Stephen Billing’s Blog

In 1989, Yukl pointed out that the numerous definitions of leadership seem to have little in common other than that leadership involves an influence practice. While Yukl thinks this is a problem, Alvesson and Sveningsson on the other hand doubt that a common definition of leadership is possible, that it would not be very helpful if it were possible, and that it may obstruct new ideas about leadership.  They also note that two thirds of leadership texts do not define leadership at all, and this may well support the view that leadership is indeed difficult to pin down.

Part of the problem may be the requirement for these definitions and insights into leadership to be applicable across such a wide range of contexts – managerial, sports and formally designated leadership, upwards, and peer, for example. A definition broad enough to cover all these situations may well be too general to be useful in specific situations. The problem with defining leadership as some kind of influencing process is that you could then interchange "leadership" with all sorts of other terms associated also with influencing, such as "culture," "strategy," "organisation structure," or other concepts. You have to be able to distinguish one from the other or else you do not actually have a clearly defined concept you can work with.

One of the common conceptions of leadership is based around the idea of the hero’s journey. The hero that is omnipresent in humanity’s various mythologies leaves (perhaps being expelled from) family and comfort, undergoes a series of trials culminating in the achievement of some mighty quest, eventually returning home, bringing an offering and transformed by the process.

In what Meindl et al call the Romance of Leadership, (subscription only, unfortunately) they say that there is a tendency to ascribe leadership to complex and ambiguous organisational events, even though it can be highly uncertain as to whether leadership actually had anything to do with those events or not. In other words, we seek a heroic journey

In other words, in the absence of any unambiguous information about cause and effect, leadership is used as an interpretive device to explain the events that took place. Just because leadership is frequently used to explain an organisation’s success does not mean that this is necessarily so.

It is important to remember that in any study that produces data, the data itself is constructed through the theory held by the researcher. Much research obscures or hides the point of view of the researcher, and so readers who are interpreting the research sometimes have to ask themselves what might the theory of the researcher be. In the case of much leadership research, the built in theory is that leadership exists and the very methodology used by the researchers actually produces the phenomenon of leadership, the phenomenon which the research is seeking to investigate.

How does this occur? In order to reduce the ambiguity of responses to make them easier to process, respondents in leadership research are often asked multichoice questions. This makes coding the answers much easier. At the same time it also has the effect of producing leadership in the frame of reference of the researcher, even if the respondents were not thinking of leadership in that way prior to answering the questionnaire.

A simple test would be to ask "If there were no such thing as leadership, would this research tell us so?" Research in which participants respond to questionnaires would mostly fail this test, because the questions have been framed in line with the researchers’ hypotheses about leadership. If respondents are asked, for example, to indicate which aspects of leadership are most important, then the very process of indicating "clarity of vision" or "feedback on performance" ignores the possibility that there may not actually be such a thing as leadership. Through this process the survey actually creates the phenomenon of leadership. This is an example of a method that could not possibly give the result that there is no such thing as leadership.

So, it is a problem that ambiguity has been neglected in the interests of producing a survey that is easily processed. The rich diversity of experience is rendered invisible (suppressed) in order to make generalisable theory possible. This involves a distortion of social reality in that it privileges certainty and order at the expense of ambiguity and unknown-ness, even though ambiguity and unknown-ness are what we experience in so much of our day to day organisational life in our practice as leaders.

There is much to question about the findings of the leadership research that is presented to us.