3.12 leadership (1)
duty13
LECTUREWK19ENTE3522_LeadershipfromCriticalPerspectives2.pptx
Perspectives on Creative Leadership
Week 20:
‘Leadership from Critical Perspectives’
Dr. Huriye Yeröz
NSS 2023/24
Students’ Choice Teaching Awards 2024
This is an opportunity for DMU students studying on UG or taught PG programmes to nominate academic or learning support staff for a Students' Choice Teaching Award (SCTA).
Nomination process:
Students are invited to nominate a member or members of academic or learning support staff for one of these awards. Nominations open on Monday 22 January and can be made online at dmu.ac.uk/scta2024 by Friday 23 February.
This is a highly competitive process, and students are strongly advised to write their nomination bearing in mind the criteria.
Questioning Conventional and Taken for Granted
Why Critical Approach?
Encourage a more questioning approach from the students in their study of leadership
Leaders are often presented as indispensable for human prosperity
Conventional approaches to teaching leadership in business schools have over relied on transformational models that stress the role of charismatic individuals, usually white men, in setting compelling visions to which all organizational actors are expected to subscribe.
6
Why Critical Approach?
Caution against depictions of leaders as miracle workers who do and should have
absolute power, and of followers as people who should unquestioningly commit to the causes espoused by leaders.
Leadership is an uncontested form of top-down influence,
follower consent is its relatively unproblematic outcome
The ideaof “change” is usually held to be a “good” thing,
irrespective of its content
The job of leaders is creating and communicating a vision for change in ways that secure employee buy-in (Kotter, 2012).
Such message(s) leaves the students unprepared for the challenges that they will face when they encounter active, questioning, and dissenting employees, or when they themselves might be faced with a decision about whether to disagree with their boss on an important issue.
7
What is being critical?
| Sociology of regulation | Sociology of change | |
| Objective approach to social science | Functionalist | Radical structuralist |
| Subjective approach to social science | Interpretive | Radical humanist |
Being critical means drawing on assumptions from a different paradigm that challenge mainstream assumptions. The word ‘critical’ is often misused by other academics who do not understand paradigms. They take the functionalist and interpretative perspectives for granted
(Black, in Critical Approaches to Analysis, p.4, 2020)
What is being critical?
| Sociology of regulation | Sociology of change | |
| Objective approach to social science | Functionalist | Radical structuralist |
| Subjective approach to social science | Interpretive | Radical humanist |
Societal Expectations and Inner Desires: The Complex Dynamics of Motivation - YouTube
Sociology of regulation
(Black, in Critical Approaches to Analysis, p.5, 2020)
Organizations as machines.
Rational, efficient, hierarchical, mechanistic.
Organizations as organisms.
Open systems adapting to environmental demands.
Organizations as brains.
Learning, sharing information and knowledge, questioning the ways in which things are done.
Organizations as cultures.
With shared visions, values, rituals, stories, subcultures.
Sociology of change
(Black, in Critical Approaches to Analysis, p.6, 2020)
Organizations as political systems.
Systems of power and conflict because of different interests and agendas.
Organizations as psychic prisons.
Involving the unconscious patriarchy, repressed sexuality.
Organizations as instruments of domination.
In which people are alienated, have to comply to corporate interests, are repressed and exploited.
Organizations as flux and transformation.
Complex, non-linear, self-organizing systems characterised by contradiction
Emancipation is about liberation from (or at least reduce the repression of) existing ideas, ideologies, identities and institutions. Thus, the goal of CMS is to problematize the status-quo in order to promote equality.
Micro-emancipation focuses on everyday challenges and is about the production of better managers, good management and fairer organizations to promote a humanistic workplace.
Macro-emancipation focuses on larger social structures and is about the overthrowing of capitalism and the total transformation of society
Goals of being critical
(Black, in Critical Approaches to Analysis, p.7, 2020)
Conventional Approach vs Critical Approach
Leadership
is fundamentally about the effective or
ineffective exercise of power, authority, and influence.
13
As an example, the Judge Business School of
Cambridge University offers an open executive education
course on transformational leadership. Its
premise is that the course will help turn participants
into transformational leaders capable of “breaching
resistance to change.
” They will be able to motivate
“employees beyond monetary incentives” and provide
“inspirational leadership and result-oriented
management.”
Employees, it seems, bring little to
the table other than a capacity for resistance, and
are sufficiently lacking in nonpecuniary motivation
that it must be generated for them by others.
Leadership Education from Critical Perspective?
14
Conventional Approach vs Critical Approach
A sample of mission statements from leading business schools. Typical of many,
Harvard promises to
“educate leaders who make a difference in the world”
Stanford seeks to
“develop innovative, principled, and insightful leaders who change the world”
Duke University’s business school wants to
“develop smart and real leaders of consequence, who are looking to make their mark and effect positive change in the world”
15
Power and Politics
“power is to organization, as oxygen is to breathing”
Power:
power is the capacity to influence other actors with these political interests in mind. It is a resource to get things done through other people, to achieve certain goals that may be shared or contested.
Politics:
politics consists of activity that rearranges relations between people and the distribution of goods (broadly defined) through the mobilization of power. (Arendt, 1958)
Conventional Approach vs Critical Approach
Leadership is not scientific but a political process
Persuasive rendition of the context is key
Leadership is based on soft power whereas management is hard power
Narratives can become self-fulling prophecies
17
Proposing a more nuanced approach to leader and follower power, influence, and agency, critical perspectives re-conceptualize leadership as a
Co-constructed,
Asymmetrical, and
Shifting dynamic
characterized by complex situated and mutually reinforcing relations between leaders and followers.
