New art of leadership research

In the 1990s and 2000s new research options started to emerge in the field of leadership studies. These approaches consciously try to avoid leader-centricity, the subject-object trap and dualistic mind-body problem of the earlier leader-follower discussions. The question then becomes: where to find leadership if it is not of necessity attached to a person? The approaches that redefine leadership represent them-selves in the form of aesthetic, ethical, and spiritual theories, and pay attention to social constructions, relations and practices. These approaches challenge the traditional categorizing by beginning from fresh assumptions about the nature of leadership. They mostly share different epistemological and ontological groundings than the previ-ous concepts.

First, both social and relational constructionism (Berger and Luck-man 1967; Dachler and Hosking 1995; Hosking 2007) and the inte-gral approach to leadership (Küpers 2007; Küpers and Stattler 2008) offer new ideas for leadership research. The integral approach aims at connecting different leadership approaches – may they be subjective or objective by nature – and at recognizing complex and inter-related relations (Küpers 2007; Küpers and Statler 2008). This approach situ-ates leadership into a domain where leaders and followers link, and it regards this domain as an ongoing, processual activity (Küpers 2005).

This approach thus has similarities with the phenomenological and hermeneutic epistemelogy. Relational constructionism does not locate leadership in leaders, followers or situation either, but concentrates on relations and how leadership is constructed by language use and talked into being. According to Dachler and Hosking (1995) the key to understanding relational approaches is epistemology: knowledge claims are to be assessed against the cultural backgrounds that perform these truths. Truth is thus a matter of relational social processes. In general a social constructionist way of approaching leadership can then also be to call it invisible management (Sjöstrand, Tyrstrup and Sandberg 2000) or invisible leadership that is marked by ‘absences’ and ‘presences’

(Ladkin 2010). These authors share an understanding of leadership as a social phenomenon that is acted out by several organizational actors and is situated in several places and incidents simultaneously.

In Dachler and Hosking’s (1995: 3–4) view, leadership research is an epistemological topic that has ontological consequences. They claim that in studies of organizations the prevalent approach is to understand individuals, and even groups or organizations, as separate entities.

This means that these phenomena are not analysed as connected, interdependent or co-constructive. Their second claim is that the actions and goals that these entities pursue are again mainly regarded as if they were in control of external and internal forces (egocentric metaphor of manhood).

In the “possessive individualism” perspective ‘followers’ are un-derstood as vehicles or objects of the leaders’ activities in two ways:

leaders’ intentions are communicated to the subordinates, and leaders possess the power to control reality construction. In this respect “the central concern is implicitly always that of how the leader/subject gets the follower/object to think, talk, or act in ways that reflect the leader’s perspective”. (Dachler and Hosking 1995: 9) In relational constructionism one cannot attribute certain qualities to leaders, be-cause that would mean to step in to the trap of entities again. It pays attention to inviting questions about social processes, and therefore rather than asking ‘what is leadership’, it would ask ‘how does it come to be through social relations’.

Hosking (2006) states that identifying taken-for-granted assump-tions about leadership and how the research is conducted depends on the local cultures we are involved with, and, along the lines of Bryman (2004, 2006) urges the leadership researchers to engage with other modes of research than their usual options. This recommendation is naturally in line with the constructionist view on multiple realities where no singular standpoint has the upper hand. She directs the at-tention to leadership attempts that: “go beyond overly simple ‘outsider’

assumptions about who are leaders and who followers, embrace the possibility of distributed – and not just focused – leadership, take seriously the involvement of (what some might call) ‘followers’ in leadership processes, and finally give space to developing ‘followers’

into leaders” (Hosking 2006: 2).

An integrated leadership approach (Küpers 2007) of leadership and followership is useful for examining interrelated process of leadership and followership, and how these roles are assumed. In this approach leaders and followers are perceived both as wholes and as separated, and integration comes about where these two parties meet in terms of leadership/followership occasions. That, to a certain degree, describes also my unit of analysis: the occasions where leadership and follow-ership become integrated. These relations are occasions for reality construction. Leadership only comes into being and exists when it is acted out in the occasions.

One of the central elements of the new leadership approaches is the tendency to regard leadership as a process (Creviani et al. 2010;

Hosking 2006; Ladkin 2010). This is also the way that sensemaking (Weick 1995) and hermeneutics (Gadamer 2004) would construct a phenomenon: understanding is a reflexive process, and when linked with process ontology, these approaches underline the socially con-structed nature of leadership as a common process in which the organi-zational members find themselves and through which they negotiate the becoming of commonly shared phenomena. This definition of emerging phenomena is close to hermeneutic “fusion of horizons”.

