Call for Papers

Research on leadership in organizations has predominantly focused on exploring leaders’ traits and leadership styles within the framework of ‘individualist and heroic models’ (Holm & Fairhurst, 2018:692). However, this focus has prompted calls for a shift away from viewing followers merely as subjects of top-down leader influence (Collinson, 2005; Raelin, 2016). Instead, there is a growing imperative to investigate the subtler dynamics of covert actions, inactions, practices, and experiences among interactants within established leadership configurations (Chreim, 2015).
 
Exploring these micro-level relations is crucial, as they give rise to novel leadership structures, reshaping interactants’ rules, roles, and expectations across diverse organizational and sociocultural contexts. Despite this recognition, there remains a significant gap in understanding the diversifying potential of leadership, or the nature and emergence of new creative, ambivalent, or destructive relational practices within existing leadership arrangements and how interactants in distinct organizational settings experience these practices.
 
Creativity in leadership, or what some term ‘bright-side’ leadership styles (Akhtar et al., 2023) signifies the emergence of innovative relational formations and practices involving leaders and followers engaging in novel forms of interaction, role shaping, and expectation setting (Eisenbeiss et al., 2008; Waldman & Bowen, 2016). This can lead to spontaneous shifts in practices, meanings, and identities; for instance, recognising leaders based on community requirements and cultural norms, rather than formal organizational designations (Eisenbeiss & Knippenberg, 2015). Positioned as a positive force, creativity fosters the development of new systems, instigates change, and extends leadership beyond structured hierarchical managerial positions (Gardner et al., 2011).
 
Conversely, destructive leadership outcomes, such as those emanating from despotic, destructive or manipulative leadership (Akhtar et al., 2023), arise from actions or inactions that can impede creativity, hinder innovation, negatively impact the organizational environment and followership allegiance, and contribute to power struggles and conflicts (Padilla et al., 2007). Recognising destructive aspects is crucial for a comprehensive understanding of leadership dynamics, shedding light on potential drawbacks and challenges when leadership practices diverge from fostering positive organizational experiences (Kellerman, 2004).
 
The interplay between creative and destructive aspects introduces ambivalence in leadership, where outcomes fall somewhere between purely positive and negative, creating ambiguity (Eisenbeiss & Knippenberg, 2015). This complexity challenges simplistic binary distinctions, demanding a nuanced understanding of leadership dynamics (Zhang et al., 2022). However, the implications of these insights for leadership theory, practice and research methods remain underexplored, warranting further scrutiny in management and organization studies.
 
The scarcity of nuanced insights in leadership studies is attributed to the predominant Global-North-centric focus, where social relations, particularly leadership interactions, are often examined in a static manner, leading to generalized outcomes (Currie & Lockett, 2011). This approach overlooks the intricacies, changes and challenges inherent in leadership practices in diverse contexts, resulting in missed opportunities to uncover interactants’ varied meanings and experiences. Even within in-groups, conflicts may arise, generating outcomes such as incongruence, lack of mutuality, or divergent values between leaders and followers (van de Mieroop et al., 2020), as evidenced in some postcolonial Global-South settings (Umeh et al., 2022).
 
Indeed, critiques of collectivist or plural leadership literature highlight its insufficient attention to power, competition, and conflict across different contexts (Denis et al., 2012: 271). Leadership-followership dynamics, whether structured formally or within informal ingroup memberships, can lead to the spontaneous emergence of shifting practices, meanings and identities, as well as varied relational experiences (Gerpott et al., 2020; Holm & Fairhurst, 2018; Cunliffe & Erikson, 2011), encompassing both creative, destructive and ambivalent tendencies and outcomes. This emphasizes the need for a more comprehensive and dynamic understanding of leadership across diverse cultural and organizational settings.
 
Second, leadership studies within organizations have predominantly adopted a critical or evaluative approach, often using the terms ‘manager’ and ‘leader’ interchangeably against specific organizational criteria, despite some distinctions made by certain authors (Chreim, 2015). While Yukl (1989) and Kotter (1995) emphasize management’s focus on risk minimisation and system maintenance, they contrast it with the creative nature of leadership, involving change and the establishment of new systems. The less-explored aspect is the examination of destructive aspects within leadership practices that may either constrain or paradoxically enable creativity (Zhang et al., 2022).
 
Finally, prevailing scholarly views tend to oversimplify the alignment of leadership with existing operations and management structures, prompting calls for a more complex leadership paradigm (Guarana & Hernandez, 2015). The issue of legitimacy in leadership is also underexplored, where individuals designated as leaders may not automatically garner followership allegiance, particularly when the leadership ‘tag’ does not translate into sustained follower support in specific organizational settings (Umeh et al., 2023). In such cases, followers may creatively confer the status of ‘actual leaders’ based on community requirements and cultural norms, irrespective of designations in the official organizational hierarchy (Chreim, 2015). Therefore, organizational leadership research should extend across boundaries into the underexplored realms of creative, destructive, or ambivalent leadership formations, which significantly impact interactant rules, roles, and expectations within organizational contexts.
 
This sub-theme will seek contributions focused on applying critical perspectives to explore varied manifestations of leadership in organizations. We welcome conceptual, empirical, and methodological contributions, drawing on a variety of theories and using diverse research methods. In all, we seek papers that contribute to our understanding of the creative, destructive or ambivalent aspects of leadership and how this is sustained, replicated, negotiated, manipulated or subverted through actions and inactions of employees in diverse organizations and sociocultural contexts.
 
