Doris Schedlitzki

Critical and alternative approaches to leadership learning and development

This article is the introduction to the special issue on ‘Critical and Alternative Approaches to Leadership Learning and Development’. This article reviews the past approaches to researching and theorising about leadership learning and development and proposes a shift towards critical and alternative approaches. This article then describes the various articles in the special issue and how they contribute towards this paradigm shift.

Using creative techniques in leadership learning and development : an introduction

The Problem Leadership development programs have become prolific in organizations in both the public and private sectors, with new initiatives endlessly being developed. Empirical and conceptual work that challenges some of the mainstream approaches to leadership learning and development has led to initiatives increasingly becoming complex in nature and to the use of innovative and unusual approaches. There is limited knowledge, however, regarding the impact of such techniques. The Solution This issue focuses on some core themes around enabling and enacting leadership development in organizations through creative techniques using art, poetry, symbolism, theater, drama, and film, and is rooted in experiences of delivering such interventions in a range of countries, sectors, and professions. Each article explores how these techniques can be translated into practice across a wide of variety leadership learning and development contexts and is rooted in the contemporary and critical leadership literature. The Stakeholders Human resource development professionals seeking to identify key considerations in selecting creative techniques for effective leadership learning and development interventions, and academics advising on such selections and teaching leadership themselves, will be interested in these articles, which will also set the basis for further empirical research and theoretical reflection on the topic.

Exploring power assumptions in the leadership and management debate

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to take a fresh look at the leadership and management debate through exploring underlying power assumptions in the literature. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is a conceptual discussion that draws on the power-based literature to develop a framework to help conceptually understand leadership in relation to management. Findings – The paper highlights the historically cliched nature of comments regarding conceptual similarities and differences between leadership and management. The paper draws attention to a problem within this debate – a confusion regarding assumptions of power. As a result the paper brings to the forefront perspectives of management that are of an emergent and non-work perspective which enables the development of a framework of the literature that includes managers “doing” leadership, managers “becoming” leaders, “being” leaders and managers, and leaders “doing” management. The paper goes on to explore the meaning and potential behind each part of the framework and suggests a need to develop an understanding of “doing” leadership and management and “being” managers and leaders through an exploration of “becoming” in organisations. Originality/value – This paper provides a new perspective on the leadership and management or leadership vs management question by introducing a non-work, emergent or personal perspective on management. Furthermore, this paper concludes that whether leadership and management are similar or different is dependent upon which power construct underlies each phenomenon, a consideration that has been neglected in the leadership and management debate for some time.

Leadership development: A place for storytelling and Greek mythology?

This article explores how storytelling and Greek mythology within classroom-based leadership development may facilitate learning to deal with ambiguity and social construction in leadership practice. We aim to show how using narratives and making explicit tacit plotlines can disrupt thinking and enable participants to experience the emergent process of re-storying. We argue that the projective focus of the re-storying process encourages critical self-reflection and discussion of the socially constructed nature of organisational roles, relationships and leadership. The use of Greek mythology archetypes in combination with re-storying helps participants to question taken-for-granted assumptions of leadership practice, explore emotions and reflect on the past, present and future of a story. Drawing on reflections from practice, we propose a re-storying leadership development workshop and highlight complexities of working within the realm of re-storying and critical self-reflection. This article concludes with an outline of avenues for future research and leadership development practice.

Working with language: a refocused research agenda for cultural leadership studies

This article critically reviews existing contributions from the field of cultural leadership studies with a view to highlighting the conceptual and methodological limitations of the dominant etic, cross-cultural approach in leadership studies and illuminating implications of the relative dominance and unreflective use of the English language as the academic and business lingua franca within this field. It subsequently outlines the negative implications of overlooking cultural and linguistic multiplicity for our understanding of culturally sensitive leadership practices. In drawing on lessons from this critical review and the emergent fields of emic, non-positivist cultural leadership studies, this analysis argues that the field of cultural leadership studies requires an alternative research agenda focussed on language multiplicity that enables the field to move towards emic, qualitative research that helps to empower individual cultural voices and explore cultural intra- and interrelationships, tensions and paradoxes embedded in leadership processes. The article concludes by offering suggestions on methodological approaches for emic cultural leadership studies that are centred on the exploration of language as a cultural voice.

Exploring Critical Perspectives of Toxic and Bad Leadership Through Film

The Problem This article considers concepts of toxic and bad leadership from a critical, post-structuralist perspective and illustrates how this can be conveyed to management students through the use of film analysis. In response to the paucity of critical approaches within toxic and bad leadership studies, we suggest that film is a useful way of developing in-depth discussion in student and management groups to uncover underlying subtleties and complexity in leadership theory and practice. The Solution We connect to film clips from Batman: The Dark Knight, and explain how this film is used with students and managers to illustrate the ambiguous nature of “good” and “bad” leadership and explore the fluid, shifting, and relational nature of these two concepts. We conclude that students and managers can recognize this more readily through viewing, discussing, and analyzing film clips such as the ones discussed herein. The Stakeholders University lecturers and students, executive educators and managers, general human resource development (HRD) professionals

Ways of leading in non-Anglophone contexts: Representing, expressing and enacting authority beyond the English-speaking world

