Leadership as a Dominant Cultural Myth: A Strain-Based Perspective on Leadership Approaches

Social and Personality Psychology Compass 8/3 (2014): 91–103, 10.1111/spc3.12093

Leadership as a Dominant Cultural Myth: A Strain-Based Perspective on Leadership Approaches Gazi Islam* People Organizations and Society, Grenoble Ecole de Management, and Insper

Abstract

The current paper is a review of leadership theory from the perspective of “strain” theories of conceptual development. From this perspective, key cultural concepts emerge to the extent that they can mediate between contradictory cultural values and symbolically capture both sides of opposing dimensions, leading such concepts to become both generally attractive and semantically ambiguous. I argue that the leadership literature, with its highly varied and sometimes contradictory conceptualizations of leadership, can be understood as such a symbolic mediation. To illustrate, the review illustrates several classical leadership approaches as attempts to capture both sides of the value dimensions of individualism– collectivism and agency–structure. While generally privileging one side of each dimension, each leadership approach tries to explain both sides, with some approaches taking borderline or hybrid positions. The potential of this approach to understanding leadership scholarship, and to building reflexivity in scholarship, is discussed.

Introduction As recent leadership literature in the critical tradition has noted (Alvesson & Spicer, 2012), leadership has taken on the status of a dominant cultural myth of our age. A plethora of diverse theories of leadership have proliferated over past decades, juxtaposing psychological, interpersonal, sociological, and critical literature in ways that, for all their diversity, lack adequate cross-talk and may create more confusion than illumination (cf. Pfeffer, 1977). In the current leadership literature, we can learn that leaders arise from unique sets of individual capacities and stable traits (Zaccaro, 2007) or, conversely, that they thrive when flexible and adaptive to social conditions (Fiedler, 1964). We learn that great leaders express their authentic selves (Walumbwa, Avolio, Gardner, Wernsing, & Peterson, 2008) and also that they can monitor and control their expressions to fit their environments (Moss, Ritossa, & Ngu, 2006). We learn that leadership can be based in, or even dispersed among, followers’ beliefs and behaviors (Denis, Langley, & Sergi, 2012) and also that followers come to see their leaders as exemplary or even heroic individuals (Meindl, Ehrlich, & Dukerich, 1985). A critical review of leadership theories, beyond selecting which theories are correct, should also account for this diversity and explain why a single concept can produce such seemingly contradictory directions. From Barley and Knight (1991), the authors draw on the idea that a society’s core myths and symbols often arise at the fault lines of contradictory values and frameworks, in those places where foundational values are in tension. The current paper treats leadership in this light, arguing that leadership theory has proven useful in mediating tensions within the organizational sciences. Further, the ways this mediation takes place can help explain the varieties of current leadership theory. Specifically, I argue that leadership concepts have been used to mediate between individualist and collectivist strands within organizational thought, as well as between structuralist organizational perspectives and those focusing more on agents and © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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their behavior. Understanding the tensions at the core of leadership perspectives can help contextualize current debates, as well as explore models of social reality underlying but often unarticulated in current perspectives. This critical review begins by outlining the theoretical premise that key cultural concepts (similarly to what Barley and Knight (1991) call “dominant cultural symbols” following Turner (1967)) can arise out of tensions between contradictory social values, arguing that such contradictions are present in the case of leadership. I will then argue that individual/ collective and agent/structure tensions become condensed in leadership theory. I describe in the body of the paper how different leadership frameworks are positioned to resolve these tensions (i.e. by privileging individuals/collectives or agents/structures). The paper concludes by assessing the benefits of using contradictions to understanding leadership theory, and the potential problems resulting from this approach, finally speculating on the use of such an approach more generally to other organizational topics. Leadership Concepts as Mediators of