Critical Perspectives on Leadership

The Language of Corporate Power

Mark Learmonth, Kevin Morrell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351602815
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Within contemporary culture, 'leadership' is seen in ways that appeal to celebrated societal values and norms. As a result, it is becoming difficult to use the language of leadership without at the same time assuming its essentially positive, intrinsically affirmative nature. Within organizations, routinely referring to bosses as 'leaders' has, therefore, become both a symptom and a cause of a deep, largely unexamined new conceptual architecture. This architecture underpins how we think about authority and power at work. Capitalism, and its turbo-charged offspring neo-liberalism, have effectively captured 'leader' and 'leadership' to serve their own purposes. In other words, organizational leadership today is so often a particular kind of insidious conservativism dressed up in radical adjectives.

This book makes visible the work that the language of leadership does in perpetuating fictions that are useful for bosses of work organizations. We do this so that we – and anyone who shares similar discomforts – can make a start in unravelling the fiction. We contend that even if our views are contrary to the vast and powerful leadership industry, our basic arguments rest on things that are plain and evident for all to see.

Critical Perspectives on Leadership: The Language of Corporate Power will be key reading for students, academics and practitioners in the disciplines of Leadership, Organizational Studies, Critical Management Studies, Sociology and the related disciplines.

1

INTRODUCING THE LANGUAGE OF LEADERSHIP

This book takes a stand against the rise of what we call the ‘language of leadership’ in organizational life. We use the phrase ‘language of leadership’ to signal the way in which some people (bosses or others with authority in organizational life) are now routinely referred to as ‘leaders’; just as what they do routinely gets called ‘leadership’.

At first glance, whether we call bosses ‘leaders’ – or anything else – might seem a relatively trivial matter. But because they are used so routinely, the terms ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ are becoming foundational in our thinking. Indeed, these terms perhaps feature in our everyday talk about work organizations – before we do any thinking. Here it is worth recalling Orwell’s caution we referred to in the Preface to be on our guard against readymade phrases. The language of leadership is made up of readymade phrases that have invaded everyday talk and they pre-package the world of work. They frame some fundamental, taken-for-granted beliefs about power and organizational life.

Within contemporary culture, ‘leadership’ is seen in ways that appeal to celebrated societal values and norms. As a result, it is becoming difficult to use any of this language of leadership without at the same time assuming its essentially positive, intrinsically affirmative nature. Routinely referring to bosses as ‘leaders’ has, therefore, become both a symptom and a cause of a deep, largely unexamined new conceptual architecture. This architecture underpins how we think about authority and power at work. Capitalism, and its turbo-charged offspring neo-liberalism, seem to have effectively captured ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’. Capitalism and neo-liberalism are both associated with competition and individualism and both make inequality at work natural or even a cause for celebration. The account of authority and power provided by the language of leadership boosts the status of the elite bosses, while at the same time it has been important in legitimating pay cuts and the precarious conditions of work for those near the bottom of the pile.

These are all reasons that we are critical of ‘leadership’ – because we see the language of leadership as something that has been hijacked by managerial elites. We are not necessarily critical of the phenomenon of leadership itself – in the sense in which the term has more traditionally been used however. Along with some major social theorists who have written about leadership (e.g. Max Weber and Sigmund Freud) we have no problem with calling someone a leader if they genuinely have ‘followers’ and can therefore legitimately claim to be among the ranks of people such as eminent politicians, religious or military figures and the like. ‘Having followers’ is, for us, one of the basic criteria someone needs to meet for ‘leader’ to be a meaningful and appropriate term. The trouble is that bosses of work organizations are very rarely leaders in this conventional sense. As far as most workplaces are concerned, as survey after survey has consistently shown, more people hate their bosses than admire them. According to a recent Gallup poll for instance, ‘eighty-five percent of workers worldwide admit to hating their jobs when surveyed anonymously … many people in the world hate their job and especially their boss’ (Return to Now, 2017). Even fewer workers would consider that they ‘follow’ their bosses. Indeed, it is for this reason that in Chapter 9 we argue that calling workers ‘followers’ is most likely to be considered an insult to workers themselves.

The Language of Leadership

Our use of the phrase, ‘language of leadership’ is different from some other uses. More typically, when people say the ‘language of leadership’ they mean something like tips on how to persuade (or manipulate) people. It can mean how to sound like a leader; or what to say in front of a mirror that will make you believe that you are a leader; or even how to stand – what ‘power pose’ to adopt perhaps. When we use the ‘language of leadership’, we are referring to a sub-vocabulary that is invading corporate life (and life elsewhere). Some examples of terms from the language of leadership in the sense we mean are shown in Table 1.1.

