Doctor Antoinette Kemp
Digital DBA, 2024
Business Science Institute
Heroes, saviours, almighty individuals: these pervasive images of the powerful and invulnerable (typically masculine) leader have long dominated the leadership narrative. However, in the face of current economic, social, environmental, and political challenges, this rhetoric is increasingly being questioned. It often benefits only a privileged few and tends to prevent us from thinking differently about how to pursue new ways of leadership and cultural change. Against this backdrop, today’s leaders are increasingly required to rethink their traditional understanding of leadership and ask themselves: Can a leader address new challenges with old recipes? What can be the role of leaders in times of cultural transition?
Research impact(s)
Both academics and practitioners emphasise that leadership should not be understood as a universal practice, but rather a contextual process. This means that instead of applying so-called “best practices”, one needs to pay attention to the situatedness of the leadership action. Driven by this desire to better document alternative leadership approaches that move away from the hero rhetoric, I took the opportunity, as an insider, to follow the cultural change journey of a traditional automotive company.
My findings reveal that cultural change generates tensions that leaders address through two main approaches: either individualisation (framing issues in terms of an individual’s problem) or socialisation (reaching out to the collective to find a solution). Each of these can be further decomposed into two sub-approaches, depending on how they relate to context or leadership.
The resulting matrix of four sub-approaches to leadership in times of cultural transition emphasises different roles and types of change, each with associated political implications for leadership. One example is the ‘Good Student’ role. Leaders who embody this role tend to apply an individualisation approach to tensions and privilege the perception of the intra-organisational context. They aim to please everyone by adhering to rules and behaving as expected, conforming to principles read in books or professed by top management. Moreover, they have a more bureaucratic-functional understanding of change and try to convert the change process into rather technical action points, which can be easily ticked off. They drive change in their functional way; they tick off all the action points on their to-do list, showing quick results. However, this approach blocks the more emotional and social construction part of the cultural change process, leading to a ‘superficial’ type of change. Roles that apply an individualisation approach tend to embrace and perpetuate a neoliberal agenda, which can lead to a depoliticization of organisational discourse.
Based on my findings, I proposed an ‘ideal’ role and type of change to enable a gap analysis and make recommendations for role-specific and context-oriented leadership development involving the organisation as a whole and not just individual leaders. To address new challenges effectively, leadership training needs to evolve from individual to interpersonal competencies, emphasising how leadership emerges within social contexts, rather than relying on outdated approaches (Carroll et al., 2008; Day, 2000).
I am currently promoting my key research insights as a tool to “stop & reflect” in cooperation with HR within my organisation. We are still in the middle of our cultural change journey, and my findings can help us leaders to check where we are on our journey: which role are we embodying, what impact we are having, and which alternative capabilities we need to develop to pursue new ways of leadership and cultural change.
Research foundations
Grounded in critical leadership studies, I problematise the traditional approach to leadership and change. This means that my study questions the romantic assumptions of leaders portrayed as heroes, capable only of changing an organisational culture individually to increase efficiency, while neglecting the social context (Grégoire et al., 2022; Kempster & Jackson, 2021; Sutherland et al., 2022). Disrupting the traditional approach to leadership seems especially relevant today in order to emancipate from the neoliberal Western context in which European organisations are situated. This environment is marked by individual freedom, the dominance of economic rationality, and the fostering of individual and technical approaches to problem-solving, which leads to the depoliticization of societal and organisational discourses (Eriksson & Eriksson, 2023; Wilson & Swyngedouw, 2015).
In the context of leadership, the term “political” pertains to power dynamics and the interests that are served, as well as who benefits from certain actions or decisions. A revitalisation of the political discourse and the political dimension of leadership is necessary to address structural issues and power relations, and to spark societal transformation (Bryson et al., 2021).
Research methodology
To explore the role of leadership in cultural transition, I used a qualitative, inductive research design grounded in social constructionism. My study centres on twenty-one semi-structured interviews with leaders at the middle management level. Additional primary data were gathered through observations and a reflexive journal kept by myself to reflect on my personal influence on the research due to my multiple roles as employee, coach, colleague, leader, and researcher.
Secondary data included internal company documents, presentations, and online postings. For data analysis, I used thematic content analysis. The implementation of my managerial recommendations was not part of my DBA thesis; however, I am actively involved in the implementation now, providing possibilities for further research.
Feedback from Professors
“The part devoted to the managerial recommendations is very interesting and is another sign of the maturity of the author: this can be seen as a high-impact research work in the field of leadership studies.”(Professor Charles-Henri Besseyre des Horts, reviewer)
Further reading and viewing
For further details on this DBA research, you can watch my defence presentation on YouTube. Further publications in academic journals, together with my thesis supervisor Pr. Pauline Fatien, are in preparation.
References
Bryson, J. M., Barberg, B., Crosby, B. C., & Patton, M. Q. (2021). Leading Social Transformations: Creating Public Value and Advancing the Common Good. Journal of Change Management, 21(2), 180–202.
Carroll, B., Levy, L., & Richmond, D. (2008). Leadership as practice: Challenging the competency paradigm. Leadership, 4(4), 363–379.
Day, D. V. (2000). Leadership development: A review in context. The Leadership Quarterly, 11(4), 581–613.
Eriksson, E. M., & Eriksson, E. M. (2023). The Pitfalls of a Popular Concept: Co-Production in Times of Individualization, Marketization, and De-Politicization. Scandinavian Journal of Public Administration, 27(3), 87–107.
Grégoire, M., Delalieux, G., & Fatien, P. (2022). Alternative leadership and the pitfalls of hierarchy: When formalization enables power to be tamed. Leadership, 16(6), 729–753.
Kempster, S., & Jackson, B. (2021). Leadership for What, Why, for Whom and Where? A Responsibility Perspective. Journal of Change Management, 21(1), 45–65.
Sutherland, N., Bolden, R., Edwards, G., & Schedlitzki, D. (2022). Putting leadership in its place: Introduction to the special issue. Leadership, 18(1), 3–12.
Wilson, J., & Swyngedouw, E. (2015). Seeds of dystopia: Post-politics and the return of the political. In The Post-Political and its Discontents: Spaces of Depoliticisation, Spectres of Radical Politics (pp. 1–22). Edinburgh University Press.
Key words: leadership, change leadership, cultural change, de-politicization, neoliberalism.
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