Leadership and Organization

A Philosophical Introduction

Sverre Spoelstra

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138917095
• eBook ISBN: 9781317423614
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

This book is a philosophical exploration of the relationship between leadership and organization. Each chapter in the book sheds light on this relationship by exploring leadership with respect to a particular theme: charisma, authority, religion, language, authenticity, image and followership. These themes are linked to popular notions of leadership, such as transformational leadership, authentic leadership and servant leadership.

Offering insight into the ways in which leadership is understood in contemporary culture, the main thesis of Leadership and Organization is that understandings of leadership today are still shaped by the figure of the charismatic leader, even though charismatic leadership itself has lost much of its appeal. The clearest expression of this paradigm is the leadership-management distinction, where the leader is someone who transcends the organization and the manager someone who resides within the organization. Drawing on a broad variety of sources in continental philosophy, the author explores the central philosophical question of how leadership can be understood in relation to organization

This book provides new perspectives on leadership that will be of interest to all students, academics and practitioners who are interested in challenging their thinking about leadership. It will particularly appeal to those considering leadership studies from a critical or philosophical angle.

1

The paradigm of the charismatic leader

Introduction

Within business discourse, it has become a cliché to call for more leadership and less management, suggesting that the difference between the two is of crucial importance. This idea—that management is something fundamentally different than leadership—has been with us since the 1970s. A particularly good early example of this distinction is Abraham Zaleznik’s influential article, ‘Managers and leaders: are they different?’, published in the Harvard Business Review in 1977. In the article, Zaleznik (1977: 70) answers his question with a resounding ‘yes’, stating that: ‘managers and leaders are very different kinds of people’. His basic message is that leaders are visionary, empathic and inspirational, whereas managers are risk-averse, lack empathy, and are locked into their organizational function. Tellingly, in the article Zaleznik speaks of ‘competent managers’ and ‘great leaders’, suggesting that management is a function that one can perform in a more or less competent manner, whereas true leadership requires a certain greatness, for example in the form of a grand vision that excites people to move into uncharted territory. According to Zaleznik (1977), leaders feel separated from the organization, which is necessary so that they can exert influence over it, whereas managers feel part of the organization. Leaders are active: they shape the organization and its context, whereas managers are passive, letting their organization be shaped by its context.¹

With the distinction between leadership and management, a straightforward diagnosis of failing organizations can be made: more leadership is needed. Particularly famous is John Kotter’s claim that failing organizations tend to be ‘overmanaged’ and ‘underled’ (Kotter, 1990), with the deceptively simple implication that we need more leadership, and less management. Management, according to Kotter (1990: 4), is about producing ‘consistency and order’ by means of activities such as planning, budgeting, staffing and problem-solving, whereas leadership is primarily about ‘vision’ and ‘inspiration’. For Kotter, these leadership qualities are ‘forces’ that are not locatable within the organization: they come from outside it, and are needed to overcome the organization in its present form. In other words, for Kotter leadership is needed to disrupt a present order that prevents the organization from moving in the right direction.²

Another popular way of expressing the leadership/management dichotomy is the distinction between transformational leadership and transactional leadership, popularized by Bernard M. Bass (1985). The transformational leader motivates their followers to unexpected heights by means of an inspiring vision, and the transactional leader manages daily affairs through the activities that are prescribed in their task description. What Bass designates as the transformational leader is essentially the same as what Zaleznik and Kotter refer to as ‘the leader’, whereas the transactional leader is another term for ‘the manager’.³ The overall message is once again that organizations may need some transactional leadership, but that transformational leadership makes the decisive difference between the mediocre organization and the truly successful one.

