We don’t need another hero : Towards the study of leadership as everyday practices
Year: 2009
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: In all theories of management and organization, leadership has a given central place in enforcing principles, motivating employees and communicating future goals and visions to strive for. Leadership is assumed to make a special, significant and positive contribution to action processes in most organizations, and leadership studies as an academic field has thus been preoccupied with the task of identifying the most successful leadership practices. At the same time, the field of leadership studies has traditionally been leader-centered, i.e. focused on the individual leader and his/hers traits, abilities and actions. Leadership practices have been equated with leaders’ practices, dichotomously separated from those of the ‘others’ in this tradition, the ‘followers’. The aim of this paper is to put forward an alternative perspective, based on the idea that leadership is a natural part of what most people do on an everyday basis in organisations. From this perspective, leadership is a set of social practices organised by people in interaction, practices related to intentional processes of organisational change and development. Empirical data from recent case studies will be used to illustrate the tenets of this alternative perspective
Language: English
Subfield: Strategy and Management
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2156496465