Theoretical Tensions As mentioned above, leadership can be analyzed as a dominant cultural symbol drawing on core myths (Alvesson & Spicer, 2012; Islam, 2009; see also Bligh & Meindl, 2004). Viewing leadership in this way opens up theoretical perspectives regarding how mythical and symbolic structures are used to encode important aspects of social life. According to Barley and Knight (1992), dominant cultural symbols, rather than simply referring to common ideas or objects, tend to encode social and cultural contradictions, and become popular precisely because of their function for standing in for tensions. According to Barley and Knight (1992), such symbols can be material, such as an image or artifact, or conceptual as in a complex idea (e.g. “justice” or “equality”). Drawing upon what they term “strain theories” (cf. Turner, 1967), they theorize that such symbolic ideas become culturally ascendant at the moment when they come to stand for different, potentially irreconcilable social principles. For example, the “equality” concept can serve to represent both equal material conditions (requiring special protections for underprivileged groups) and equality of process (tolerating unequal outcomes across groups). Similarly, in their analysis, the “stress” concept mediates tensions between beliefs about mental agency (“it’s all in your head”) and physical disease concepts (“heightened heart rate”). Because such concepts are slippery enough to slide between different ideological constituencies, they become useful discursive tools and become widely employed across diverse domains. Such usage tends to make their meanings strategically ambiguous (Giroux, 2006) and multiple, thus creating the possibility for misunderstandings. There is strong reason to consider leadership according to this strain perspective, as a concept that codifies contradictory aspects of social life (cf. Gronn, 2000). First, as Pfeffer (1977) notes, leadership is a fundamentally ambiguous notion, notoriously difficult to pin down and giving rise to several and contradictory definitions and characterizations. Second, the notion of leadership slips notoriously between descriptive and normative meanings; to say that someone is a “leader” (especially a “real” or “true” leader) is not only a statement of fact but also of approval, suggesting the role of leadership in supporting normative value frameworks. Third, the centrality of conceptions of leadership to questions of social and organizational control, as well as to the appropriate styles and mechanisms of the use of power, suggests that such conceptions are likely to reflect ideological positions regarding the “right” way for social groups to be organized (cf. Nafstad & Blakar, 2012). Thus, this paper uses a “strain” perspective to treat leadership as the locus for contradictory ideological and value frameworks. It is argued that leadership is plastic enough to mediate tensions between opposing frameworks but that the ways this mediation takes place colors © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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the subsequent leadership theory. The result is a variety of different theoretical frameworks that not only vie for “scientific” prominence through empirical testing but also reflect differing positions on the ideal makeup of social and organizational phenomena, from the nature of action and social rules, to the relation between individuals and their group contexts. Individual–Collective and Structure–Agency as Leadership Dimensions Accepting that leadership concepts serve to codify social contradictions, the question arises “But what kinds of tensions or contradictions specifically underlie leadership discussions?” To provide a preliminary direction in answering this question, it is possible to look at two central aspects of leadership, first, who is given a leadership role (i.e. single leader, top management team, delegation to followers, etc.) and, second, where is the locus of control within leadership processes (i.e. organizational rules, institutional norms, individual preferences, etc.). Because leadership involves question of how power is exerted and by whom, these two questions seem especially central to the kinds of social value frameworks that can become reflected in leadership theories. Focusing on questions of who exerts leadership leads to the identification of an individual– collective distinction among leadership perspectives. Because leadership typically involves individual (or small group) control over larger social bodies, a tension between individual and group seems built into leadership situations. Perspectives that focus on individual leaders will have to explain how such individuals come to initiate group-level action, and groupbased perspectives will have to explain why