Critical Leadership Study Examples

"Critical leadership studies: The case for critical performativity" written by Mats Alvesson of Lund University, and André Spicer of City University London, looks at several theories, stories, and first-hand experiments that involve leadership. The article looks at how control and resistance play a pivotal role in the successes and failures of leadership. The article shows examples of successes and failures by highlighting negative practices in leadership positions, while coming up with a plan to improve and better those negative practices. The successes and failures are determined by the “leaders” ability to limit and control the influence they have on other’s work, ideas, and beliefs. Not only does the leader determine the success of leadership, …show more content…
Without a leader, or leadership, the team will fail, and chaos will ensue. The authors make this their main point by giving ideas and practices that will help eliminate pre-existing problems and in return yield good leadership. They add that conversation and understanding are keys to leadership. A more detailed explanation of their theory is provided in the definition of Ontological leadership. Ontological leadership is the idea that leadership is constructed through an on-going process of inter-subjective understanding. This stresses the importance of learning from the past, as well as through personal failures. The second suggestion the authors makes, is using the principal of progressive pragmatism. Progressive pragmatism is sensibly, but critically working with already accepted discourse. Much like ontological leadership, progressive pragmatism works through previous mistakes and problems, but in perhaps a more critical and hostile way. This occurs to allow everyone to express their feelings and really get everything off their chest for the means of improvement. By using both definitions, the authors are using ethos to get the purpose across. Ethos is an appeal that makes the audience or viewer believe the writer is a credible and trustworthy source. Examples are seen through the definitions of ontological leadership and progressive pragmatism as seen …show more content…
They wanted to target the negatives of leaders and leadership, but not let the respondents get away without having any fault in the situation. When targeting the leader and leadership, the authors attack the leadership position by saying leaders feel they have “Hollywood heroics”. The authors are making the point that leaders feel they must do everything because of the power their position holds. This connects to the idea that leaders use dominance tactics, and force their ideas and practices upon others. This also ties to the idea that the leaders become close-minded, and refute any suggestions made by their peers. By targeting this, the author is directly talking to people in leadership positions, and is trying to make them realize some of their mistakes and failures. As mentioned previously, the authors do feel the respondents or peers to the leadership, also have faults in the situations. The authors mention that the respondents tend to also be close-minded and develop an immediate dejection to leadership. While the authors understand the respondents position, they encourage that they have a better attitude about this. The authors support their claim by saying “rejection can trigger other managerial responses such as bureaucracy, strict output measurement or dictorial control.” In these cases, the situation escalates and nothing gets accomplished. By giving fault to both parts of the