ESADE Business School - Ramon Llull Univeristy, Spain
Current leadership scholarship posits that leadership processes involve both individual (leader) and collective elements (leading). Broadly speaking, while entitist scholars look at individual elements and relationship dynamics between pre-existing individual entities, process and relational ontology grounded scholars aim to de-center individual and foreground social interactions. Strong processual scholars follow Dewey and Bentleys’ (1949) trans-actional view where focus is on dynamic unfolding and process of becoming. Nevertheless, leadership research in performative and processual flow of practice and relations (e.g. relational leadership and leadership-as-practice) still views leader and leading as ontologically distinct. There is privileging and foregrounding of a collective and dynamic horizon, but the ideas of personal predispositions and dimensions still linger, just in the background. This paper aims to address how we can create ontological continuity between leader and leading and proposes a deep relational lens where nothing is purely individual or collective. From individualistic end, the persona of a leader is to be viewed through a deep relational ontology lens and thus approached as a figuration, where every action is performed by configurations of relations acting through other relations. From a collective practice end, the boundaries of ‘living conversations’ and relational flows in situ are to be broadened: living conversations continue on living, even outside the space between people. Finally, by illuminating both individual and collective elements as belonging to the same relational order, we are able to move towards viewing leadership anew, through a deep relational ontology lens.