group control becomes concentrated in one or a few individuals. Early “romantic” conceptions of leadership (cf. Meindl et al., 1985) tended to aggrandize individual talented leaders, endowing these leaders with uncommon powers of persuasion, mobilization, or “charisma”. By contrast, leader–member exchange (e.g. Scandura & Graen, 1984), followership (Avolio, Walumbwa, & Weber, 2009), distributed leadership (Brown & Hosking, 1986), and other perspectives have emerged to question whether this focus on the individual leader is warranted and have argued that a more socialized conception of leadership should replace the earlier individualized conceptions (cf. Islam, ; Pfeffer, 1981). Much of leadership theory since these early perspectives has thus revolved around how much power individual leaders exert and how much of leadership influence should be attributed to delegated subordinates, leadership team members, or followers, in other words, whether leadership should be considered an individual or collective phenomenon. Individualistic theories have had recourse to concepts of persuasion or coercion to explain the collectivization of individual decisions, while collectivistic theories have explained the individualization of leaders through attribution errors (Pfeffer, 1981), or group prototypicality processes (e.g. Hogg, 2001). Alternatively, focusing on questions of the sources from which leadership control emanates leads to the identification of a structure–agency dimension among leadership perspectives. The now familiar “structure–agency” debate (cf. Reed, 2003) involves the question of whether actors, either individual or collective, are able to structure their social situations, or whether these situations, via institutional pressures, regulations, codes, or shared cognitive categories, effectively determine or position actors into the spaces they ultimately inhabit. Historically, the emergence of contingency theories of leadership that stressed situations as determinants of effective leadership (e.g. Scandura & Graen, 1984) were the clearest example of decentering leadership outcomes from behavioral planning and decision making, and followed a series of critiques of overly intentional, agentic leadership theories (e.g. Pfeffer, 1977). Approaches to leadership as elements of organizational systems (e.g. Perrow, 1970), as well as critical theories, placed leadership concepts as ideological elements of social authority © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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maintenance (Alvesson & Spicer, 2012) and also tended to stress the structural over the agentic aspects of leadership. Alternatively, while earlier “romantic” theories tended to wed individualist views of leaders with highly agentic views, contemporary perspectives such as distributed and team leadership (cf. Bolden, 2011) have attempted to retain the agentic aspect of leadership while replacing the lone individual with more socialized conceptions of collective agency. The previous point highlights the observation that although the individual–collective and agency–structure dimensions both refer to levels of analysis, and have both been summarized using the term “micro–macro”, they are analytically distinguishable and refer to conceptually distinct underlying tensions. In short, it may be true that individualistic views have stressed agency and an underdetermined view of leadership, while collectivistic views have emphasized more structural, overdetermined views of leadership (Pfeffer, 1981). However, this connection is not a necessary one and is put into question in the emerging distributed leadership perspectives described below. In the review below, I summarize perspectives over the range of individual–collective and agency–structure positions, as well as hybrid cases. Since the former distinction involves tensions over who controls organizations, while the second addresses the theoretical issue of the nature and locus of control itself, leadership concepts have been able to address these problems distinctly. Figure 1 shows the various configurations possible between the individual–collective and structure–agency dimensions, with the relevant leadership theories outlined in each quadrant. Below, I outline how these theories resolve the underlying tension by “taking sides” with one of the contradictory terms. In other words, each quadrant tends to be privileged by certain theoretical perspectives. Additionally, between the quadrants are listed theories with attempt to integrate the two terms through a hybrid perspective or one that draws upon elements of each term. I also argue below that such cases of hybridization or boundary theories can result from prolonged debates within the field, leading to compromises or middle-ground positions.