Further contemporary leadership concepts are the ethical, spiritual and aesthetic leadership approaches. Ethical leadership (Brown and Trevino 2006) and ethical stewardship (Caldwell 2007) have gained in importance after the several scandals in different organizations that range from Enron in the early 2000s to sports doping scandals and the financial crisis and suspected ethical misconducts in 2007–2008. In place of authenticity and self-awareness (authentic leadership), ethical leadership emphasizes moral management and awareness of others; in place of of visioning, faith and work as vocation (spiritual leadership), it emphasizes moral management; and in place of of vision, values and intellectual stimulation (transformational leadership), it emphasizes ethical standards (Brown and Trevino 2006: 598).

Spiritual leadership (Fry 2003) calls for “more holistic leadership that integrates the four fundamental arenas that define the essence of human existence—the body (physical), mind (logical/rational thought), heart (emotions, feelings), and spirit” (Fry 2003: 694). In this approach human spirituality is an element of human organization, but it has so far been effectively neglected by organization and leadership research, even if more familiar concepts like ‘company spirit’ or ‘atmosphere’

are often referred to as motivational factors influencing efficiency and promoting the well-being of an organization.

Finally, aesthetic leadership has recently been introduced to suggest that leadership occurs and is constructed not only in the intellectual mind of the leader and the followers, but also in and through the sens-ing and experiencsens-ing bodies (Hansen, Ropo & Sauer, 2007; Ladkin, 2008; Ladkin and Taylor, 2010; Ropo and Parviainen, 2001; Ropo, Parviainen and Koivunen, 2002; Ropo and Sauer, 2008; Sinclair, 2005) and through emotions and intuitions (Fineman 2000; Sauer 2005).

Aesthetic is here understood as “sensory knowledge and felt mean-ing” (Hansen, Ropo & Sauer, 2007). Leadership is equated with arts and the art of leadership, and Hatch, Kostera and Koźmiński (2006) propose three faces of leadership: manager, artist and priest. A recent issue of Leadership Journal was devoted to the topic of leadership as art; six articles explored different variations on the theme (Ladkin and

Taylor 2010). In short, as Adler (2006) summarizes the new develop-ments in leadership research “the time is right for cross-fertilization of leadership and the arts”..

As stated above, the tradition of leadership research is by and large cognitively oriented (Hansen et al. 2007), focusing on the person of the leader and her/his ways of utilizing her/his power – following the feudal metaphor of the king (Barker 1997). The Aesthetic leadership approach takes a different epistemological standpoint by regarding knowledge not only as a matter of cognition, but including emotions, experience and practical wisdom, “knowing in action” (Adler 2006; Hansen et al.

2007; Ramirez 1995; Ropo et al. 2002; Ropo & Sauer 2007; Strati 1999, 2007). In addition to rational knowledge and cognitive processes, aesthetics emphasizes “sensory knowledge and felt meaning” (Hansen et al. 2007: 545) as essential ways of knowing. Even if “management and leadership theories are explicitly more familiar with the discourse of control, profit, and effectiveness than with aesthetics” (Ropo et al.

2002: 24), aesthetics in epistemological respect is an undeniable ele-ment of organizational reality (Strati 1996).

The view of leadership as a socially constructed phenomenon is illustrated by Hansen et al. (2007) as a shift of focus in leadership research as follows:

Figure 3. Shift of Focus in Leadership Research (Hansen, Ropo, Sauer 2007)!

The shift of focus is from leader-centricity towards relations. Even if

“there is no leader without followers” (Hansen, Ropo, Sauer 2007:

548), traditionally the followers have been defined by the position of leader, so the shift is a more radical move than that which the more purely follower-centric theories suggest. Leadership is not a momentary glimpse in time, Hunt and Ropo (1995) argue, but has a processual character. If we regard leadership as an evolving and growing relation-ship between leader and followers, not an object or stable entity to which unchanging characteristics can be attributed, then leadership studies ought to take a similar time-perspective into account too.

To sum up the new leadership approaches perspective: Leadership is not a quality of an individual, but of an organization. Leadership is also not only a rational capacity, but involves the whole embodied experience of being a human. Nowadays also the ethical and spiritual aspects of a workplace are taken into consideration, as the more holistic approaches, including wider epistemological and ontological considera-tions, have gained a foothold in organizational studies. After decades of despair and frustration there are winds of change in leadership studies and the future with a new impetus looks bright.

4.2 On qualitative methodology in leadership research