The English language has for some time dominated academia worldwide (Steyaert and Janssens, 2013) and become accepted and institutionally embedded as the international language of academia. This is illustrated within the field of leadership studies where, since its beginnings in the early part of the Twentieth Century, research into leadership has largely been pursued by scholars in the USA and the UK working in the English language. Consequently, the sub-discipline of ‘leadership studies’ has been developed and theorised within Western traditions of research, which have produced predominantly Anglo-centric linguistic interpretations of the concept (Jepson, 2010). This dominance of a culturally and linguistically ‘naturalised’ Anglo-centric view of leadership has heavily informed the development of leadership and management knowledge and practice. Such ethnocentricity, furthermore, has resulted in tacit assumptions regarding the general applicability and transferability of knowledge beyond English language speaking contexts. As a consequence, other culturally situated notions of leadership, leading and managing have been comparatively marginalised (Schedlitzki et al., 2016).

The absent follower: Identity construction within organisationally assigned leader–follower relations:

This article seeks to add to our understanding of processes of identity construction within organisationally assigned leader–follower relations through an exploration of the role of the absent, feminised follower. We situate our work within critical and psychoanalytic contributions to leader/ship and follower/ship and use Lacan’s writings on identification and lack to illuminate the imaginary, failing nature of identity construction. This aims to challenge the social realist foundations of writing on leader–follower constellations in organisational life. We examine our philosophical discussion through a reflective reading of a workplace example and question the possibility of a subject’s identity construction as a follower. If a subject is unable to identify him/herself as follower, he/she cannot validate others as leaders, rendering the leader–follower relationship not only fragile but phantasmic. We highlight implications of our exploration of the absence of follower/ship and endless, unfulfilled desire for leader/ship for future research and practice.

Bringing the ugly back: A dialogic exploration of ethics in leadership through an ethno-narrative re-reading of the Enron Case

In this article, we adopt a dialogic approach to examining narratives on ethics in leadership. We do this through an ethno-narrative re-reading of writing on the Enron case informed by Bakhtin’s ideas on dialogue. Employing concepts such as beautyism, aesthetic craving and recent writing around disgust and abjection in organizations helps us to develop a deeper relational interpretation of written accounts of leadership and ethics in organizations. We identify two underlying and interrelated social tensions exemplified in existing narratives on this popular example of ‘unethical’ leadership practice. Both tensions, we conclude, are linked to denigrating the ugly in favour of the beautiful, and we have labelled them ‘suppressing the ugly’ and a fetish for ‘looking good’. We go on to suggest that these two tensions then combine in the stories about this case to ultimately beautify a toxic masculinized persona. We suggest therefore that our dialogic perspective on ethical leadership narratives helps to uncover how accounts about Enron are developed through an intricate interplay between seeking to ‘look good’ and the suppression of moral judgment by leaders of the organization.

Using Greek mythology in leadership development: the role of archetypes for self-reflection

Deep, critical self-reflection is not easy (Reynolds, 1999). It requires time, space, courage and careful support and is often very difficult to achieve in the context of busy, demanding organisational lives where we are expected to be confident, strong decision-makers in the here-and-now. Yet, critical self-reflection on the past, present and future is crucial as it enables us to step back and evaluate our own and other’s actions and decisions in the context of our own and other’s needs, aims and values. The development of skills for self-reflection seems therefore an important task for organisations and we will – in what follows – suggest one way in which this could be achieved. This chapter will evaluate the usefulness of working with Greek Mythology to enhance self-reflection through the discussion of an example of how the characteristics of Greek Gods and Goddesses have been used in a classroom based executive education setting to encourage critical self-reflection and engender deep conversations on notions such as leadership, followership, power and gender. Drawing on Gherardi’s (2004) view of myth as the most fundamental form of narrative knowledge, connecting past, present and future of humanity, we link throughout to existing contributions on the use of mythology in leadership development (e.g. Hatch et al., 2005, Schedlitzki et al., 2015), reflecting specifically on the role and usefulness of archetypes offered through mythology within management education and leadership learning. Of particular interest here is how cultural memory is embedded in and transmitted through myths and how the archetypal characters of myths are still relevant and applicable today (Schedlitzki et al., 2015). It is through the use of the metaphorical language of these archetypes that participants in leadership development may be able to see the complex and often paradoxical nature of human characteristics and behaviour, enabling a safe space for deep, critical self-reflection and identity work. Lessons from the use of these archetypes will be shared and particular attention paid to the ways in which they help to highlight the dualistic nature of personal strengths and weaknesses within working relationships and changing organisational contexts. Based on the experience presented here, it seems that working with archetypal characters from Greek Mythology enables participants, for example, to challenge existing norms of good and bad leadership by allowing them to explore how certain characteristics usually associated with strong/weak or good/bad leadership may have quite the opposite effect in different organisational contexts and in interaction with other colleagues. The chapter will conclude with reflections on the efficacy of the workshop and show how for some participants, working with Greek Mythology in this setting has opened up new ways of seeing and evaluating leadership and helped them to re-assess existing relationships at work. It will also highlight that other participants have found it more difficult to embed this learning in their day-to-day practice. Finally, we reflect on how to deal with the range of emotional reactions of participants that may be triggered by this process of critical self-reflection.