Leadership as individual agency

Individual

“Heroic” Theories Personality Theories Behavioral Theory

Contingency Theories Cultural theories

Leader-Member exchange Relational Theories Collective

Level of analysis

As noted above, a fundamental dilemma in most leadership situations is how single individuals can represent, control, or speak on behalf of large organizations, at times seeming to take iconic status as a stand-in for the organization itself. Intuitively, scholars may begin to interpret the tension between the leader’s personal agency and the social system as resolvable by

Distributed Leadership Followership Theories

Identity Theories Leadership Schema Attribution Theories

Substitutes for Leadership Critical Theories of Leadership Leadership Archetypes

Agency

Structure

Source of Leadership

Figure 1. Leadership theories along individual–collective and agency–structure dimensions. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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positing extraordinary talents, or unique personality features, to those who reach top leadership positions (Meindl et al., 1985). Thus, trait-based leadership perspectives (e.g. Bono & Judge, 2004; Zaccaro, 2007) have searched for what differentiates leaders from non-leaders. Such traits allow leaders to bypass environmental and structural constraints that would hinder leadership attempts by individuals lacking these traits. In some cases, leadership characteristics are considered deep-seated personality features, while other studies treat them as leadership styles or behavioral tendencies that can be learned (cf. Derue et al., 2011). While trait or behavioral style-based views of leadership clearly focus on the individual, the emphasis on agency over structure is often implicit, under the premise that particular traits confer the power to act on social systems. Some views, however, are more explicit about system-transformative potential of leaders. The transformational leadership approach (Bass & Avolio, 1994), for example, is explicit about the ability for individual action to change or “inspire” systemic shifts in organizations. A central approach in the leadership literature (e.g. Lowe, Kroeck, & Sivasubramaniam, 1996), transformational leadership was adapted from earlier charismatic leadership views stemming from Weberian sociology (Weber, 1947; cf. Beyer, 1999), later passed to organizational studies (cf. Trice & Beyer, 1988). In the earlier charismatic tradition (cf. Andreas, 2007), the charisma notion served as a way to try to explain how spaces of agency were possible among the bureaucratic forces of social structures. As Beyer (1999) notes, however, as these approaches became integrated into organizational and leadership studies, they tended to view charisma as a trait-like capacity for transformation, uniting the focus on agency with a focus on individual differences. Such drift toward trait descriptions may reflect the difficulty of retaining agentic visions of social action, particularly given social scientific tendencies toward deterministic explanations. Some have argued (e.g. Meindl, 1993; Pfeffer, 1981) that leadership trait attributions reflect a tendency for managers to focus on personality rather than situational attributions, particularly because individualistic explanations provide sensemaking heuristics. Based on a fundamental attribution error (Pfeffer, 1981), the relative ease of explaining outcomes via personal attributions versus complex situational variables means that leadership makes a useful heuristic for explaining away organizational ambiguity. In short, individual agentic approaches toward leadership, while central to the study of leadership, have to deal with fundamental issues regarding the individual’s role in collective systems, and their ability to change structures that would seem to be beyond their reach. To do so, they may have had to move toward “heroic” conceptions of leaders (Beyer, 1999; Meindl et al., 1985), where social systems are deterministic for most individuals, but not for these extraordinary ones. In the approaches, such as transformational leadership, which have clearer sociological roots, this tension may be felt more acutely (Bass, 1999; Beyer, 1999). Leadership as structural adaptiveness The above perspectives, which form the traditional core of leadership theory (Beyer, 1999), focus on individual leaders, attributing these individuals the capacity to structure organizational environments through their actions and decisions. These perspectives thus privilege both individualism and agency as leadership foundations. By contrast, one may retain the notion of the individual leader, endowed with certain talents and traits, yet question the extent to which leaders can act against highly constrained environmental structures, including cultural, legal, and institutional norms, as well as resource constraints. In this case, structures are privileged over agency, yet the view of the leader as an individual set against such structures remains unchanged. As a result, individual adaptiveness to structural exigencies becomes an intuitive criterion under such conditions. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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Contingency theories (e.g. Fiedler, 1964; Hersey & Blanchard, 1977) are the most obvious result of the combination of individual leadership styles and situational constraints. As Zaccaro and Klimoski (2001, p. 12) clearly state, leadership is typically considered without adequate regard for the structural contingencies that affect and moderate its conduct. We maintain, however, that organizational leadership cannot be modeled effectively without attending to such considerations.

