Leadership Development in Organizations: Multiple Discourses and Diverse Practice

Leadership Development in
Organizations: Multiple Discourses

and Diverse Practiceijmr_344 359..380
Christopher Mabey
Birmingham Business School, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK
Corresponding author email: c.mabey@bham.ac.uk
Research on leadership development in organizations is abundant, as are the resources
invested in developing their leaders. Although rarely made explicit, much of this writing
and activity is driven by functionalist assumptions, with a primary concern for good
design and enhanced corporate performance. Given the politically sensitive, culturally
complex and institutionally embedded nature of leadership, as well as controversy
over the way leadership itself is best dened and developed, the author argues that
this reliance on a single perspective is potentially limiting. The aim of this paper is to
enhance leadership development practice in organizations by proposing a fresh and
theoretically informed approach for exploring the multiple meanings of leadership
development. This is done, rst, by clarifying the discursive assumptions underlying
studies in this eld and revealing the distinctive insights that arise from functionalist,
interpretive, dialogic and critical discourses of leadership development; and second, by
exploring how each of these discourses, or readings, might promote quite different
approaches to leadership development in organizations.
Introduction
Leadership development
1
in organizations is a high-
prole activity. It often focuses on senior or elite
staff, it frequently comprises a key element in com-
petitive strategy (Becker and Huselid, 1998), it con-
sumes a signicant amount of time and proportion of
budget (Fulmer and Goldsmith 2001; Lamoureux
2007) and, perhaps for these reasons, remains a
politically contentious activity. A wide range of
stakeholders have vested interests in nding ways
to develop leadership capability; these range from
government to professional agencies, from in-house
learning units to corporate universities, and from
consultancy rms to business schools (Storey 2011).
Practitioner commentary and academic analysis
is prolic, but what does it offer those seeking
deeper, theoretical understanding and more reective
practice of leadership development in and around
organizations? Authors tend to remain committed
to their favoured ontological approaches, with little
constructive dialogue between them. As pointed out
by others (Clegg and Hardy 1999; Morgan 2000),
this has the effect of stunting debate and progress
in a given eld of study. In a recent review, Jackson
and Parry (2008, p. 119) observe that calls for
more empirical studies that examine leadership
development, made a decade earlier, have remained
largely unheeded. The consequence of all this is
1
This review chooses to focus on the role of leadership,
because this is what is required to address complex, intrac-
table, unbounded or wicked problems in organizations, as
against management, which is the application of appropri-
ate processes to solve tame problems (Grint 2005). The
term development is intended to cover a wide range of
activities, formal and informal, on-the-job and off-the-job,
which are designed to enhance leadership capability both
individually and collectively in organizations. However,
classroom leadership training is excluded, as this forms part
of a separate literature.
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International Journal of Management Reviews, Vol. 15, 359380 (2013)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2370.2012.00344.x
2012 The Author
International Journal of Management Reviews 2012 British Academy of Management and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA
02148, USA
that guidance for those responsible for designing
and delivering leadership development remains
indistinct.
All those concerned with leadership development
are operating within a discourse. A discourse can be
thought of as a connected set of statements, concepts,
terms and expressions that constitute and condition a
way of talking and writing about a particular issue
(Watson 1995). Often, this discourse is so familiar as
to be unremarkable, even irrelevant. However, if one
is to understand the eld of leadership development
and explore the possibilities of different develop-
mental activities, one requires greater reexivity
concerning ontological and epistemological assump-
tions (Cunliffe 2003). So the rst aim of this review
is to propose a fresh and theoretically informed way
to explore the impact and signicance of leadership
development in organizations. It offers four different
discourses or readings of leadership development,
each bringing some distinct and occasionally contra-
dictory insights that might routinely be missed. This
leads to the second aim, which is to recommend
principles of effective leadership development prac-
tice arising from each discourse, and to offer direc-
tions for future research.
