Dialectics of leadership

Abstract

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.

Performing Leadership: Observations from the World of Music

“…This interconnectedness is operationalized within organizations by moving from either-or polarities to embrace both-and complexities [43]: a shift in focus that is more than a language game of playing with conjunctions. Rather, it represents how artful engagement can impact profoundly on organizational life, especially team processes [74], by moving groups beyond a leader-follower duality to embrace and explore the complex array of interactions [75].…”

“…For instance, Burke, Fiore and Salas [42] emphasize this point, writing, "as the leadership function is dynamically transferred among team members, effectiveness is heavily dependent on the smooth transference of this leadership between team members" (p. 105). Similarly, Collinson [43] advocates thinking beyond the dualities of leaders and followers in order to enable groups to work in complex environments. This requires a shift in emphasis away from a leader-centric ideology to a more dialogic approach where group members participate equally in the production of ideas and strategies.…”

Political Leadership in Parliament: The Role of Select Committee Chairs in the UK House of Commons

“…Heifetz, Grashow and Linksy's (2009) analysis of adaptive leadership is particularly useful in understanding group dynamics and the crucial leadership skill of empowering groups to deal with issues and challenges in relation to the group's context, rather than the leader simply dictating action from above ('t Hart, 2014, p. 105). These insights allow us to conceive of leadership and followership as necessarily imbued with 'multiple, shifting, contradictory and ambiguous identities' (Collinson, 2005(Collinson, , p. 1436 which reflect the dynamics of the organizational terrain in which they operate. Finally, the idea of leadership as a distributed resource which is shared with followers is crucial to understanding its conceptual utility in the specific parliamentary context which forms the analytical focus of this article.…”

Organizing resistance movements: contribution of the political discourse theory

“…In OS, there have recently been a number of critical engagements with leadership, which has often been focused on specific individual characteristics and traits, which can, for example, be mobilized to organize work more efficiently or to reduce resistance in the workplace. Collinson (2005Collinson ( , 2006, for example, points to the need to end the analytical separation between leaders and followers, which privileges the first. Instead, a truly relational perspective is needed that studies leadership as a dialectical phenomenon.…”