How Leadership Moments are Enacted within a Strict Hierarchy: The case of kitchen brigades in haute cuisine restaurants

Abstract

This paper employs a strong process approach to leadership – one that focuses on leadership moments in action – to explore how collaborative leadership emerges within a hierarchical context. Drawing on observation in three Haute Cuisine restaurant kitchen brigades – highly hierarchical teams that deal with intense time pressures – we document empirically in the ongoing flow of experience how leadership moments reorient collective action as a response to an unstable environment. Moreover, we show how collaborative leadership emerges from a hierarchical structure, counterintuitively, during the most critical period of the service. Our contribution is twofold. We offer a novel conceptualization of the emergence of plural leadership within a hierarchical context, one that highlights the capacity to reframe the way of working together during the most critical moments of an unfolding situation. In addition, our work contributes to the strong process approach to leadership through the methodology adopted: rather than exploring how turning points are discursively enacted, we focus on these as manifested in action and in the non-verbal aspects displayed at such moments.