Structural adaptiveness requires a degree of agency in that leaders must be able to sense and adapt to their environments, and are in this sense not entirely determined by context. However, in such approaches, context is often considered as external to action and exerts force upon action opportunities. Similarly to contingency theories, some cultural approaches have stressed the importance of macro-level cultural traits on the behaviors of individual leaders (cf. Gelfand, Erez, & Aycan, 2007). Most well-known among these are Hofstede’s (1980) classic study of cultural differences among managers, and House et al.’s (2004) more recent GLOBE study of leadership across cultures. While cross-cultural studies of leadership have focused on individually held traits, beliefs, or values, these are conceptualized as outcomes of macro-cultural processes, considered as deeply set over long historical periods, and thus of relative stability (Hofstede, 1980). Thus, effective leadership in such contexts is often framed as a question of understanding and being able to adapt to local cultural norms, rather than as a work upon culture itself. In these two cases, the tension between individual–collective and agency–structure issues is resolved by positing the leader as an individual, but highly constrained by external structures. The presence of collectives is found, in cultural theories, by the aggregation of individual traits into larger collectives of similarly-mined individuals, while in contingency theories, collectives form part of the “environment” that individual leaders much know how to organize (e.g. Hersey & Blanchard, 1977). Agency, as mentioned, inheres in both approaches as the ability to strategically adapt to external pressures. Structure, in the cultural approach, is built from collective beliefs about hierarchy or social roles, for example, while structure in contingency approaches is broadly conceived of as environmental contingencies (Drazin, Glynn, & Kazanijian, 2004).

Leadership as collective action While individualist perspectives, as we have seen, can take more versus less agentic aspects, recent interest in the collective aspects of leadership decenter leadership from individual actors or adaptors (cf. Denis et al., 2012). As a result of critiques of the over-individualism, or even “heroism”, of much of leadership theory, as well as a restructuring of much of organizational work to emphasize group-based tasks and dynamic teams (e.g. Klein, Ziegert, & Knight, 2006), visions of leadership as collective action have become increasing popular (Grint, 2009). As Grint (2009) suggests, the move toward seeing leadership as distributed may also stem from an ideological hesitation to accord great powers of agency to individual actors, and from a democratic urge to “spread” agency around communities (see also Edwards, 2011). In general, attempts to discuss leadership in collective terms, while not reducing agency to social or structural determinism, lead to what I term here “collective action” views of leadership. An important step in decentering leadership from individual leaders has been in a renewed interest in followership (cf. Avolio et al., 2009; Shamir, 2007). While follower © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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cognition views (e.g. Hogg, 2001) view followers as important because of their leader preferences, other perspectives note that followers can play a more active role in leadership processes (Kelley, 1992). In the same way, leader–member exchange theory (LMX; Scandura & Graen, 1984) has shifted the focus from leaders to relationships, although studies tend to focus on leader treatment of followers, rather than collective follower agency (e.g. Scandura & Graen, 1984). More clearly aligned with a collective action perspective are recent treatments of “distributive leadership” (Bolden, 2011; Brown & Hosking, 1986; Klein et al., 2006). Distributive views see leadership as “a collective social process emerging through the interactions of multiple actors” (Uhl-Bien 2006). In some cases (e.g. Klein et al., 2006), focusing on distributive leadership (and more specifically, the delegation of leadership) helps understand how dynamic and unstable organizational arrangements become viable. The focus on follower interaction, moreover, allows better understanding of the power relations within organizational communities. Such a focus thus departs from the idea that all agency comes from a single actor at the top of an organization (Edwards, 2011). As Bolden (2011) describes in his review of the literature, distributed leadership describes a different unit of analysis than traditional perspectives, following a trend in multilevel literature that has flourished over the last decade (Klein & Kozlowski, 2000). Because multilevel perspectives by necessity take a position along the individual–collective continuum (Islam, 2010), the dislocation of leadership from individuals to groups (or “communities”, in Edwards, 2011) involves a renewed focus not only on individual followers but also on their collective, or relational, agency. This link between collective relationality and agency is reinforced by distributive leadership’s like with “informal” leadership (Bolden, 2011), locating the roots in distributive not in formal organizational structures but in the dynamic relationships that groups use to exert organizational influence outside of formal constraints.

