being Good and – Therefore – Necessary

In order to make sense of leadership an increasing number of writings have emerged over some three decades. This development has resulted in a large and fragmented field of concepts, models and theories that presents a rather confusing picture. As noted by Kets de Vries (1994, p. 73):

When we plunge into the literature on leadership, we quickly become lost in a labyrinth: endless definitions, countless articles and never-ending polemics … it seems that more has been studied about less and less, to end up ironically with researchers studying everything about nothing.

If we look at various versions and views of leadership, the list seems almost endless: task-oriented, relations-oriented, laissez-faire, charismatic, transformational, transactional, servant, authentic, practice-based, relational, emotional, distributed, shared, strategic, administrative, complex, coaching, symbolic, visionary, etc. And with this book the reader can add reflexive leadership to the perhaps already too long and complicated list. The reader may now feel that this book just adds another label and offers a pseudo-innovation. Hopefully not – we are pretty sure that we approach the topic in a rather new and constructive way and at least partly solve the problem of dealing with all this confusing mass (and mess) of leadership views and labels. But we will come back to this.

Much contemporary literature portrays leaders and leadership as strong and determined, with the ability to challenge, influence and change. In many descriptions of contemporary leaders – although not always explicit – there is a glow of heroism. These are people doing high-powered influencing. Success – and also failure for that matter – are regularly attributed to the leader and his/her traits, behaviour or style. Traditionally, leadership related to people expected to carry out supervision in one sense or another in relation to their subordinates. Now, the leadership industry is much more into targeting broader and more abstract organizational issues such as culture, identity, vision and strategy. The focus has moved from supervisors and middle-level managers to CEOs and other senior people. A popular variant of the hero theme is how leaders’ behaviour, traits and abilities help to develop organizations in light of difficult challenges. Visionary and strategic leadership linked to radical change and development is often in focus. Leadership is about highly significant issues, forming the overall organizational direction, and is key for organizational survival.

But the field is broad and complex and there are also low-key, ‘post-heroic’ ideas on leadership. Leadership is here viewed as less spectacular and consisting of more mundane actions; the everyday managers are portrayed as humble and hardworking heroes who manage to accomplish change – or maintain high quality and efficiency – and business success incrementally. In a bestselling management book about how to be better than good it is suggested that the difference between excellent and mediocre organizations is intimately related to leader traits such as humbleness, endurance, professional will and a strong determination to contribute to creating organizational rather personal wealth (Collins, 2001).

This view is also expressed in leadership that involves listening, small talk, showing recognition, coaching and other ordinary activities. It is often suggested that leaders should have close contact with organizational reality and be engaged, supportive and positive – sometimes framed as varieties of post-heroism. Occasionally well-being among subordinates is made central – it is expected that the leader should contribute to a stimulating, fun, friendly and cosy working atmosphere. To this we can add that leadership also includes personal development, ethics, diversity, equality and organizational health.

Based on this brief overview of some common themes in leadership it is clear that there is a multitude of demands and expectations on leaders and on what leadership can (and should) accomplish. Normally we expect managers at a variety of different levels – including middle management – to exhibit a host of skills and traits to meet these demands in modern organizations. However, often there is a mismatch between demands and what the great majority of managers are capable of doing. They lack the skills, time and interest to do all this. And they are expected to do many other things, including carrying out regular managerial work in administration as well as the operative work that is necessary for complex organizations to function.

An important development over the last two decades or so is that junior and middle managers are exposed to mixed messages about what is commonly known as micro-management, that is, the supervision or control of detailed behaviour and predictable deliveries.² All managers, regardless of their position in the corporate food-chain are nowadays more or less assumed to exercise leadership. Thus they are all expected to take...