TABLE 1.1 The Language of Leadership

Core terms	Leader, Lead, Leading, Leadership (and even ‘Leaderful’) referring to a role, person, activity, quality or process
The kind of person or process or style of being a leader or kind of leadership	Adaptive Leader, Altruistic Leader, Autocratic Leader, Authentic Leader, Benevolent Leader, Change Leader, Character Leader, Charismatic Leader, Coaching Leader, Collaborative Leader, Cross-cultural Leader, CSR Leader, Democratic Leader, Differentiated Leader, Distributed Leader, Embodied Leader, Empowering Leader, Ethical Leader, Integrative Leader, Laissez-faire Leader, Participative Leader, People-oriented Leader, Positive Leader, Primal Leader, Purpose-driven Leader, Relational Leader, Safety Leader, Self-Leader, Servant Leader, Social Justice Leader, Spiritual Leader, Strategic Leader, Strong Leader,Task-oriented Leader, Team Leader, Thought Leader, Transactional Leader, Transformational Leader, Transformative Leader (in this list, wherever it says leader we can also have leadership)
Jobs that are a	Leadership … Challenge / Opportunity / Position / Role / Task / Vacancy
A training activity	Leadership … Awareness / Building / Coaching / Development / Mentoring / Mindfulness / Training
A ‘real’ quality	Authentic … / Have a Track Record of … / Have Proven … / Showed … / Genuine … / Real … / True … ‘Leadership’ (which concedes that a lot of what could be called ‘leadership’ is not real in any conventional way of thinking about the real.)
Jobs require you to	Demonstrate … / Display … / Embody … / Role Model … / Show … Leadership
A kind of follower or followership	Activist / Bystander / Alienated / Collaborator / Colluder / Conformer / Courageous / Diehard / Dynamic / Isolate / Leader-centric / Loyal / Pragmatic / Star / Sheep / Yes-person … Follower(ship)
Terms that imply a leader or the need for leadership	Vison / Values / Hearts and Minds / Strategy / True North / Compass-setting / Direction-setting / Path-breaking and – most basically perhaps – Change

We are not simply using the phrase ‘language of leadership’ to pick out the specific cluster of terms in Table 1.1. In any case, the table is not an exhaustive list of phrases. Nor are any of these phrases necessarily wrong in any way. Any one of them could be being used appropriately by authors or people describing a setting. Despite our cynicism about the language of leadership we are also not suggesting that when any of these terms are used that our eyes should simply glaze over and that we ought to disregard whatever is said next because it is bound to be nonsense (though it often is close to being nonsense in our experience).

Even though we have set the table out in this way, the ‘language of leadership’ does not just mean a bundle of terms that can be used to refer to a quality or a role, or practice, or person or process, or to describe a set of characteristics or behaviours in any given situation. Instead, we are critical of the language of leadership for a broader reason. The cynicism we have about these readymade terms is motivated by a simple, but powerful idea: that these words ‘do’ things. In saying that terms do things we mean they are not purely descriptive. Instead, the very act of calling something ‘leadership’, or calling someone a ‘leader’, or using any of the terms in Table 1.1 or similar terms – actually changes the nature of that situation. As we explain in more detail in Chapters 6 and 7, the words that we use to describe the social world also create our world. Each of the terms and phrases from the language of leadership in Table 1.1 ‘does’ things when it is used to describe the world of work.

This distinction between describing the social world and creating the social world is what motivates Orwell’s caution that we be on our guard against readymade phrases. It is crucial when it comes to dissecting terms like ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ because it is through ordinary, day-to-day language that we create the world at work. These terms come bundled with assumptions about how we should understand relations of power in work organizations. Throughout the book, we identify and challenge these assumptions. We unravel the language of leadership by identifying the connotations and associations ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ have in contemporary organizational life. We explore these and explain how they affect those who become called ‘leaders’ and those who they might believe they lead.

There are contradictions and tensions that come bundled with terms like ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’. On the one hand, these terms are used in ways that suggest people called ‘leaders’ are in positions of unquestioned power and authority. On the other hand, the overwhelmingly positive associations to the terms ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ suggest organizational leaders are ‘good’ or ‘nice’ in some way. Unlike ‘managers’ – whom we might even expect to have occasional conflict with their subordinates – ‘leaders’ must have followers for the term ‘leader’ to make sense. ‘Leaders’ at work are, by definition, on the same side as those they lead – or else why would they deserve the title? As Jeffrey Pfeffer (2015a) has pointed out:

Over the last several decades, the [leadership] industry has produced a recipe for how to be a successful corporate leader: Be trustworthy and authentic, serve others (particularly those who work for and with you), be modest, and exhibit empathetic understanding and emotional intelligence.