Leadership as system control The sense of group agency stressed in collective action approaches is not co-extensive with the de-emphasis on the individual leader. In fact, perhaps because of the difficulty in conceptualizing agency or action at the group level (e.g. Islam, 2010; Meyer & Jepperson, 2000), it is more likely that focusing on collectives will lead to a view of leadership emphasizing systemic controls rather than social solidarity, an aspect of collective leadership that has drawn mistrust and charges of the “tyranny of the collective” (Grint, 2009, p. 90). Thus, although approaches that de-emphasize both individual leaders and agency tend to be rare – what, in this case, would “leading” constitute? – they can be seen in notions of system design and control. For example, Jacques’ (Jaques, 1989) vision of leadership as an aspect of system architecture builds the leadership role into the design of the organization, rather than viewing leadership as externally transformative of the organization. Similarly, Kerr and Jermier’s (1978) “substitutes for leadership” paradigm examines specifically those organizational factors that can make individual agency unnecessary. Both of these views rest on the idea that an organizational architecture can do much of the organizational work attributed to leaders. While system control perspectives usually do not exclude agency entirely, nor, like adaptiveness perspectives, do they locate it in individual leader decision making, they tend to locate it in the moment of designing organizational systems. Design then constrains the ways in which subsequent relationships can develop. In the words of Podolny, Khurana, and Hill-Popper (2005, p.27): © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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If a researcher were to privilege communication activities to a degree that implied the downplaying of organizational design as an aspect of leadership, the researcher would run the risk of overlooking how the features of the organization impact on the way the communication is received.

The prospect of removing both the agency from individuals and collectives, while downplaying even individual adaptiveness to structural domains, gives a picture of organization that is difficult to reconcile with the expectation that leaders can actually affect organizations. Thus, perhaps not surprisingly, collective, non-agentic perspectives have tended to be most visible within the critical leadership literature (cf. Alvesson & Spicer, 2012; Alvesson & Sveningsson, 2012; Collinson, 2011), where they have not been espoused but rather critiqued as forms of power and control within organizations. For example, Alvesson and Spicer (2012) acknowledge the limits of leadership given its placement within wider organizational and social ideologies yet retain some possibility of a positive role for leadership. The role of a critical theory of leadership, therefore, would be to outline how such a role could emerge out of an otherwise totalizing system. Similarly, Ford and Harding (2011) in their critical analysis of authentic leadership note that leaders are forced to subordinate their identities to the organizational collective, thus making authenticity to oneself seemingly impossible. The question would then become how the search for authenticity seeks to overcome this impossibility and whether such a project is fundamentally misguided. In this way, the collective primacy of leadership becomes a basis for scholarly critique.

