Leadership: Who needs it?

Abstract

This article provides a critique of leadership. The thrust of this critique is focused on the discourse of leadership as a vehicle for representing organisational practice. In particular, the article identifies a series of important conceptual inadequacies, most of which are rarely addressed by leadership commentators. These include: difficulties in distinguishing leadership from management; tensions between leadership, influence and power; the potential redundancy of leadership in the face of possible substitute factors; leader-followership's presumption of a division of labour; the prevailing myth of exceptionality; and disciplined subjectivity achieved through emergent forms of designer leadership. Embedded in each of these criticisms is the claim that, if leadership is to retain its conceptual and practical utility, then it has to be reconstituted in a distributed, as opposed to a focused, form. A series of suggestions as to how this transformation might be accomplished is outlined in the final section of the article.

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