Discussion: Distinctive elements of the new art

Distinctive elements of the new art of leadership research An element is “one of the fundamental or irreducible components making up a whole” and “a cause that contributes to a result” (Collins Concise Dictionary). As a conclusion of the above discussion I would like add three elements that are often missing in theories of leadership.

By adding these elements I am still not raising the expectations toward leadership to any extra-ordinary heights; instead I want to stress that if leadership as a social construction aims at discussing leadership in a new light, new elements are needed. The elements are epistemological and ontological creativity, informality and uniqueness. They are partly inspired by the context of the study and by the need of contemporary organizations for leadership that recognizes complexity, fast-paced change, more creative approaches, customer orientation, growing specialization and fewer levels of hierarchy, and that takes virtual and disseminated work into account (Dale and Burrell 2008; Florida 2002;

Hamel 2007; Orr 1995).

First, epistemological and ontological creativity are needed in leader-ship research. Basically this element suggests a re-thinking of epistemo-logical and ontoepistemo-logical assumptions. An example of this is offered by aesthetic epistemology: The word aesthetics originates from the Greek aisthesis, which refers to any kind of sensory experience, whether it

is direct sensory information or interpretation, judgment. In Plato’s discussion on aisthesis in the dialogue Theaetetus, the aesthetic ap-proach denies the existence of pure knowledge. Aisthesis implies both sensory information, knowledge and judgment. The reason for not separating these instances is based on the Ancient holistic view on knowledge. Aesthetic knowledge is not limited to direct, sense-based or actual sensory knowledge. Instead, it includes personal feelings and bodily felt relations with the world, as Strati (2007) with his examples of roof-builders’ balancing acts and ”looking with ears” points out.

Roof-builders need to balance on the top of the building, and because of the danger the height poses, the the roof-builders Strati talked with used all possible senses to ensure the balance, even “looking with ears”.

When we think about confronting a colleague, friend, spouse or our child we don’t rely on the sensory data alone, but also “hidden aspects”

(Strati 2007: 63) such as memories and experiences. The same hidden aspects are found in leader-follower relations: previous successful co-operation, having suspicions or having been rejected, dismissed or hurt by the other – all that affects the present perception. Our body carries the wounds and scars of old incidents – that is part of learning.

An example of ontological re-thinking can be taken from arts-based approaches. Ladkin and Taylor (2010: 239) state that the chal-lenge for leadership scholars is “to attend to those aspects of leadership and leading which are not easily measured, or even defined. Rather than conducting more studies into correlations based on dubious proxies for invisible variables, ‘leadership as art’ suggests that leadership schol-ars should engage in critique more akin to art criticism, rather than relying heavily on the tools of logical positivism to analyse leadership practice.” The ontology of leadership, that which is under scrutiny, needs to be of central concern for future leadership studies. It is, after all, a phenomenon we are studying, not an object, and the ways of approaching a phenomenon are only limited by our imagination – and by negotiations with the scientific communities we want to involve.

In order to make sense of the social becoming of such a complex and multi-dimensional phenomenon as leadership, I believe that adding

this element requires use of different methodologies – which cross the existing scientific boundaries.

The second additional element is informality of leadership, which refers to the shift from leader-centricity toward leadership. The theory of informal organization was born as a side-effect of the Hawthorne studies in the 1920s-30s, as a research group around Harvard Business School Professor Elton studied the effect of work conditions on the productivity of factory workers at the Western Electric company’s Hawthorne Works in Chicago. The research group placed 6 female workers in a separate room and increased or decreased the amount of light in the room. Their research showed no clear connection between the amount of lightning and productivity. However, there was clear improvement in productivity during the examined period no matter what the lightning level.

It turned out that the social factors – building cohesion in a team, taking responsibility, being measured and informal conversations – had more effect on the workers than external factors like lightning.

Nowadays the theory of informal organization claims that people make sense of organizations and leadership informally. (Ekman 1999) The term “invisible management” describes these discussions. (Sjöstrand et al. 2001)

I stated that this research is inspired by studies like those of van Maanen (1989), Orr (1991) and Bragd (1998). How should Balinese cock fighting (Geertz 1973), police patrolling (van Maanen 1989), a fire-fighter crew’s deadly accident (Weick 1993; 2007) or the design of a new Volvo car (Bragd 1998) inform us about leadership? How do these ethnographically oriented studies that do not explicitly study leadership but culture inform us about leadership? All these studies illuminate the informal organization and the way it is practised. From a social constructionist and phenomenological point of view they describe how the phenomenon comes to be.

Mary Parker Follett described the informality and invisibility of leadership – the non leader-centric approach – in the following words:

“Leaders and followers are both following the invisible leader – the common purpose. The best executives put this common purpose clearly before their group. While leadership depends on the depth of conviction and the power coming there from, there must also be the ability to share that conviction with others, the ability to make purpose articulate. And then that common purpose becomes the leader. And I believe that we are coming more and more to act, whatever our theories, on our faith in the power of this invisible leader. Loyalty to the invisible leader gives us the strongest possible bond of union, establishes a sympathy which is not a sentimental but a dynamic sympathy” (Follet 1941, in Klenke 2010: 315).

But if leadership is invisible, how do we recognize it in the materials?

Where to observe it, what to pay attention to?

The way leadership is defined initially makes the biggest differen-ce for the analysis. If we take Follet’s suggestion seriously, then we should observe the common purpose, for instance how it is accepted socially and how people become motivated to follow it – and not to concentrate solely on what the dominated leader does. Informal leadership refers to process ontology and avoids leader-centricity. As a social construction, leadership is not only attached to an individual, but even more to an organization and its relations. Leadership is acted out together, and each member of the organization is embedded in it and represents it. Thus leadership is found in practices, interactions and relations (Küpers 2007; Hosking 2007; Crevani et al. 2010), and these can be appropriately studied through culture – as in the above cases by Bragd, Geertz, van Maanen, Orr, and Weick.

The third element is uniqueness. Rather than generalizing the lively features of materials into abstract formulae, new art of leadership research should keep the phenomena alive as long as possible, and only then to generalize. That way it allows the impressions to have a more lasting effect and does not categorize from the outset. However, the downside of presenting readers with the realities of leadership – e.g.

routinized practices, following the common purpose, the impact of

context, leadership as relation-building – is that it is difficult to pro-vide general notions on leadership. Uniqueness calls for studying the phenomena, not to create one more general, grand leadership theory.

With that aim in mind, leadership might still, indeed, disappear (Alvesson and Sveningsson 2003a), or be replaced by another kind of research that yet acknowledges the phenomenon.

Uniqueness is a related term to phenomenon. Phenomenology, the study of what appears to us as phenomenon, “recognizes the subjective nature of knowledge and pays close attention to lived ex-perience as a valid source of knowing. Many of the more traditional ways of exploring leadership attempt to describe it ‘from the outside’

in accordance with accepted social science methods and assumptions about validity and objectivity. In contrast, phenomenology embraces the significance of meaning within human sense-making processes”

(Ladkin 2010: 6).

When we consider leadership as a unique, invisible and informal phenomenon, it means that very little can be taken for granted. As a phenomenon the perceived world appears first unique, as a never-seen-in-this-form-before, and only after that will it be categorized (defined, modelled). The central quality of the social world is its uniqueness:

to be precise, there are no two similar individuals, needs, actions, or social situations. In practice leadership always takes place in unique circumstances that never happened before or will happen again in exactly the same manner.

So what do materials look like through these epistemological and ontological lenses that show the phenomenon in an informal and unique, processual light?