This distinction between leadership and management, and different versions of it, including the idea of transformational leadership, are so deeply ingrained in contemporary leadership discourse that one could be excused for thinking that this is how leadership has always been thought of. But this is not the case, and part of this chapter tells the story how the distinction between management and leadership became so popular. The central point of reference in telling this story is the so-called charismatic leader. My thesis is that the figure of the charismatic leader functions as a ‘paradigm’ for contemporary ideas about leadership, which is to say that the way we currently think about leadership is structured by the example (the word ‘paradigm’ originates from the Greek term paradeigma, which means ‘example’) of the charismatic leader. This does not mean that the charismatic leader is the most celebrated leader. We shall see that his popularity—paradigmatically, the leader is not female—has waned strongly since the early 1990s. The thesis I will develop, in this chapter and the chapters that follow, is that charismatic leadership towers over contemporary thinking about leadership, even when it is itself evaluated negatively.

In comparison to the other chapters in this book, this chapter deals little with philosophy. The purpose of this first chapter is slightly different: to map the territory. Hence, we look primarily at popular and academic constructs of leadership, as they exist today.

On the idea of leading by example

A popular expression in leadership discourse is to ‘lead by example’. What this usually means is that the person who is recognized as a leader must display the behaviour that he or she looks for in followers, perhaps even in an exaggerated fashion. For instance, to achieve ‘extraordinary things’, Kouzes and Posner (2007: 16) suggest that the leader must ‘go first by setting the example through daily actions that demonstrate that they are deeply committed to their beliefs’. The clear message is that a true leader cannot rely on pretty words alone: to be inspiring one must be inspired, to foster creativity one must be creative, to create commitment one must be committed, and so on.

When leadership by example is propagated, the meaning of ‘example’ is rarely reflected upon. This is a shame, because the term itself can already bring us quite far in thinking about leadership. The term is Latin in origin, with the literal meaning of ‘that which is taken out’. This is still consistent with everyday use of the term and can be interpreted in two different ways. First, one may think of the example as a random item taken from a group of items, as in ‘green is an example of a colour’. In this case, the example may have been any other colour. Second, one may think of the example as that which is taken from the group but that is especially well suited to show the nature of the group as a whole, as in ‘dog is an example of a companion animal’. In the latter case, I chose ‘dog’ not as a random example from the entire set of pets, but as a so-called ‘paradigmatic example’, which captures something essential about the relation between humans and pets (‘pets are loyal, like a dog’). In this case, the example is not randomly taken out, but also keeps the set together: the set appears as a set because of the example. We may also say that the dog, in relation to a set of companion animals, is both ordinary (just another member of a particular order) and extraordinary (out of the ordinary, because it captures the entire set particularly well).

Analogies to leadership offer themselves: the leader is quite literally someone who is extra-ordinary—someone who stands besides or above a certain order, such as an organization or society, whilst also being a member of that order. This also applies to the idea of the exemplary leader: the exemplary leader is, paradoxically, both inside and outside the organization. Exemplary leaders are part of the organization as ordinary organizational members, who get a monthly pay cheque like anybody else, but they are also ‘taken out’. As out-standing figures, they may exemplify something that is considered to be part of the identity of the organization as a whole or they may exemplify something that others ought to try to live up to.

This essential unlocatability—deriving from an existence simultaneously inside and outside the organization, has great implications for what is and what is not recognized as leadership. In particular, the role of the leader as an example makes explicit rules unnecessary. The philosopher and historian of science Thomas Kuhn provides a good example of this. In his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn (1970) influentially proposed that science also proceeds by means of paradigms. One of the ways in which Kuhn uses the word ‘paradigm’ is precisely as ‘an example, a single case that by its repeatability acquires the capacity to model tacitly the behaviour and research practices of scientists’ (Agamben, 2009: 32). Kuhn provides the example of Newton’s highly influential work Principia, which showed a model for scientific research that was followed by many others; it created, in Kuhn’s terms, ‘normal science’. Following this notion of the paradigm, i.e. as example, it would be a mistake to associate different research paradigms with different methodological rules. The point of Kuhn’s notion of a paradigm is that science is not governed by a set of rules for scientific inquiry, but by a model from which tacit rules follow. Ludwick Fleck’s (1979) concept of a ‘thought style’, one of Kuhn’s sources of inspiration, expresses the idea that researchers within a paradigm think alike. Therefore, a radical formulation of Kuhn’s thesis is that science proceeds through exemplary leadership rather than through methodology.