Although the list below is not exhaustive, possible questions papers may seek to address include:

• How do micro-level relations lead to the emergence of new leadership structures, altering rules, roles, and expectations of leaders and followers within diverse organizations and sociocultural contexts?

• How do leaders and followers engage in novel interactions contributing to creativity in leadership within organizations?

• How do destructive leadership outcomes, actions, or inactions of interactants constrain creativity within organizational contexts?

• How and to what effects does ambivalence in leadership arise, where actions or outcomes fall somewhere between purely creative and purely destructive?

• How does the contextual focus of leadership studies within organizations, particularly those with a Global-North-centric perspective, impact the understanding of leadership interactions and outcomes in the Global South?

• What challenges and opportunities arise in leadership practices within organizations in postcolonial Global-South contexts, and how do they differ from insights from conventional leadership studies?

• How can organizational leadership research utilize methods to explore the uncharted territories of leadership formations, whether creative, destructive, or ambivalent, and their profound influence on interactants?

References

• Akhtar, Muhammad W., Garavan, T., Syed, F., Huo, C., Javed, M., & O’Brien, F. (2023): Despotic Leadership and Front-Line Employee Deviant Work Behaviors in Service Organizations: The Roles of Moral Disengagement and Moral Identity. Journal of Service Research, 10946705231207991.

• Chreim, Samia (2015): The (non) distribution of leadership roles: Considering leadership practices and configurations. Human Relations 68(4):517-543.
• Collinson, David (2005): Dialectics of leadership. Human Relations 58(11): 1419–1442.
• Cunliffe, Ann L. and Eriksen, M. (2011): Relational leadership. Human Relations 64(11):1425-1449.
• Currie, Graeme and Lockett, A. (2011): Distributing leadership in health and social care: Concertive, conjoint or collective? International Journal of Management Reviews 13(3): 286–300.
• Denis, Jean-Louis, Langley, A. and Sergi, V. (2012): Leadership in the plural. The Academy of Management Annals 6(1): 211–283.
• Eisenbeiss, Silke A., & Knippenberg, D. V. (2015): Boiled frogs and the division of labor: An investigation of ambidextrous leadership and team creativity. Academy of Management Journal, 58(4), 1108–1127.
• Eisenbeiss, Silke A., Knippenberg, D. V., & Boerner, S. (2008): Transformational leadership and team innovation: Integrating team climate principles. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93(6), 1438–1446.
• Gardner, W. L., Cogliser, C. C., Davis, K. M., & Dickens, M. P. (2011): Authentic leadership: A review of the literature and research agenda. The Leadership Quarterly, 22(6), 1120–1145.
• Gerpott, Fabiola H., Fasbender, U. and Burmeister, A. (2020): Respectful leadership and followers’ knowledge sharing: A social mindfulness lens. Human Relations 73(6), 789-810.
• Guarana, Cristiano L. & Hernandez, M. (2015): Building sense out of situational complexity: The role of ambivalence in creating functional leadership processes. Organizational Psychology Review, 5(1), 50-73.
• Holm, Flemming & Fairhurst, G. T. (2018): Configuring shared and hierarchical leadership through authoring. Human Relations 71(5): 692-721.
• Kellerman, Barbara (2004): Bad leadership: What it is, how it happens, why it matters. Harvard Business Press.
• Kotter, John P. (1995): What Leaders Really Do. In Wren, J. Thomas (ed.) The Leaders Companion. New York: The Free Press, 114-123.
• Padilla, Art, Hogan, R., & Kaiser, R. B. (2007): The toxic triangle: Destructive leaders, susceptible followers, and conducive environments. The Leadership Quarterly, 18(3), 176–194.
• Raelin, Joseph A. (2016): Introduction to leadership as practice. In: Raelin Joseph A. (ed.) Leadership as Practice: Theory and Application. New York: Routledge, 1–18.
• Umeh, Chidozie, Cornelius, N., & Wallace, J. (2022): Exploring equality, diversity, and inclusion in multiethnic settings: A context‐sensitive approach. Human Resource Management Journal, 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1111/1748-8583.12441
• Umeh, Chidozie, Cornelius, N., Wallace, J. (2023): A Bourdieusian exploration of ethnic inequalities at work: the case of the Nigerian Banking Sector. Work Employment and Society https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170231173604
• Van De Mieroop, Dorien., Clifton, J., & Verhelst, A. (2020): Investigating the interplay between formal and informal leaders in a shared leadership configuration: A multimodal conversation analytical study. Human Relations, 73 (4), 490-515.
• Waldman, David A., & Bowen, D. E. (2016): Learning Like a Leader: The Critical Connection between Leadership Development and Leader Experience. Organizational Dynamics, 45 (1), 53–62.
• Yukl, Gary (1989): Managerial leadership: A review of theory and research. Journal of Management 15 (2), 251-289.
• Zhang, Yan, Zhang, Y., Law, K. S., & Zhou, J. (2022): Paradoxical leadership, subjective ambivalence, and employee creativity: Effects of employee holistic thinking. Journal of Management Studies, 59 (3), 695-723.