Stephen Billing’s Blog

Three reasons: practising managers are vague about leadership, ideology about leadership is pervasive and research methods can be misleading.

Alvesson and Sveningsson in their article about the disappearance of leadership summarise two main means by which ideas about leadership break down. One is that common definitions of leadership do not correspond to the accounts of leadership produced by people in leadership positions in organisations.

The second is that their initial claim about what is important in leadership is contradicted by their efforts to show what this means when they are applying it in their daily work.

To me, this is very interesting. But there is more.

Reviewing the literature about leadership, the main common aspect amongst various leadership definitions seems to be that leadership is an influence process. Unfortunately this is not enough distinction because you could also say that selling is an influence process. You can probably think of other influence processes such as political lobbying.

What is the difference between leadership and, say, selling or lobbying? Well, one difference is in the context of an asymmetrical organisational relationship. What this is referring to is that the leader/manager has more power and is attempting to influence what those reporting to him or her do. A salesperson or lobbyist is operating in a different context, where there is not the same asymmetrical power relationship.

Alvesson and Sveningsson come to three conclusions in their highly interesting article.

First, highly intelligent managers have rather vague and contradictory notions of leadership, which are only discovered by taking an open ended research approach (questionnaires would not discover this).

Secondly, there are strong ideological overtones to the views people have about leadership, and so the leadership industry should be careful about the extent to which its ideological perspective enables the easy production of leadership as something distinct and robust without adequate questioning. From this study, the phenomenon of leadership seems to be much more fragile than is commonly assumed.

Thirdly, while the researchers do not want to kill leadership off, they do want to make sure that there is clear understanding of the research methods used to draw conclusions about leadership. Do the methods used to research leadership generate the views about leadership that they report on, rather than reporting on observations about leadership?

Ultimately, I think that Alvesson and Sveningsson’s research points to the need to ask of any leadership research what the method was, so that you can decide whether or not the study has avoided the tendency to impose its own leadership ideology, thus creating the leadership phenomenon it intends to report on.