On this interpretation, there is an interesting analogy between paradigms in science and leadership by example. Both are, in a sense, forms of ‘rulership without rules’: the example rules without relying on explicit rules. It can do so because it offers a model that inspires imitation. Leadership by example, we might say, is precisely not a form of ‘ruling’ because it exerts influence without the help of rules. Leadership, as we understand it today, tends to be contrasted with rulership (if rulership is taken to consist of setting rules).

But what do we mean when we say that the leader is not a ruler, or that the leader does not rely on rules? It is fairly obvious that, empirically speaking, this is a half-truth at best: anyone who has closely observed the practice of a ‘really existing’ leader (that is, a person who is recognized as a leader) knows that people recognized as leaders do, in fact, at least occasionally impose rules on others, which suggests that leadership can at least take the form of rulership. One may therefore conclude that we are simply wrong in insisting on the separation between leadership and rulership; empirically, they often come together.

I have already touched on this point in the Introduction, but it is worth stressing again: in this book we are not primarily concerned with really existing leaders, but with ideas about leadership. Ideas about leadership change (and this chapter deals with some of these changes). If we say that leadership is different from rulership this means that the way we tend to think about leadership today is different from—even opposed to—the way we think about ‘rulership’ (or, as we shall explore in the next chapter, ‘authoritarianism’).

So, how do we grasp how leadership is paradigmatically understood? The answer must be clear by now: we are in need of an example. In this case, not an example of a particular human individual, who ‘leads by example’, but of a concept of leadership that exemplifies how leadership is today understood. In other words, we are looking for a particular concept of leadership that shows how leadership is thought about; that defines the ‘thought style’ of leadership. The example, or ‘paradigmatic example’, that this chapter suggests is the figure of the charismatic leader.⁴

First, however, we will take a brief look at the etymology of the words ‘leadership’ and ‘management’, to emphasize that the meanings of these words are by no means fixed: ‘leadership’ is not necessarily in opposition to functions, management, organization, order, rules, and so on, even if this how leadership is today predominantly understood.

‘Leadership’ and ‘management’

The etymology of the words ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ are extremely complex, partly because their contemporary meanings have developed not only from their own roots but also from translations from other languages, such as the Greek hēgemonia, ‘hegemony’, and the Latin ducere, ‘to guide’. Also important are twentieth century translations of the Italian duce and the German Führer, with important references to the ‘authoritarian leadership’ of Mussolini and Hitler.

The English term ‘leadership’ itself is rather young. It has been in frequent use for less than two hundred years, but the verb ‘to lead’ has a much longer history. The roots of ‘leadership’ stem from the Old English lædere, which, according to some sources, goes back to the ninth century. It is affiliated to the German leiten (not the German führen, which has the same root as the English ‘to fare’), the Dutch leiden and the Old Norse leitha. All of these verbs are derived from the Proto Germanic laidijaną, ‘to cause to go’. If one goes even further back, one gets to the Proto-Indo-European ‘leyt’, ‘to go, to depart, to die’. The connotation of death is still present in the German leiden and the Dutch lijden, both having the meaning of ‘to suffer’. To summarize, the dominant etymological meaning of ‘to lead’ is ‘to guide’, ‘to go’ or ‘to travel’. If there is an agent involved in the process of leading, then he, she or it (also the wind, the clouds, the spirit, and even conditions or circumstances can ‘lead’) causes others to go, and thereby acts as a guide towards a different place. In that sense, a ‘leader’ always implies at least one ‘follower’.

Often when one uses the verb ‘to lead’, the guidance that is offered does not lead to any other place, but to a better or higher place. In these cases, ‘to lead’ has a normative dimension. Translations of the Latin ducere are of particular interest here, with connotations of leading one towards the right path (inducere, ‘to induce’) and to lead one away from the straight path (seducere, ‘to seduce’).⁵ To seduce is to lead astray or to ‘mislead’, hence not to exercise leadership in the proper sense of the word. As we shall see, this normative dimension is something that clearly shows itself in contemporary discourse about leadership, where the argument often is that ‘real’ leadership is by definition ‘good’ leadership in a normative sense.

