Becoming the leader: Leadership as material presence
Ford, J; Harding, N; Richardson, S
Date: 28 January 2017
Journal
Organization Studies
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Publisher DOI
Abstract
This paper seeks to understand leaders as material presences. Leadership
theory has traditionally explored leaders as sites of disembodied traits,
characteristics and abilities. Our qualitative, mixed method study suggests
that managers charged with the tasks of leadership operate within a very
different understanding. Their ...
This paper seeks to understand leaders as material presences. Leadership
theory has traditionally explored leaders as sites of disembodied traits,
characteristics and abilities. Our qualitative, mixed method study suggests
that managers charged with the tasks of leadership operate within a very
different understanding. Their endogenous or lay theory understands
leadership as physical, corporeal and visible, and as something made
manifest through leaders’ material presence. This theory-in-practice holds
that leadership qualities are signified by the leader’s physical appearance:
the good leader must look the part. Actors consequently work on their own
appearance to present an image of themselves as leader. They thus offer a
fundamental challenge to dominant exogenous, or academic, theories of
leadership. To understand the unspoken assumptions that underpin the lay
theory of leadership as material presence, we interrogate it using the new
materialist theory of Karen Barad and the object relations theory of
Christopher Bollas. This illuminates the lay theory’s complexities and
sophisticated insights. In academic terms it offers a theory of how sentient
and non-sentient actors intra-act and performatively constitute leadership
through complex entanglements that enact and circulate organizational and
leadership norms. The paper’s contribution is thus a theory of leadership
micro-dynamics in which the leader is materialised through practices of
working on a corporeal self for presentation to both self and others.
Management
Faculty of Environment, Science and Economy
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