Researching Leadership-As-Practice

The Reappearing Act of Leadership

Vasilisa Takoeva

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000376449
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Business
• Sous-sujet: Gestione

One current challenge of conducting research from the leadership-as-practice perspective is a practical one: how to capture and analyse the elusive practice of leadership within the web of mundane organising processes. Although a number of researchers have attempted to address the issue, there is not yet a definitive 'how to' guide to making sense of the empirical manifestations of leadership practices.

The book responds directly to this challenge and offers a theoretical framework and practical guidance to capturing, identifying and analysing evidence of leadership practice emergence; and provides implications of this approach for leadership academics and practitioners. The developed framework enables a method for understanding these leadership instances as they are enacted by individuals within and against the evolving activities of their day-to-day work. The framework is underpinned by cultural-historical activity theory and critical realism and it conceptualises leadership practice by placing agents' actions and interactions within the context of their relationships, objectives, experiences, material and non-material artefacts and wider organising processes and organisational structures; work that has not yet been undertaken in the field. It offers a strong theoretical foundation for further development of our understanding of leadership-as-practice, providing a methodological guidance for undertaking leadership-as-practice research, and enables a discussion on the variety of underlying processes and elements as they emerge from empirical observations.

It will be of value to researchers, academics, professionals, and students in the fields of business and management with a particular interest in management theory, organisational studies, and leadership research.

1 What Is Leadership-as-Practice?

An Introduction

Setting the Scene

This book explores leadership from a practice perspective, theoretically and empirically.

A relatively recent development within the leadership field, leadership-as-practice emerged in the last decade in response to a call for a better understanding of the mundane routines and day-to-day actions that people experience in organisations as the reality of leadership. Rejecting the entitative, or individual-based, ontology that had been traditionally adopted by leadership researchers and steering the attention towards individuals—the ‘leaders’—their traits, styles, skills and behaviours, the leadership-as-practice approach emphasises the importance of focusing on the human and non-human interactions as the “unit of analysis” and calls for their exploration within an organisational context (Crevani and Endrissat, 2016). Following the “practice turn” in the broader landscape of organisation studies (Carroll, Levy and Richmond, 2008), it assumes that leadership—similar to strategy—is not ‘done’ by the individuals in the boardrooms and not even always done in the meeting rooms; rather, it is enacted through the myriad of questions, decisions, actions and interactions that affect and alter the flow of people’s activities.

The book title echoes a prominent article by Alvesson and Sveningsson (2003) “The great disappearing act: difficulties in ‘doing’ leadership” and directly responds to the arguments raised in the paper. Drawing on the lack of consistent leadership discourse in managers’ narratives when asked to define the term and to describe how it translates into their practice, Alvesson and Sveningsson propose that leadership is a theoretical construct that may or may not relate to a ‘real’ phenomenon:

A closer look sensitive to incoherencies and deviations from the claimed characteristics of leadership means that it dissolves; even as a discourse it is not carried through. Not even the massive presence of scripts for leadership articulation in contemporary organizations, provided by popular press and management educators, seems to be sufficient to produce coherent treatment of the subject matter.

(p. 379)

The premise of this book provides an explanation for the discrepancies in individuals’ narrative of leadership and the applied practice of leadership, as these two belong to essentially different social domains. The explanation is derived from the philosophy of critical realism, which underpins my research and is introduced in detail in later chapters. From this standpoint, leadership phenomenon itself is regarded as a socially real process that unfolds within day-to-day routines and patterns of interaction resulting in increased direction, alignment and commitment (Drath et al., 2008). In contrast, leadership theories are conceptually real that may and will inform individuals’ ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’ leadership.

This means that individuals’ engagement in leadership practice does not have to translate into an ability to recall or describe their leadership actions or produce an accurate or consistent account of consequent impact and outcomes. On the contrary, these individuals become involved in leadership practice as part of their coping with everyday activities, and they are not necessarily aware of them or of the contextual factors driving and shaping them. The context of leadership emergence is diverse and includes, but is not limited to, the individuals’ intentions, their ongoing actions, past experiences and future aspirations as well as material and non-material artefacts, assumed norms of communication and behaviour and wider organisational structures and processes. The apparent variety of the potential foci of attention has led to a wide range of leadership interpretations within the growing body of leadership practice research.

Therefore, it is not surprising that, despite great promise, leadership-as-practice has posed a methodological conundrum for leadership researchers, which has not yet been fully answered—that is, how to identify and study something that is so embedded in the organisational practices that individuals may not even be aware of them? In this book, chapter by chapter, I present an attempt to theorise, capture and analyse leadership practice through the lens of cultural-historical activity theory.

The Purpose for This Book

This book will be of interest to readers for several reasons. First, for those interested in conducting organisational research from a practice perspective, and in particular, in extending the leadership-as-practice horizon, it provides a clear and practical methodological guidance for empirical examination—from framing the research questions and fieldwork design to analysis and validation. This book is written on the basis of an exploration of leadership-as-practice, and therefore, the narrative is focused on elucidating the process of co-construction of leadership practice as it unfolds within individuals’ interactions, illustrated through examples—“episodes”—of the ‘small acts’ of leadership emerging where agents address the appearing and re-appearing tensions in their day-to-day activities. However, this approach could be adopted to uncover other organising practices—for example, strategy, learning and knowledge management.

