Chellie Spiller

Pipeline to the Future: Seeking Wisdom in Indigenous, Eastern, and Western Traditions

In this chapter, we explore the ways in which the dominant wisdom, economic, and social traditions of the West can potentially integrate with some of the wisdom, economic, and social traditions of indigenous and Eastern cultures in the interest of creating a more complete understanding of links between wisdom, economics, and organizing. Western thinking tends to be based not only on a modality of constant growth but also on a worldview that is based on linear thinking and atomization and fragmentation of wholes into parts as paths that lead to understanding. These ways of thinking have resulted in the West’s putting economics, materialism, consumerism, and markets ahead of other types of values and issues. In contrast, many indigenous and Eastern traditions offer a more holistic, relationally based set of perspectives that might provide better balance in approaching issues of work, economics, and organization. Indigenous wisdom traditions, illustrated through African, Chinese, Indian, Islamic, Japanese, Māori, and Native American worldviews, offer insights into a worldview of relatedness where foundational values inform members of society on how to lead a wise life through serving others, including the environment. We believe that by integrating the perspective of wisdom traditions that offer these more holistic, interconnected, and nature-based views of the world, Western traditions could be more appreciative of the intrinsic worth and ontological differences of people and environment and that such perspectives can be very useful in our globally connected, interdependent, and, in many ways, currently unsustainable world. We offer this synthesis as a beginning of that conversation.

Managing and Leading from a Maori Perspective: Bringing New Life and Energy to Organisations

Attending to the life-energy of an organisation is an important, yet often overlooked aspect of management and leadership. Ignoring energy dimensions in an organisation can lead to dispirited, dysfunctional workplaces. In this chapter, we explore how nourishing different life-energies can revitalise relationships within the workplace and with communities to support organisational thriving. A central premise of this theoretical enquiry is that organisations which cultivate healthy, thriving life-energies offer added value for their stakeholders, including employees, customers, social and cultural communities, and the environment. We focus on indigenous Maori conceptualisations of life-energies and offer a series of touchstones, drawn from theory and our management and research experience, to guide sustainable business practice with the kaupapa, intention, of bringing new life and dignity into dispirited modern enterprise.

Introduction: authentic leadership: clashes, convergences and coalescences: Clashes, Convergences and Coalescences

When we were invited by Edward Elgar Publishing to edit a book about authentic leadership, we were both a bit sceptical. Authentic leadership? Isn’t that just a 1990s repackaging of transformational leadership? What does it actually mean, anyway? Given the contested nature of ‘authenticity’ itself, how would anyone know whether or not a leader was acting authentically? These were just some of the questions which nagged us as we began to consider the project. Scepticism soon morphed into intrigue as we began to delve a bit more deeply into the issues at the heart of our unease. Our reservations coalesced into two prime questions, which we introduce here as a way of framing the book as a whole. First, we both start from the premise that leadership is a relational phenomenon, not something that can ever be distilled down to the actions of one ‘leader’, whether ‘authentic’ or not. Instead, we understand leading to be something that involves taking up the leader ‘role’ – a part required by a particular socio-historic ‘moment’ – rather than being something that a person ‘is’ (Ladkin 2010; Spiller et al. 2010). In contrast to such a view, much of the authentic leadership literature focuses on the individual ‘leader’ (with a few notable exceptions such as Algera and Lips-Wiersma 2012 and Leroy et al. 2012). A key challenge, then, is ‘What are the implications of a relational view of leadership for the concept of “authentic leadership”?’ This is an underpinning question which informs many of the chapters in the book, either explicitly or implicitly. A second difficulty we have with the concept centres on the nature of the ‘self’ and what it means to ‘be’ one’s self authentically. Given that ‘authenticity’ is generally tethered to the ‘self’ (in that authenticity is often coached as ‘being one’s “self”’), how that ‘self’ is conceptualized is key to its possibilities for its ‘authentic’ enactment. Once again, we both

Minding less: Exploring mindfulness and mindlessness in organizations through Skillful Means

Mindfulness has received increased attention in organizational studies. Yet we ask, is mindfulness necessary, indeed achievable, in every “moment” and every context? Mindfulness as co-opted by organizations is often considered a positive and helpful state, while little attention is paid to the important notion of mindlessness. Our comprehensive exploratory review of mindfulness and mindlessness highlights theoretical debates and responds to calls for a more balanced approach to mindlessness and mindfulness. In addition, it highlights practical implications to management learning by introducing Eastern Buddhist principles of non-attachment, practiced through the key concept of Skillful Means. A distinctive contribution of this article is a Five-Fold Framework detailing five aspects of a skillful mindful and mindless approach: context-flexibility, managerial emotional display, managerial learning under complex situations and dilemmas, transferring mindfulness practices from individual to organizational level, and context-sensitive research.

The journey of individuation: A Jungian alternative to the theory and practice of leading authentically

Along with increasing interest in the concept of ‘authenticity’ as it applies to leadership, critique of dominant authentic leadership theorizing is also on the rise. This paper joins that critique in relation to a key aspect of dominant theorizing: its neglect of the unconscious and its role in shaping one’s experience and behaviour. This oversight results in an unrealistic version of ‘authenticity’ which over-emphasizes pro-social, positive conduct, prescribes components through which authenticity is achieved, and directs individuals to act from an individually determined ‘true self’ rather than recognizing the role that both others and the wider context play in the creation of that self. The notion of ‘mature personhood’, underpinned by Jung’s theory of individuation is offered as an alternative aspirational aim for those wishing to take up the leading role in a way which align what is ‘real’ for them at a given moment within the demands of organizational contexts. Drawing from Jung’s ideas of ‘the shadow’, the ‘centre point’ and ‘the collective’, we theorize an integrated approach to leadership which accounts for unconscious as well as conscious processes, works with less desirable aspects of the self rather than dismissing them, is achieved through reflexive processes rather than prescriptive formulae; and is collectively, rather than individually determined.

Ambicultural Governance: Harmonizing Indigenous and Western Approaches

Indigenous and Western business practices and worldviews can be harmonized to create and enhance well-being through ambicultural governance practices. This article focuses on exploring, both theoretically and empirically, creative governance endeavors to bring together Indigenous and Western practices for the purposes of creating both wealth and well-being in the service of society. We emphasize the need to return to the idea of business as serving the well-being of communities and suggest this can be done through a relational kaitiakitanga, stewardship approach that is at the heart of our research. Through a qualitatively rich case study of a Māori business, we present a Strategy Model He Whenua Rangatira—A Balanced Landscape that serves to act as a decision-making tool that facilitates both tangible and intangible benefits for organizational success and collective well-being. We suggest that all businesses, both Indigenous and Western, can gravitate toward this approach, while contextualizing their ambicultural governance.

Ambicultural Governance: Harmonizing Indigenous and Western Wellbeing

Increasingly, the spiritual, environmental, social and cultural degradation of the modern world is being attributed to the supremacy of the self-interested, profit-oriented and individualistic mark...