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ABSTRACT Mainstream leadership studies tend to privilege and separate leaders from followers. This article highlights the value of rethinking leadership as a set of dialectical relationships. Drawing on post-structuralist perspectives, this approach reconsiders the relations and practices of leaders and followers as mutually constituting and co-produced. It also highlights the tensions, contradictions and ambiguities that typically characterize these shifting asymmetrical and interdependent leadership dynamics. Exploring three interrelated 'dialectics' (control/resistance, dissent/consent and men/women), the article raises a number of issues frequently neglected in the mainstream literature. It emphasizes that leaders exercise considerable power; that their control is often shifting, paradoxical and contradictory, that followers' practices are frequently proactive, knowledgeable and oppositional, that gender crucially shapes control/resistance/consent dialectics and that leaders themselves may engage in workplace dissent. The article concludes that dialectical perspectives can provide new and innovative ways of understanding leadership.
KEYWORDS control/resistance/consent * dialectics * dualisms * gender
Introduction
In contemporary western societies leadership issues are frequently understood in binary terms. For example, leaders are often viewed either as 'heroes' or 'villains', elevated or blamed, seen as the solution or the barrier to organizational success. In the UK, the notion of the 'leader as saviour' is currently in vogue, exemplified by the plethora of recent publications promoting 'excellence' in leadership policy, practice and development. The converse perspective of the 'leader as villain' is also prevalent, fuelled by recent cases of corporate fraud and corruption at companies like Enron and WorldCom in the US and Guinness and Maxwell in the UK. Informing these apparently polarized perspectives is a shared assumption that complex organizational problems can and should be solved by leaders themselves.
Meindl et al. (1985) were early critics of this tendency to develop overly heroic and exaggerated views of what leaders are able to achieve. They suggested that in the context of causally indeterminate and unpredictable events, 'romanticizing leaders' merely provides a reassuring, simplified way of understanding complex organizational processes. For them, leaders' contribution to a collective enterprise is inevitably somewhat constrained, closely tied to external factors outside a leaders' control such as those affecting whole industries. Yet, many, possibly most studies of leadership display a similar tendency to separate 'leaders' from 'followers' and privilege the former as the primary agents in these dynamics.