The routine, readymade uses of ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ are redrawing our picture of relations at work. What these terms ‘do’ goes beyond describing people who are in positions of power and authority. Instead, the use of these terms creates and justifies a particular kind of relationship. This has two aspects: flattering bosses and flattening workers – the core themes of this book.

Flattering Bosses

The first aspect to the readymade uses of these terms is that talking about bosses as leaders overly flatters them and excessively glamourizes their roles. As mentioned, this is because the title ‘leader’ has connotations of an authority and power that goes unquestioned. To call someone ‘leader’ implies more than that they have been appointed to a formal position of authority. It suggests there is something ‘special’ about them and their authority. This implication airbrushes away the kind of conflict at work that we might associate with the term manager. For this reason, one of the important consequences of the rise in the language of leadership is that the people who used to think of themselves as mere ‘managers’ can now imagine themselves using a term that makes them sound much grander and considerably more important. They can imagine themselves as ‘leaders’.

The following quote by John Hendry (2013: 96–7) captures the ways in which many people imagine what it must be like to be a ‘manager’:

For most managers, management is basically a job … Few people become managers … out of a sense of vocation. It is not something they do out of a burning desire to express themselves, to contribute to society or humanity, or to take a stand on issues that matter to them. A successful manager … might well be proud of her achievements, but being a manager … is rarely in itself a source of great pride. … It is a job, and a good and respectable job, and for many people an interesting and/or remunerative one, but at the end of the day it’s just a job.

In contrast, Gianpiero and Jennifer Petriglieri (Petriglieri and Petriglieri, 2015: 631) show us how today’s dominant cultural image of the organizational leader is rather different:

The image of leadership that predominates is of an individual ascending to, or occupying, a position of hierarchical power, competently adapting to his or her environment, and wielding his or her influence to achieve financial (or otherwise measurable) results and, in so doing, rising further up the ladder. … [thus, this image] portray[s] leaders as ‘crafters of their own fortunes’ … in a world where success – usually defined as promotions and profits – hinges on making the right decisions in high-stake situations … a worldview in which individualism and heroism prevail.

When we call one person a leader and another person a manager, we are not just naming them differently. While managers are generally imagined as bureaucrats, leaders are imagined to be admired by their followers, shareholders and market analysts alike; imagined too, as being able to transform organizations and those who work for them as they pursue their visionary strategies (Wilson, 2016). In other words, a key reason the language of leadership has become popular is because it has suited the interests of those who represent corporate power – the bosses. This language has become a pro-elite resource; a kind of filter through which elites can imagine and project their identities in much more positive (and functionally useful) ways than was the case with the language of management.

Flattening Workers

The second way in which the language of leadership is redrawing social relations is perhaps even more important. ‘Leaders’ at work, by definition, have the same goals as their so-called ‘followers’; although ‘leaders’ set these goals. Yet the language of leadership is often a mask or disguise because – plainly – those in positions of power often have different and incompatible interests to those lower down the organizational hierarchy. Routinely using ‘leader’ is almost a form of permission that allows this disguise to persist. It can make us turn our eyes away from wider injustices that many so-called leaders benefit from.

Over the last thirty years or so, one of the huge ironies of the growth in popularity of the term ‘leader’, as we examine in more detail in Chapter 4, is that it has occurred at the same time as there has been a massive deterioration in pay, job security and working conditions for many ordinary workers. This widening gap undercuts any idea that there are more harmonious relations between ‘leaders’ and their supposed ‘followers’. On the contrary, the deterioration in ordinary workers’ pay has directly benefited senior staff in terms of pay rises at the top. Often such pay rises are also conditional on ‘efficiency gains’ or what we might call work intensification.

When we redraw this picture and redescribe managers as leaders, we are reshaping the ways in which we imagine organizational elites. The overwhelmingly positive cultural images and associations surrounding the term ‘leadership’ are reshaping the image of bosses. This is done in a way that is not simply glamourizing and flattering to them, but that also actively serves their wider political and financial interests, in the process denying the interests of ordinary workers.

‘Leadership’ is Terminally Toxic

Given the pro-elite associations of ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’, w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. Introducing the Language of Leadership
• PART I: Against ‘Leadership’
• PART II: ‘Leadership’ as Rhetoric
• PART III: The Seductions of ‘Leadership’
• PART IV: Resistance
• References
• Index