The Routledge Companion to Leadership

John Storey, Jean Hartley, Jean-Louis Denis, Paul 't Hart, David Ulrich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781032402390
• eBook ISBN: 9781317578239
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Leadership has never been more important – and divisive – than it is today. The idea and discourse of the leader remains a critical factor in organizational and societal performance, but there is evident tension between the persistent focus on the critical importance of individual leaders and the increasing emphasis on collective leadership. The Routledge Companion to Leadership provides a survey of the contentious and dynamic discipline of leadership.

This collection covers key themes in the field, including advances in leadership theory, leadership in a range of contexts and geographies, leadership failure, leadership process, and leadership development. Topics range from micro studies to wider political analyses of leadership, taking in unusual but important aspects such as portrayals of leadership in architecture, media, and science fiction. Contributions from 61 internationally renowned authors from 16 countries make available the full range of perspectives, approaches, and insights on the idea of leadership. Providing both a social sciences and a psychological approach, these go beyond common themes to offer diverse perspectives on such topics as emotion and leadership, portrayals of leadership. This volume situates leadership debates and evidence within contemporary leadership crises, while ensuring that the explorations of the issues are of enduring relevance.

With wide and critical coverage of the key topics and potent contextualization of themes in current events, The Routledge Companion to Leadership is the ideal resource for graduate study in leadership.

Part I

Conceptualizing Leadership

Introduction

Leadership is like the famous movie by Luis Bunuel – it is an obscure object of desire. When things go right or wrong in organizations, commentators all too readily either praise the role played by an exceptional leader or trace the problem to the lack of leadership. ‘Leadership’, like ‘communication’, is often used as one of those garbage can ideas used to make sense of a diversity of phenomena in society and organizations.

A variety of related concepts are associated with leadership. It is often used as synonymous with power or influence. The marker of leadership here will be found in the ability to observe empirically how certain individuals influence others in their actions or organizational behaviours. Leadership will thus be visible in action and not in the idealized expression of traits and attitudes. For others, leadership is more of a psychological phenomenon, in which identification and aspiration shape relations among individuals in organizations. The interest in ‘charisma’ is close to a psychological conceptualization of leadership. The notion of ‘authority’ also intersects with leadership. Some individuals, apparently more than others, impact on their environment. Of course, any careful observers of organizations will recognize that formal authority conveyed by hierarchical positions is only one piece of the puzzle. Influencing others and contributing to amazing achievements depend on a multitude of factors. While this is very plausible, formal authority has not to be neglected in any thinking about organizational leadership. Formal authority provides the individual with opportunities to be, or become, a leader. It may also, through a complex process of selection, reveal the advantages that some have over others in organizations and societies. Put differently, authority is one dimension of power and may place individuals in formal positions in a privileged niche from which to develop and deploy leadership. These considerations are all influenced by a relatively narrow representation of leadership. Leadership is mostly considered here as something that takes form in an individual – an individual that can be clearly identified and that is the carrier of an idealized and powerful representation of leaders. However, contemporary analyses of organizations have, through various theoretical prisms, called for a much more complex and messy picture of organizations and leadership (Uhl-Bien et al. 2007). Here, leadership is not only an obscure object of desire; it is somewhat intractable being located at a network of ramifications, interdependencies and joint production in discourses and actions. Leadership is not the property of individuals; it is the expression of a collective ability to shape organizations.

The four chapters in Part I of the Companion each in their own way explores various conceptions of leadership, showing that this domain of study is à la fois fertile but somewhat fuzzy. Each of the chapters seeks to bring some clarification and boundary about what we will conceive as ‘leadership’ in organizations.

In Chapter 1, Grint and colleagues review these competing representations of leadership. To navigate the field of leadership studies, the authors ask five questions: Is it WHO ‘leaders’ are that makes them leaders? Is it WHAT ‘leaders’ achieve that makes them leaders? Is it WHERE ‘leaders’ operate that makes them leaders? Is it WHY ‘leaders’ lead that makes them leaders? Is it HOW ‘leaders’ get things done that makes them leaders? They suggest refocusing leadership studies on the subject as a way to develop a more productive representation of this important phenomenon.

