Marian Iszatt-White

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.

Leadership as Emotional Labour : the effortful accomplishment of valuing practices

Within the context of an ethnographic study of leadership in the learning and skills sector, this article focuses on the role of leadership in making stafffeel valued (Iszatt-White & Mackenzie-Davey, 2003) and the‘emotional labour’ (Hochschild, 1983) through which leaders’ valuing practices are accomplished. By shadowing college leaders, observation was made of the day-to-day practices through which they sought to give staff a feeling of being valued. The article provides evidence of such‘valuing practices’ before going on to explicate the notion of emotional labour— previously researched largely in the services sector— in the professional context of educational leadership. In doing so, it differentiates professional emotional labour from‘emotional intelligence’ (Goleman, 1995), a more common theme within the management literature. It also explores the role of social identity and value congruence in moderating the‘emotional dissonance’(Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993) which can result from a requirement for prolonged emotion work.

Methodological Crises and Contextual Solutions:An ethnomethodologically-informed approach to understanding leadership

The view of context as something which restricts the range of research but is not an integral part of that which is being researched is implicit in many traditional approaches to leadership theory development. Some recent approaches have sought to address this by taking a more directly situated approach to the understanding of leadership, and by paying close attention to the practical accomplishment of leadership work within a given context. It is the premise of this paper, however, that there is still much work to be done in this important aspect of leadership research, and that considering this from a specifically methodological perspective may have a contribution to make. In support of this argument, the paper adopts the ethnomethodological notion of ‘mutual elaboration’ to explore leadership practices as irreducibly events in a social order. By placing context centre stage, and explicating the practice of leadership as an inherently contextual performance, it offers a relatively untapped approach to the understanding of leadership work and suggests the value of this approach in providing a rich resource of data for the development of innovative theory.

Towards co-constructed coaching: Exploring the integration of coaching and co-constructed autoethnography in leadership development

This article introduces a new method for leadership development: co-constructed coaching. The terrain of executive coaching is outlined and contrasted with co-constructed coaching that draws on the research method of co-constructed autoethnography. In particular the relative merits of directive versus non-directive leadership development interventions are examined, along with the issue of multiple agendas in coaching/research relationships in this context, and the implications, both positive and negative, of having a highly informed active partner in the leadership learning process. The paper makes a contribution to management learning by presenting co-constructed coaching as a credible and potentially beneficial alternative to executive coaching by enabling a critically reflexive dialogue.

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.

The Relational Aspect to High Reliability Organization

The literature on ‘high reliability organizations’ demonstrates how central reliability is to organizing in certain highly demanding settings. In more mundane settings, however, where there may not be a dominant type of catastrophic failure, the meaning attributed to reliability is less likely to be unambiguous and consensual. It is more likely to be explicitly relational: a quality of the relationship between an entity that is being relied on and an entity that is relying on it. This draws attention to the importance of the relying process in contributing to how a system performs and whether it meets expectations. A field study was carried out in a highway construction and maintenance organization to analyse the various understandings of reliability that organizational members had in different contexts. It found that there were multiple understandings – involving a capacity not only to achieve particular outcomes but also comply with norms, fit behaviour to situations, and communicate about what could and could not be achieved. It also found that reliability problems were not solved in some simple sense. Instead they were transformed into other reliability problems that then had to be managed by further effort or by other organizations. We suggest that recognizing the multiple meanings of reliability, the importance of relying, and the way in which reliability problems are transformed from one form to another all have important practical implications.

Strategic leadership: The accomplishment of strategy as a ‘perennially unfinished project’

Based on an ethnomethodologically informed ethnography of further education college principals, this paper explores the nature and accomplishment of strategic leadership work as an ongoing, processual activity. In particular, the paper focuses on the ‘pre-implementation’ phase of the strategizing process, and suggests how the practices of clarifying, rehearsing, upholding, adapting and elaborating are integral to maintaining the spirit of the strategy in the face of unforeseen events. In so doing, it adopts the notion of strategy as a ‘perennially unfinished project’ (Knights and Mueller, 2004: 55), and explicates the constant need for improvisation and adjustment in order to successfully implement, not the letter of a strategic plan, but its intent. It also echoes Suchman’s seminal thesis on plans as ‘resources for situated action [that] do not in any strong sense determine its course’ (Suchman, 1987: 52).

