D L Collinson

Dialectics of leadership

Mainstream leadership studies tend to privilege and separate leaders from followers. This article highlights the value of rethinking leadership as a set of dialectical relationships. Drawing on post-structuralist perspectives, this approach reconsiders the relations and practices of leaders and followers as mutually constituting and co-produced. It also highlights the tensions, contradictions and ambiguities that typically characterize these shifting asymmetrical and interdependent leadership dynamics. Exploring three interrelated ‘dialectics’ (control/resistance, dissent/consent and men/women), the article raises a number of issues frequently neglected in the mainstream literature. It emphasizes that leaders exercise considerable power, that their control is often shifting, paradoxical and contradictory, that followers’ practices are frequently proactive, knowledgeable and oppositional, that gender crucially shapes control/resistance/consent dialectics and that leaders themselves may engage in workplace dissent. The article concludes that dialectical perspectives can provide new and innovative ways of understanding leadership.

`Surviving the Rigs': Safety and Surveillance on North Sea Oil Installations

This article examines the politics of accident reporting on North Sea oil installations. In the context of an all-pervasive safety culture and performance assessment system, offshore workers restricted the reporting of accidents. Other studies suggest that workers often respond to increased monitoring by engaging in defensive practices that manipulate performance information. Accordingly, a central contention of this article is that performance assessment frequently creates employee performances. In turn, the paper highlights the value of linking the work of Goffman to that of Foucault for the critical analysis of culture, performance assessment and safety in contemporary organizations.

‘Over the Pond and Across the Water’: Developing the Field of ‘Gendered Organizations’

This article is concerned with the development of gendered organizations as a field of study. It begins by exploring some of the factors that militate against integrating organization studies and gender studies and gendered organizations scholarship over national/continental divides. Increasingly doubtful about whether traditional (mainstream and critical) organization theories will or can adequately address gender, we contend that scholars of gendered organizations should ‘strike out’ on our/their own, ‘boldly going’ into unfamiliar territory to create new, innovative theories, concepts and ideas. We make various suggestions about possible future directions for theorizing and research.

Trust Relations in High-Reliability Organizations

Workplace trust has been recognized by researchers and practitioners alike to be an important component of an effective safety culture. However, despite this, the concept of trust as it relates to safety has been underresearched, particularly within high-reliability organizations. This article examines the importance of trust relations and their concomitant impact on safety culture within the specific context of high-reliability organizations using relevant literatures. The article then explores the implications of high and low trust situations for safety through case studies conducted within the nuclear and offshore industries as exemplars of organizations operating within high-reliability sectors.

Dichotomies, dialectics and dilemmas: New directions for critical leadership studies?

This article builds on Fairhurst and Connaughton’s proposals for future research agendas in leadership studies by critically examining three key themes in the leadership literature: dichotomies, dialectics, and dilemmas. The first section argues that mainstream leadership research frequently relies on conceptual dichotomies which are often multiple, inter-related, and proliferating. Critiques of dichotomization are suggestive of more dialectical forms of analysis and these are discussed in the second section. Dialectical studies can surface important questions about organizational power relations, paradoxes and contradictions that are typically under-explored within mainstream leadership studies. The third section proposes an additional, future research theme for critical perspectives, namely whether and if so why, how, and with what consequences leaders may engage in discourses of denial regarding the dilemmas and tensions of organizational life. The article concludes by arguing that re-framing leadership dichotomies as multiple, intersecting dialectics can open up fresh lines of enquiry and generate important insights about the complex and situated relations of power and identity that comprise leadership and followership dynamics.

In search of the perfect manager? Work-life balance and managerial work

Work-life balance debates continue to proliferate but give relatively little critical attention to managerial workers. This article draws on research into the experiences of managers in a local government organization revealing an intricate, multifaceted and heterogeneous picture of fragmentation, conflicting demands, pressures and anxieties. The study highlights the importance of paid work for public sector managers; the concomitant difficulties in controlling working hours for those in managerial roles and the extent to which shifts in work orientation occur during managers’ careers. Research findings suggest that in practice work-life balance initiatives may only serve to increase managerial anxieties and pressures, the very opposite outcome to that intended. These themes do not feature in many work-life balance debates, which tend to assume the perfect manager who is able and willing to create a symmetrical balance between different spheres of life.

Prozac leadership and the limits of positive thinking

This article critically examines excessive positivity in leadership dynamics. It argues that the tendency for leader positivity to become excessive is a recurrent but under-researched medium through which power and identity can be enacted in leadership dynamics. Drawing on the metaphor of ‘Prozac’, it suggests that leaders’ excessive positivity is often characterized by a reluctance to consider alternative voices, which can leave organizations and societies ill-prepared to deal with unexpected events. Prozac leadership encourages leaders to believe their own narratives that everything is going well and discourages followers from raising problems or admitting mistakes. The article also argues that followers (broadly defined) are often quick to identify leaders’ excessive positivity and are likely to respond through various forms of resistance. It concludes by considering the extent to which excessive positivity also characterizes leadership studies, and raises additional questions for further critical analyses of Prozac leadership.

Rethinking Global Leadership Development Programmes: The Interrelated Significance of Power, Context and Identity:

Organization studies scholars have examined leadership development processes on only a handful of occasions. This paper argues that an organizational lens, rather than individualized and decontextualized research, can significantly advance this under-theorized field. A critical organizational framing, in particular, assists not only in problematizing the ‘leader’ identities produced within contemporary leadership development programmes (LDPs), but also in surfacing the ways in which power, context and identity can be inextricably linked within specific practices. The article contributes to critical leadership and organization studies in three main ways. First, it theorizes through a critical identity lens the regulatory practices that constitute an idealized leader self in two separate global LDPs, and which create tensions and paradoxes rarely examined in studies of LDPs and organizations more generally. Second, it examines participants’ considerable resistance to the prevailing models of global leader prescribed in the two programmes. Third, our dual case analysis highlights the role of discursive context, enabling us to compare two particular strategies of leadership development through identity regulation: ‘investiture’ and ‘divestiture’. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of this analysis for rethinking theory and practice, and suggests future research directions for critical organization studies of leadership and LDPs.

Barriers to Employee Rights: Gender, Selection, and the Labor Process

This article applies a labor process analysis to the issue of employment rights in the particular context of gender inequality and unlawful discrimination in the recruitment process. It criticizes conventional perspectives on employee rights for their failure to examine critically managerial power and prerogative and its implications for gender inequality. The article outlines two particular labor process theories of gender divisions and inequality. In exploring the strengths and weaknesses of these more critical perspectives, the article highlights the analytical significance that they ascribe to power asymmetries in the labor process and labor market. Building on this perspective, the analysis then presents empirical data on gender discrimination in the selection practices of contemporary UK organizations. The research material reveals how gender discrimination can be reproduced, rationalized, and resisted. These empirical findings are theorized through a combined labor process analysis of power, knowledge, and identity in recruitment practices. We conclude that labor process analysis facilitates our understanding of the deep-seated barriers that continue to impede the protection of employee rights in workplace practices.

MISMANAGING SEXUAL HARASSMENT: PROTECTING THE PERPETRATOR AND BLAMING THE VICTIM

The EC has recently ratified a code of practice on sexual harassment in the workplace. Drawing on case study material, argues that initiatives designed to formalize the procedures for dealing with sexual harassment are necessary but by no means sufficient for its effective management. Presents case studies which outline how sexual harassment can be mismanaged both by professional managers and by trade union representatives.