12133: New Perspectives on Power and Leadership

Within leadership studies there is growing interest in more critical approaches. These perspectives seek to revitalise leadership studies by investigating how leadership dynamics are reproduced, rationalised, and sometimes resisted in power relations (Collinson, 2011; Learmonth & Morrell, 2019). Such issues are largely overlooked in mainstream leadership theory, which is becoming increasingly distanced from the social reality in which leadership is situated (Alvesson, 2020; Learmonth & Morrell, 2019). This panel will convene critical voices and explore recent intersections of leadership and power. A central critique concerns the assumption implicit in mainstream approaches and ‘leadership science’ that good or bad leadership originates in human nature and can therefore be depicted as timeless and universal qualities of individual leaders (Alvesson, 2020; Wilson et al., 2018). Power in this perspective is something attached to a persona and is possessed by leaders that others follow (Edwards et al., 2015; Ladkin & Probert, 2021). Countering this stance are calls for relational understandings of leadership and power that shift analytical attention from power as something possessed and exercised over others (Knights & Roberts, 1982; Uhl-Bien & Ospina, 2012) to constellations of relations between people, organizations, institutions and their associated resources that produce power dynamics (Cunha et al., 2021). In this perspective, power is seen as continually produced, negotiated and performed between actors – leaders, managers, subordinates and stakeholders (Ernst & Koll, 2024; Ladkin & Probert, 2021; McCabe, 2014). This critique relates to discussion on the nomenclature used to identify what is understood both as a function and a phenomenon. The preference for ’leadership’ over ’management’ is criticized for privileging particular forms of normative performativity and for thriving on symbolic assets that prevent organizational actors and researchers from reflecting on their use of these categories (Kniffin et al., 2020; Learmonth & Morrell, 2021). In this panel, we will tie together power and leadership because we believe that our assumptions regarding power are fundamental to our understanding of both leadership and management. Researchers from different critical and reflexive streams thus call for more attention to power in relation to a number of topical leadership themes, including ‘more socialized leadership’ (Whyte et al, 2022), collective leadership (Fairhurst et al., 2020; Foldy & Ospina, 2023), caring leadership (Gabriel, 2015; Levay & Andersson Bäck, 2022; Tomkins, 2020), leadership and organizational change (Ernst & Koll, 2024), as well as the symbolic disguise and strategies of managerial elites (Kerr & Robinson, 2016; Learmonth & Morrell, 2021). Each theme involves strategic shifts in emphasis that the panel will explore. For example, in regimes of extensive employee engagement it falls on formal leaders to uphold the ’therapeutic fiction’ that collective empowerment among all is possible (Tomkins, 2020). At the same time, while managerial elites are expected to be caring, most of the actual care work is carried out by those at the bottom of status hierarchies (Gabriel, 2015; Levay & Andersson Bäck, 2022). The panel takes such paradoxes, contradictions, and insidious forms of control seriously and aims to stimulate joint critical reflection on the power dimensions of leadership discourse and practice.