An educator’s perspective on reflexive pedagogy: Identity undoing and issues of power:

This article looks at reflexive pedagogical practice and the ‘identity undoing’ that such practice demands from educators. Such identity undoing is found to have strong connections to the impact on identity of power relations, resistance and struggle. A dialogic ‘testimonio’ approach is adopted tracing two of the authors’ experiences of attempting to introduce a reflexive pedagogy within a structured, accredited learning intervention. This approach analyses educators’ own reflexive dialogue to make visible the assumptions and tensions that are provoked between educators and students in a reflexively oriented learning process. In undertaking this analysis, we problematise the pursuit of a reflexive pedagogical practice within executive and postgraduate education and offer a paradox: the desire to engage students in reflexive learning interventions – and in particular to disrupt the power asymmetries and hierarchical dependencies of more traditional educator–student relationships – can in practice have the effect of highlighting those very asymmetries and dependencies. Successful resolution of such a paradox becomes dependent on the capacity of educators to undo their own reliance on, and even desire for, authority underpinned by a sense of theory-based expertise.

Authenticity in leadership : Reframing relational transparency through the lens of emotional labour

In this paper we problematise relational transparency as an element of authentic leadership when viewed through the lens of emotional labour. Using the method of analytic co-constructed auto-ethnography we examine a senior hospital manager’s experience of seeking to be authentic during a period of intense challenge as he pursues the closure of a hospital ward. A first-person account is developed that speaks to the necessity of hiding felt emotions and displaying his perceptions of desired emotions warranted in the context in which he seeks to lead. That this is not experienced as inauthentic is seen as deriving from two dimensions of experienced authenticity: strength of identification with leadership role and fidelity to leadership purpose. The veracity of this reframing of authenticity in leadership practice is explored through a second study, of practising leaders required to balance the demands of performing emotional labour and appearing and feeling authentic. We suggest that reframing relational transparency as ‘fidelity to purpose’ may be a valuable counterweight to the goal of relational transparency promulgated by the leadership industry and a practical advance for those seeking to practise authentic leadership.

Games leaders play: using Transactional Analysis to understand emotional dissonance

Most of us are familiar with the idea of ‘emotional labour’ (Hochschild, 1983) in the service industry, that ‘service with a smile’ which service workers are expected to give irrespective of what they actually feel or think. In the context of leadership, where the relationships involved are lasting rather than transient, two-way rather than uni-directional, and have complex, ongoing goals rather than straight-forward, one-off ones, the equivalent labour required is that of a ‘skilled emotional manager’ (Bolton and Boyd, 2003). The demands of professional codes of practice, issues of value congruency, and the sustained nature of the emotional performance all contribute unique characteristics to the nature of the more complex emotional labour thus required. Recent approaches to understanding leadership have placed increasing emphasis on the ‘human element’ and the role of leaders as ‘managers of meaning’ (Smircich and Morgan, 1982). New theories of spiritual leadership (Fry, 2005), authentic leadership (Avolio and Gardner, 2005), and even servant leadership (Spears and Lawrence, 2004) all speak to the emotional component within the leader-follower relationship. This paper addresses one element of this through a detailed examination of ‘the stressful aspect of emotion work’ (Zapf and Holz, 2006) performed by leaders – emotional dissonance. By synthesizing the very different theoretical perspectives of emotional labour and Transactional Analysis it seeks to provide a more nuanced model of practitioners’ experience of emotional dissonance within leadership roles, using a systemic constructivist approach (Kreyenburg, accessed 19/8/11) and drawing on the concepts of ulterior transactions, scripts and games originally developed by Eric Berne, Claude Steiner and others in the 1960’s and 70s. In ulterior transactions two messages are communicated - the overt or social level message, and the covert, psychological message also known as the ulterior. Berne’s third rule of communication states that ‘the behavioural outcome of an ulterior transaction is determined at the psychological and not at the social level’ (cited in Stewart and Joines, 1974). Ulterior transactions are associated with ‘script’ – the ‘unconscious life plan’ (Berne, 1966) that Berne asserted is decided in childhood as a survival strategy and then lived out, out of awareness, during our adult life. They are also associated with ‘psychological games’ - ‘any sequence of ulterior transactions that ends up with the parties feeling bad’ (Stewart and Joines, 1974) - the function of which is to further script. Our research explores the hypothesis that ‘emotional dissonance’ can occur when something in the here and now resembles a significant situation from childhood, and the leader’s Adult strategies to achieve the complex ongoing goals of leadership become subsumed by their unconscious strategies to achieve the survival goals of childhood. Of particular interest are how leadership decisions may be affected when leaders engage in ‘scripty’ behaviour and the possible connection between the bad feelings that result from a game and the stressful element of emotional dissonance. Through a fine-grained analysis leadership practitioners’ experiences of this important phenomenon the distinction between emotional labour which remains congruent with internal feelings (even if the display was ‘ratcheted up’ or down in order to achieve the desired response from followers) and situations where this was not the case is explored and the implications for effective leader decision-making are discussed.