1 - Dominance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 February 2021
Summary
In his 1996 article, ‘Leaders who make a difference’, organizational psychologist and leadership consultant Manfred Kets de Vries sprung to leadership's defence:
Some organisational observers argue that the leader’s role is not very significant and that the importance of leadership is highly over-rated. To them, leadership is only static in the system since an organisation is mainly influenced by the environment in which it operates. … Granted, environmental forces do play an important role in organisational life, but underestimating the human factor makes the whole equation indecipherable. Shakespeare’s Henry V without the character of King Henry wouldn’t make any sense. The English would certainly have lost the battle of Agincourt if they had underestimated the importance of the leadership factor. Any astute observer of organisations will notice that CEOs have a considerable impact on their companies, for better or worse. And the quality of leadership is particularly relevant in situations of strategic transformation and change. A good leader has the capacity to transform strategic constraints into new challenges. Such leaders influence organisational culture and provide direction in their vital role as catalysts of change.
Reading his impassioned plea for leadership in 2020 is a strange experience. The extensive promotion of leadership by scholars and practitioners in the last two decades has since lifted leadership to a sacred status. Leadership is now more widely assumed as a vital force for good and commonly regarded as a panacea for all manner of organizational and societal problems. Ket de Vries’ evocative words tapped into a neoliberal yearning for hyperagency. He encourages the reader to imagine ourselves as King Henry V commanding our army at the Battle of Agincourt. The hypnotic repetition about our power to effect ‘strategic transformation and change’ and ‘transform strategic constraints’ in our ‘vital role as catalysts of change’ lulls us into the seductive belief that we can and we will single-handedly change the world.
Within this romance with leadership is a love song to white masculinity. The early formation of leadership studies took shape around the values of the European Enlightenment, which instated rigid gendered and racial hierarchies. At the centre of leadership stood the figure of the autonomous European man from whom leadership gloriously emanated. He represented ‘orderliness, rationality and self-control’ while the Others he colonized and enslaved represented ‘chaos, irrationality, violence and the breakdown of self-regulation’.
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- Redeeming LeadershipAn Anti-Racist Feminist Intervention, pp. 21 - 40Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2020