In Chapter 2, Ulrich and Allen explore three loci of leadership: the person, the organization and external stakeholders. They propose that leadership thinking should move outward and explore how leaders contribute (or not) to fulfil the expectations of these stakeholders. The promotion of such a shift in leadership studies is based on the growing role of intangible assets as represented for example in measuring the role of leadership in the evaluation of firms. Tools and metrics are offered in this chapter which can be used to assess empirically the leadership capital of firms and other organizations. The added value of this perspective is to look at leadership from a result-oriented perspective which departs from an approach in which leadership is considered to have intrinsic value by itself.

In Chapter 3, Sergi and colleagues explore representations and studies that go beyond the individual and heroic bias of the field. They suggest that it is important to bring context back in and to open up new and more collective views on leadership. Pluralistic organizations and networks are arenas where distributed and shared forms of leadership flourish. A more processual approach underlines that leadership is not a given in organizations. Actors have to work to position and reposition themselves as leaders in the organization. The authors conclude that more attention can be paid to atypical contexts such as virtual networks where innovative forms of leadership can develop, often in the periphery of hierarchical relations.

Finally, Chapter 4 by Rast and Hogg deals with the manifestation of leadership in contexts of crisis and uncertainty. In such contexts, landmarks that are used to define boundaries and relations are destabilized or blurred. Leadership tends to be reformulated to take into account attributes of unusual situations. The authors identify key identity and group processes which are required to understand how leadership takes shape and is transformed in the context of crisis. Such contexts offer opportunity for the development of atypical leadership figures; yet paradoxically they may also culminate in pressures for more conservative figures of leadership.

These chapters, taken as a whole, launch the book with a diversity of avenues for thinking about the many meanings of leadership. They also illustrate how leadership studies are pluralistic and in constant flux. The focus and boundaries of the field are in motion.

Reference

Uhl-Bien, M., R. Marion and B. McKelvey (2007). Complexity leadership theory: Shifting leadership from the industrial age to the knowledge era. The Leadership Quarterly, 18 (4), 298–318.

1

What Is Leadership

Person, Result, Position, Purpose or Process, or All or None of These?

Keith Grint, Owain Smolović Jones and Clare Holt

What Is Leadership?

Research into leadership – at least in written form – can be traced back to Plato in the West and Sun Tzu in the East, but we do not seem to be any nearer a consensus as to its basic meaning, let alone whether it can be taught or its moral effects measured and predicted, than we were well over two millennia ago. This cannot be because of a dearth of interest or material: on 29 October 2003, when one of the authors first tried to answer the question ‘what is leadership?’, there were 14,139 items relating to ‘leadership’ on Amazon.co.uk for sale. Assuming you could read these at the rate of one per day, it would take almost 39 years just to read the material, never mind write anything about leadership or practise it. Just two months later, that number had increased by 3 per cent (471 items) to 14,610. Assuming this increase was annualized, we could look forward to just under 20,000 items by the beginning of 2005, 45,000 by 2010 and 100,000 by 2015. In fact in January 2015 there were 126,149 items, so the increase is exponential. It should be self-evident that we do not need more ‘lists’ of leadership competences or skills, because leadership research appears to be anything but incremental in its approach to ‘the truth’ about leadership: the longer we spend looking at leadership, the more complex the picture becomes.

Traditionally, leadership is defined by its alleged opposite: management. Management is concerned with executing routines and maintaining organizational stability – it is essentially concerned with control; leadership is concerned with direction setting, with novelty and is essentially linked to change, movement and persuasion. Another way to put this is that management is the equivalent of déjà vu (seen this before), whereas leadership is the equivalent of vu jàdé (never seen this before). Management implies that managers have seen it all before and simply need to respond correctly to the situation by categorizing it and executing the appropriate process. Leadership implies that leaders have never seen anything like it before and must therefore construct a novel strategy. But this division is often taken to mean that different people are necessary to fill the different roles – hence anyone relegated to the role of ‘mere’ manager cannot be considered as bringing anything unique to the party – after all, their task is limited to the mechanical one of recognizing situations and applying pre-existing processes. That most roles actually require both recognition and invention should also be clear.