Second, the book offers a way of theorising leadership-as-practice using a conceptual framework developed out from cultural-historical activity theory. The framework scopes the elements of the leadership practice as an activity system of its own, positions them against the other organising activities and explains their interconnectivity and the potential causal powers and processes that affect the systems. By equipping leadership-as-practice with a language and a theoretical framework, the book sets out potential directions for future examination of organisational and leadership activities that would expand our understanding of the situated manifestations and social and relational aspects of construction of leadership.

Third, drawing on both theoretical and empirical research, I provide considerations for leadership development from a practice perspective. Despite the promise of leadership-as-practice to bridge the gap between theory and practice of “doing leadership”, and explain how leadership process emerges and affects individuals on a day-to-day basis, which then should enable a more impactful approach to leadership development, the limitations of empirical investigations have led to a limited application of these considerations to improvement of leadership practice in organisations. On the basis of the theory presented in this book, I suggest a way forwards in expanding the traditional approach to leadership development and augment this discussion with my reflections on my own practice and conversations I have had in the workplace in the recent years.

The Main Questions

Leadership-as-practice seeks to understand how leadership relations are shaped within ongoing interactions between agents, and shared activities are continuously re-negotiated and re-shaped through the process of co-influence and co-construction of the meaning (Carroll, Levy and Richmond, 2008; Kempster and Parry, 2011). The theoretical and empirical exploration of this relational, collective and situated phenomenon has been so far limited and inconsistent due to challenges around the complexity of the concepts and the relative novelty of the approach (Raelin, 2019; Kempster, Parry and Jackson, 2016), and this book seeks to address these key challenges—presented in the form of questions that are linked to each other and answered in the later chapters.

Challenge #1 is best illustrated by the following rationale: if we assume that organisations are constituted of myriads of organising practices, how do we separate those that relate to leadership? If change is happening potentially everywhere and at any moment, what is the leadership’s role in this process? Taking this observation to an extreme, Crevani and Endrissat (2016) propose that practice-based interpretations of organisational phenomena—such as leadership, strategy and coordination—are so similar that the same definitions can describe each phenomenon if the terms are replaced in the sentences, and over time, they all may collapse into the building blocks of a single organising process. Whereas in practice it may indeed be difficult to differentiate between the meanings of every mundane act and its impact on the organisation, this book proposes criteria to spot the emergence of leadership practice based on the context of its emergence and indented outcome.

This leads us to another debate within the leadership-as-practice perspective (Challenge #2): is leadership an outcome of the collective action, its component or the catalyst? Crevani and Endrissat (2016) define the social accomplishments of leadership practice as production of direction, or “collective agency in changing and setting courses of actions” (p. 42). Alternatively, Sergi (2016) regards leadership practice to be an outcome of the collective action. Although an answer to this chicken-and-egg question may be straightforward and can be explained by claiming simultaneous changes at several levels of reality, a conceptual elaboration would clarify the issue—and this discussion is presented later in terms of both theoretically and empirically driven arguments.

Next, Challenge #3 lies within application of the theoretical definition of leadership-as-practice to the empirical research: when observing the ongoing actions and unfolding routines in organisation, what should researchers look for in order to capture the leadership practice? What constitutes the practice of leadership in terms of observable actions, interactions and material and non-material objects that all form its emergence? We need to identify and single out the units of analysis within relational ontology and dwelling epistemology and deconstruct them in order to identify the patterns that change—or the patterns of change—within them.

Finally, existent research has stressed the importance of a number of elements to the enactment of leadership practices, such as situational context, the actors, the materiality, and the impact of the past and the prospects of the future there and invited for further exploration of these aspects (Woods, 2016). Furthermore, there is a requirement for a new language for describing organising activities that is based on verbs and gerunds rather than nouns (Weick, 1979) and analysing the leadership-as-practice processes (Ramsey, 2016). Altogether, these issues exist due to the fact that at the moment there is no single framework that would link these factors—and this constitutes Challenge #4.

The Approach of This Book

In order to tackle challenges given earlier, I adapt the conceptual framework of cultural-historical activity theory (Engeström, 1987; Blackler, 1993) for organisational and leadership studies.

According to this framework, every action of an individual can be attributed to at least one activity system, characterised by a subject of activity (agent) working to achieve a goal or to maintain a routine (object of activity) with the use of artefacts (tools and concepts), situated within the context of underlying assumptions, wider community and expectations around roles and responsibilities that invisibly govern the system. These activities are layered within organisational structures, intertwined with each other and continuously undergo conflicts both within and between the systems. The approach presented in this book assumes that the activity of leadership emerges when individuals engage with leadership practices in order to address such conflicts and create, modify and align the systems for a better future-oriented collaborative action. Therefore, this allows us to distinguish the social accomplishment of leadership activity (Nicolini, 2009) by its objective, which is very similar to the direction, alignment and commitment outcomes as proposed by Drath et al. (2008).

Although the attempt to initiate a change—which I call ‘leadership episodes’ in subsequent chapters—may come from one single person, leadership practices cannot be enacted in isolation, and any activity system alteration requires interaction and a collective effort. The individuals have a ‘choice’ fro...