From the nineteenth century onwards, when the term ‘leadership’ starts to appear, leadership is also frequently associated with office or administration. One could make a case that such use of the term is imprecise in relation to its etymological roots. This is the point made by Walters (2009: 89), who, on the basis of an etymological study of ‘lead’ and ‘leadership’, concludes that ‘position may be a part of leadership but when the term leadership is used to denote a position, the term is used casually and not precisely nor technically’. However, given that ‘to lead’ may also refer back to non-human agents, it is perhaps not strange that also ‘governments’ or ‘positions’ may be said to exercise leadership over people. In any case, what is interesting is that the connotation of leadership with ‘position’ or ‘office’ has been quite dominant in certain periods over the last two centuries. This is clear, for instance, in the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of ‘leadership’:

The dignity, office, or position of a leader, esp. of a political party; ability to lead; the position of a group of people leading or influencing others within a given context; the group itself; the action or influence necessary for the direction or organization of effort in a group undertaking. (Emphasis added)

In recent times, the association of leadership with office or function was particularly strong after the Second World War, until the 1960s. As we shall see, this is important in relation to the notion of ‘charisma’ and ‘charismatic leadership’, which became popular in the US in the 1960s and in business discourse in the 1970s. Charisma, following Weber’s definition, is precisely not tied to function, and it is this anti-functional sense of leadership that is still dominant today.

Before we move on to contemporary discourse about leadership, let us also take a brief look at its counterpart, ‘management’. Raymond Williams has an interesting entry on management in his book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Its origins are from the Italian maneggiare, with the meaning ‘to handle and especially to handle or to train horses’ (Williams, 2015: 139) (the Latin manus means ‘hand’). According to Williams, this meaning became intertwined with the French ménager, ‘to use carefully’, and ménage, ‘household’. The idea of the manager, as it is known today, captures this dual origin: ‘from trainer and director (maneggiare) to careful housekeeper (ménager)’ (Williams, 2015: 140). Williams further notes that in the twentieth century the term ‘manager’ becomes dissociated from bureaucracy, in the sense that managers are generally seen to reside in the corporate world, whereas bureaucrats are found in public institutions, even when ‘their actual activities are identical’ (Williams, 2015: 140). Today, we can note this distinction for instance in (especially British) universities, where ‘management’ often refers to those who bring business principles—such as forms of corporate assessment—into the university; they are ‘managers’ rather than ‘public servants’ or ‘bureaucrats’. When it is said that these managers are supposed to act like ‘leaders’, this signals that they ought to be more than corporatized bureaucrats; they must, for instance, also be visionary.

This brief excursion of the etymological roots of leadership and management reminds us that their meanings are not set in stone, and that their relation can be thought in different ways. Both the term ‘leader’ and the term ‘manager’ have the connotation of directing, i.e. to give direction or to show the way, and both have been associated with holding an office. But they can also be seen as having rather different meanings, especially when management is associated with the practical guidance that is needed to keep a household (or organization) going, and leadership with a higher form of guidance, such as spiritual or ethical guidance.

In the next section, we move from the etymological history of leadership to contemporary leadership discourse in business, and the paradigm of the charismatic leader in particular. Specifically, I will ask how charismatic leadership could become a dominant way of thinking about leadership.

Charismatic leadership as a response to crisis

Charismatic leadership, in the sense that we use this phrase today, is of rather recent origin. Max Weber introduced the term to the social sciences in the early twentieth century, notably in his 1915 lecture ‘politics and vocation’ (Weber, 2004) and posthumously in his magnum opus Ec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The paradigm of the charismatic leader
• 2. Leadership and authority
• 3. Leadership after the death of God
• 4. How to lead with words
• 5. Authentic leadership and its mirror
• 6. Images of leadership
• 7. Followership
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index