Another way of approaching the problem might be to consider what the most popular textbooks have to say on the issue. When one of the authors did this in 2003 (Grint, 2005a), the four best-selling general review texts on leadership were Hughes et al. (1999), Northouse (1997), Wright (1996) and Yukl (1998). Apart from noting the variegated properties of their definitions I was, and we are, left more rather than less confused by them. Leadership does seem to be defined differently and, even if there are some similarities, the complexities undermine most attempts to explain why the differences exist. That is to say, we know differences exist but we remain unable to construct a consensus about the concept. However, the dissensus seemed to hang around four areas of dispute: leadership defined as person, result, position and process. Ten years later, while the fourfold typology has proved useful, the paper by Kempster et al. (2011) rightly pointed out that it seemed to omit the very ‘purpose’ of leadership, and we have included that as a separate element.

The rest of this chapter focuses upon these five approaches and we conclude with an explanation of the problem of diversity and a way of constraining its effects. We hesitate to use the word ‘resolution’, because the explanation actively inhibits any resolution, but it does enable us to establish some parameters that we might use to understand why the differences exist in the first place. In other words, this does not provide a first step towards a consensus, but a first step towards understanding why a consensus might be unachievable. Moreover, the point is not simply to redescribe the varieties of interpretation, but to consider how this affects the way leadership is perceived, enacted, recruited and supported. For example, if organizations promote individuals on the basis of one particular interpretation of leadership, then that approach will be encouraged and others discouraged – but it may well be that other interpretations of leadership are critical to the organization’s success. Hence the importance of the definition is not simply to delineate a space in a language game, and it is not merely a game of sophistry; on the contrary, how we define leadership has vital implications for how organizations work – or do not work.

Let us first generate a taxonomy of leadership that does not claim universal coverage but should encompass a significant proportion of our definitions of leadership. Moreover, the typology is not hierarchical: it does not claim that one definition is more important than another and, contrary to the consensual approach, it is constructed upon foundations that may be mutually exclusive. In effect, we may have to choose which form of leadership we are talking about, rather than attempt to elide the differences. It is, however, quite possible that empirical examples of leadership embody elements of all five forms. Thus we are left with five major approaches:

• Leadership as Person: is it WHO ‘leaders’ are that makes them leaders?

• Leadership as Result: is it WHAT ‘leaders’ achieve that makes them leaders?

• Leadership as Position: is it WHERE ‘leaders’ operate that makes them leaders?

• Leadership as Purpose: is it WHY ‘leaders’ lead that makes them leaders?

• Leadership as Process: is it HOW ‘leaders’ get things done that makes them leaders?

All these aspects are ‘ideal types’, following Weber’s assertion (see Grint, 1998: 102–103) that no such ‘real’ empirical case probably exists in any pure form. But this does enable us to understand the phenomenon of leadership better, and its attendant confusions and complexities, because leadership means different things to different people. This is therefore a heuristic model, not an attempt to carve up the world into ‘objective’ segments that mirror what we take to be reality. We will suggest, having examined these five different approaches to leadership, that the differences both explain why so little agreement has been reached on the definition of leadership and explain why this is important to the execution and analysis of leadership. Finally, we use the work of Lacan to ask whether ‘leadership’ is so porous in meaning because it is an ‘empty-signifier’ – a vehicle capable of embodying all kinds of meanings and fantasies – hence its persistence, resilience and contested nature.

Defining Leadership

Person-Based Leadership

Is it who you are that determines whether you are a leader or not? This, of course, resonates with the traditional traits approach: a leader’s character or personality. We might consider the best example of this as the charismatic, to whom followers are attracted because of the charismatic’s personal ‘magnetism’. Ironically, while a huge effort has been made to reduce the ideal leader to his or her essence – the quintessential characteristics or competencies or behaviours of the leader – the effort of reduction has simultaneously reduced its value. It is rather as if a leadership scientist had turned chef and was engaged in reducing a renowned leader to his or her elements by placing them in a saucepan and applying heat. Eventually, the residue left from the cooking could be analysed and the material substances divided into their various chemical compounds. Take, for instance, Wofford’s (1999: 525) claim that laboratory research on charisma would develop a ‘purer’ construct ‘free from the influences of such nuisance variables as performance, organizational culture and other styles of leadership’. What a culture-free leader would like is anyone’s guess and this attempted purification is literally reductio ad absurdum: a pile of chemical residues might have con...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Routledge Companion to Leadership
• Endorsement
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• PART I Conceptualizing Leadership
• PART II Studying Leadership
• PART III Practising Leadership
• PART IV Contextualizing Leadership
• PART V Evaluating Leadership
• PART VI Imagining Leadership
• PART VII Nurturing Leadership
• Index