What does Leadership look like from a Critical perspective?
18
Where about to be CRITICAL?
In interpreting meaning of leadership
critiquing romanticism
foregrounding power
rethinking followership
The idea that leadership is socially constructed and interpreted and that “it” could mean very different things to different actors in different situations is largely ignored.
Contested Meaning of Leadership:
20
Critiquing Romanticism
Recognize the tendency to credit responsibility for organizational success to the supposedly superior insights of formal leaders, such as CEOs, as well as apportion most blame to these same people when organizations fail.(e.g., Meindl et al., 1985).
attention to the complexities of organizational life;
the role of accident and coincidence in determining the outcomes of leader decisions; and
the need to distinguish more clearly between correlation (the presence of Leader A when Organization B succeeds or fails) and causation.
Critiquing Romanticism
To recognize how organizational success can be (over)attributed to leadership in general, and to the CEO in particular (Rosenzweig, 2007)..
For example, individuals who hold a romantic view of leaders, that is, those who over attribute company performance to leaders (cf. the romance of leadership model; Meindl, Ehrlich, & Dukerich, 1985) perceive their leader as more charismatic (Shamir, 1992).
Critiquing Romanticism
How important in love in leadership? - YouTube
Critiquing Romanticism
Rather than address such issues, mainstream approaches tend to emphasize the importance of leaders as charismatic visionaries, often with minimal to no evidence that their claimed impact on
organizational performance has actually occurred
(Meindl, Ehrlich, & Dukerich, 1985).
For example, Spector (2014) argues that the portrayal of Iaccoca in
the 1980s as a transformer of Chrysler was unsubstantiated, but also foundational to early conceptualizations in the literature of transformational leadership and its subsequent popularization in the business school curriculum (Bass & Riggio, 2006).
Critiquing Romanticism
| Compelling vision |
| 1) Vision ‘totalistic’ in its implications 2) Agreement with vision precondition of group membership 3) Vision communicated unidirectionally from top to bottom 4) Dissent from vision penalised, by withdrawal of valued social rewards and/or expulsion |
Leaders promote ideological totalism which inoculates others against doubt and non-believers are ostracised
‘Truth’ becomes less evident as the leader’s vision becomes normalised
Critiquing Romanticism
| Individual consideration |
| 1) Followers reward for compliance and penalised for dissent 2) Indoctrination rituals that alternate between stressful and exhilarating 3) Leaders maintain the vision is perfectly tailored to the deepest needs of followers 4) Continuous indoctrination to reinforce initial sense of affiliation 5) Followers encourage to believe that the leader has a vested personal interest in their welfare |
Using ceremonies to indoctrinate potential recruits through ‘love bombing’
Praising in accordance with rules and values of the organization which create a sense of hierarchy.
Creating a overwhelming sense of group identity infused with the spirit of loyalty, cohesion and commitment to group goals – which are decided by the leader
(Tourish & Pinnington, 2002)
Critiquing Romanticism
Together, these findings lead to the conclusion that the perception of actual leaders is not independent of the perceiver’s implicit leadership theories. To quote Cummings, “It has been said that leadership is like beauty—you know it when you see it” (2007: 143).
Critiquing Romanticism
Typically, there is little mention of misjudgment, greed, narcissism, shame, duplicity, stupidity, hubris, soaring CEO salaries, power, and lack of democracy or employee involvement: that is, there is no mention of many of the emotional and political issues that frequently preoccupy real people in real organizations.
Critiquing Romanticism
Critiquing Romanticism
wisdom vs. misjudgements, uncertainty
“The complexities of the business environment are reduced to the innate wisdom or clumsy misjudgments of a single individual”.
Hindsight also affords commentators the luxury of judging the quality of their decisions without confronting the elements of uncertainty that existed when they were made.”
Foregrounding Power: Gender, Ethnicity, Class, Disability,
Foregrounding Power: Gender, Ethnicity, Class, Disability,
Foucault’s model of power
Power is relational
Power is not the hammer, because the hammer needs the nail!
The relation between the hammer and the nail is a power relation
Power relations are everywhere!
An Introduction to Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish - A Macat Sociology Analysis (youtube.com)
Disciplinary power
The Panopticon – Internalising surveillance
Disciplinary power
How is power exerted in/through this lecture theatre?
Resistance
Is resistance futile?
Resistance and organisations
Management’s resistance vs. shareholders
Workers’ resistance vs. management
Individual
Overt: formal complaint, requests
Covert: stealing, irony, absenteeism, sabotage
Collective
Overt: trade unions, industrial action, strike, working-to-contract, occupation of the workplace
Covert: leafleting, clandestine campaigning, satirical magazine
Speak Like a Leader!- Leadership Narratives
Stories are power means of communication and persuasion
Stories impart meaning to ambiguous events
Stories disseminate ethical, cognitive and pragmatic messages
Stories create ‘knowledge’ inside and outside the organization
Speak Like a Leader!-
Leadership Narratives
Management of Dilemma, Tensions, Conflicts and Leadership
Storey and Salaman (2009: 22) hold that the management of dilemma and paradox is ‘‘the essence of leadership.’’
Thank you!