Borderline and hybrid cases The previous sections have briefly described the four combinations that result from individual– collective and agency–structure tensions, and gave examples of theoretical approaches in terms of their tendencies toward one or the other poles of each continuum. It should be noted, however, that in virtually none of the cases is this tendency total. That is, individualist perspectives do have to deal with the mobilization of collectives, just as collectivist perspectives have to explain the ascendance of individuals to leadership positions. Likewise, structuralist positions have to explain how structures are constructed or brought about, while agency-based perspective have to explain how, under tight structural constraints, agency is possible in the first place. Thus, even approaches that fall quite squarely into one quadrant or the other of Figure 1 have to account for the opposing tendency, and some degree of hybridity between the opposing principles is inevitable. As discussed above, this is the essence of a strain theory of dominant cultural symbols. However, some leadership theories, by straddling more equally both sides of a value dimension, show this hybridity to a greater extent, thus crossing the borders between individual–collective and agency–structure emphases. Although most contemporary leadership theories show forms of hybridity, for illustration purposes, I will focus on two main types of “borderline” theorizing, each with particular theoretical variants. For instance, while above, I discussed followership approaches as related to a decentering of individual leaders and a focus on collectives, several follower-based theories do not highlight group dynamics per se but remain largely individualist in their focus on personal cognitions. For example, leadership categorization theory (LCT; Lord, Foti, & DeVader, 1984) and social identity theory (SIT; Hogg, 2001) both explain the emergence of leaders on the basis of follower cognitions, but these cognitions are fundamentally individual-levels. In LCT, followers are apt to prefer leaders that conform to a cognitive leader prototype, while © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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in SIT, individuals judge a leader’s proximity to their own self-identities, using proximity as a criterion for evaluation. Similarly, attribution theories (cf. Pfeffer, 1981) see preferences for leaders to the extent that followers can project important or special traits or powers onto those leaders (Pfeffer, 1981). In all these cases, it is not the leader himself/herself that possesses the requisite leadership capacities but the attribution of traits or responsibilities by followers. These cognitions, as structures of social identity, stereotypes, or other “cognitive institutions”, are by their content structural rather than agentic. Yet, these are always projected on individual leaders, and leadership is always imagined by followers as focused on individuals. Thus, the group-bases of leadership are at once affirmed and denied within such frameworks, even as the content of leadership preferences in structurally determined as a set of normative social cognitions. Similarly, relational (Uhl-Bien, 2006) and leader–member exchange (LMX; Scandura & Graen, 1984) theories also straddle the individual–collective divide, while remaining more agentic in scope. LMX, for example, tends to focus on leader–member dyadic quality as an explanatory mechanism, while focusing on outcome variables such as individual satisfactions and performance (e.g. Scandura & Graen, 1984). Additionally, relationship quality may be considered as a function of social category grouping as well as personal ties, leading to an ambiguity in LMX regarding the role of collective categories over idiosyncratic relationships. Yet relationships with groups as such are rarely treated, emphasizing personal over group relationships. Moving more toward the collective side of leadership, recent views of “relational leadership” (Uhl-Bien, 2006; Uhl-Bien, Maslyn, & Ospina, 2012) view leadership as a socially constructed set of relationships among organizational members. Rather than focusing on individuals, on the one hand, or on collective groups, on the other hand, relational approaches emphasize micropractices of interaction and dialog, whereby socialized views of leadership can be created through intersubjective practice (Cunliffe & Eriksen, 2011). Both of these are interesting examples of theoretical frameworks that mediate between two opposing frameworks, because they arise historically from tensions between “oversocialized” and “undersocialized” (Pfeffer, 1981) views of leaders and integrate features of both. While cognitive theories of leader perception deploy social psychological theory in order to counter personality-based trait views, they remain essentially psychological (and not sociological) in nature. Similarly, exchange and relational perspectives focus on micro-situations and personal relationships, as a way of looking beyond individual leadership behaviors while maintaining a focus on the active construction of leadership. Discussion/Conclusion The purpose of the above descriptions has been to provide some examples of how leadership theory has navigated among different fundamental value dimensions, often emphasizing one side of each dimension while being force to account for the other side. While in some cases the balancing act postulated above may have been a conscious consideration described by authors, the above argument does not necessitate such deliberate weighing of options. Rather, as in other cases of dominant cultural symbols (Barley & Knight, 1992), tensions between value frameworks may be felt as theoretical gaps, or new domains of research. The above suggests that leadership might be best thought of not as a fixed object of study but as a field whose boundaries depend on meta-theoretical decisions that are only partially based in the leadership literature itself. The agency–structure debate, for example, remains largely absent from contemporary leadership discussions and is much more central to foundational socialtheoretic debates than that in leadership in particular. Yet, I argued, these more general issues spill over into leadership thinking is unacknowledged ways and structure the field so as to make © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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certain choices seem more intuitive. Thus, for example, a researcher holding agentic individualistic implicit social theories would be likely to ask “what individual traits make leaders more likely to be influential”, rather than, for example, “what social conditions favor certain personality traits for leadership prototypes”, or even “how to personality types themselves arise from structured patters of social interaction”. Thus, the questions we ask about leadership are shaped by our visions of society as collections of individuals versus groups, and agents versus structures. That said, the current paper does not assume that these underlying positions are driven by purely theoretical choices; rather, the social-theoretic positions taken up in leadership approaches are likely themselves products of social organization that privileges, or at least makes apparent, certain positions at the expense of others. A focus on agents versus structures, for example, may itself be linked to social and economic organization, the role of political and economic institutions, and the relation between private and public forces within a social field. One advantage of strain views of leadership, therefore, is that they open up the possibility for a critical theory of leadership by tracing the continuity between leadership theories and these underlying structures. Future research, therefore, could build on the current outline by showing how, historically, systems of power have been instrumental in promoting visions of what role individuals play vis-à-vis groups, and carving out spaces of agency visà-vis macro-structures. These systems likely vary across societies and across time, also laying a foundation for a comparative study of leadership theories. Going deeper still, the “strain” notion itself takes for granted pre-existing individual/group and agency/structure binary distinctions, with two main shortcomings. First, that these distinctions are the primary ones, and not others, is itself a premise that should be explored. More fundamentally, their binary nature itself is not absolute but is itself a product of history. While agents and structures, for example, have been long considered a central binary opposition in social theory (e.g. Dessler, 1989), the idea that agents are opposed to structures has been called into question (e.g. Giddens, 1984), with growing recognition that the distinction itself is a product of modernist thinking and that there are other ways to structure social field that do not involve opposing agents to structures. Indeed, some have noted that the dualisms upon which leadership theory are built may indeed be outdated (Gronn, 2000). Thus, beyond the “critical” approach suggested above, a “deconstructive” approach might interrogate the very idea of strain, and the ontology of binary oppositions it implies. Although the current paper only lays an initial idea for leadership theory as born out of oppositions, the elaboration of the idea would no doubt bring about the questioning of the very notion of “strain”. Thus, while I do not assert that the individual–collective and agency–structure dimensions are the sole or primary dimensions upon which leadership research has been created, I argued above that the situation of leaders, which usually involves some concentration of control as well as some kind action upon existing systems, makes these two dimensions intuitive as a starting point. Similarly to Barley and Knight (1991), this argument could be strengthened by empirical work tracing the co-emergence of leadership literature, and social and academic concerns around these two dimensions. Empirical evidence of co-emergence would lend weight to the claim that the literature is, at least in part, responding to prevailing social and intellectual concerns that are wider than leadership topics narrowly defined. Further, linking leadership theories with wider tensions around underlying social values is one way to contextualize leadership theory and practice. For instance, as organizations move toward dynamic team settings and away from traditional hierarchy, leadership theorists may feel the need to produce ideas around collective processes without reifying collectives as unchanging external forces; hence relational theories may evolve to challenge traditional collectivistic theories of culture, for example. Thus, leadership theory becomes itself an artifact that can reflect ideological responses to changing organizational conditions. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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Being aware of this aspect of theory can in itself lead to a new domain within leadership studies, but additionally, can be a source of reflexivity that leadership scholars can draw upon while formulating their own ideas. Beyond leadership studies per se, the focus on cultural strains as a source for both folk and theoretical concepts is a way for theory to integrate social conflict and contradiction into its analytical frameworks. In many domains of social psychology, competing theories might best be viewed as competing solutions to underlying contradictions in society at large. Viewing them as such might be a way to create critical reflexivity in academic research while at the same time forging a link between theory and the social worlds in which it emerges. Short Biography Gazi Islam completed his PhD in Organizational Behavior at Tulane University, where his research focused on organizational identity, voice, and power relations. He has served as a faculty member at Grenoble Ecole de Management, Insper, Tulane University, and the University of New Orleans. His current research interests include the organizational antecedents and consequences of identity, and the relations between identity, group dynamics, and the production of group and organizational cultures. His work been published in journals such as Organization Studies, Leadership Quarterly, Organization, Human Relations, The American Journal of Public Health, Journal of Business Ethics, and American Psychologist. Note * Correspondence: People Organizations and Society, Grenoble Ecole de Management, Grenoble, 38000, France. Email: [email protected]

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