A discourse approach to
leadership development
In a reworking of Burrell and Morgan (1979), Deetz
(1996) proposes that two continua or sets of assump-
tions should guide organizational research: those
concerning social order and those concerning episte-
mology. This framework is developed further by
Alvesson and Deetz (2000). They derive four distinct
research perspectives or, more precisely, discourses:
the normative or functionalist, the interpretive, the
dialogic and the critical. Although dened in many
ways, discourse in this paper is distinguished from
everyday talk-in-interaction, to refer to: an inter-
pretive repertoire [. . .] tool bags of terminology,
tropes, themes, habitual forms of argument, and so
on, that, in effect, contextualize by supplying leader-
ship actors with a set of linguistic resources for use
in discourse (Fairhurst 2009, pp. 1011). For explor-
ing leadership development processes and enact-
ments, the notion of discourse is preferable to that
of paradigms. Unlike paradigms, discourses are not
intended to be theoretically watertight boxes, and
their permeability allows us to be imaginative about
the way they might interact with each other at the
margins. It should be noted that, despite being highly
inuential, discourses are nevertheless social con-
structions and therefore precarious; also, meaning is
not constant across discourses, as they are subject to
historical change (Rees and Garnsey 2003).
Different discourses lead to contrasting concep-
tions of what leadership represents, and this will have
profound implications for the way leadership devel-
opment in organizations is articulated, practised,
experienced and researched (see Figure 1) and it is
these implications that are explored in the rest of the
paper. The use of discourse in the study of organiza-
tional behaviour is not new, but partly because
writers and researchers tend to remain committed to
their favoured approaches, multi-discourse enquiry
is, with some notable exceptions (Alvesson and
Karreman 2000; Fairhurst 2009; Lewis and Keleman
2002; Schultze and Stabell 2004), relatively un-
common. Before turning to this analysis, the next
section provides a brief explanation of the method
adopted to conduct this review.
Method
In preparation for this paper, a comprehensive review
of papers dealing with leadership development
since January 2000 was conducted. This was done by
checking three electronic journal databases (EBSCO
Business Source Premier, PROQUEST ABI Inform
Global and EMERALD) which, between them,
provide full-text access to more than 2200 business
and management and organization behaviour jour-
nals. The intention was to identify theoretical and
empirical papers addressing leadership development.
Ortenblad (2010) discusses the way that management
terms are frequently packaged in the form of labels
consisting of two or more words, such as knowledge
management. He proposes three approaches to
this issue that could equally be applied to the term
leadership development: rst, a fragmentary
approach, which assigns non-negotiable denitions to
each word separately and then puts themtogether in
this case, development as an activity referring speci-
cally to the category of people known as leaders;
second, a wholeness approach, which regards the
entire label, rather than single word components, as
the novel object of interest for example, leadership
development might be seen as an organizational
project comprising a mix of formal and informal
interventions; third, an interpretive approach shifts
attention to what people mean by using a particular
360 C. Mabey
2012 The Author
label, through studying their language and cultural
context; here, the term leadership development
allows a wide range of interpretations for example,
as a legitimizing process, as a way of constituting
identity, as a form of discipline and so on. For the
purposes of this paper and, in particular, when choos-
ing the papers summarized in Table 1, all three
approaches to the termleadership developmentwere
included.
Based on an initial reading of the abstract and
further checking of the text where necessary, papers
were categorized according to one of the four
dominant discourses, as described above, adopted by
the author(s). In the majority of cases, this was not
explicit, but was possible to infer from the way in
which they described the purpose of their paper, their
theoretical framework, methodology and their main
conclusions. It is acknowledged that this allocation
was somewhat arbitrary; however, the intention was
less to categorize papers in a denitive manner
and more to nd examples illustrative of different
discourses and then to provide an approximate
Figure 1. Four discourses of leader/ship and leadership development (LD)
Table 1. Review of leadership development literature (20002011) by discourse, journal location and rst author location
Dominant discourse Journal location First author location
Total USA Europe Other USA Europe Other
Functionalist 188 64 117 7 110 35 43
Interpretive 24 4 20 4 17 3
Dialogic 7 7 1 5 1
Critical 9 9 9
Leadership Development 361
2012 The Author
indication of the overall numbers exemplifying the
four dominant discourses. A further step was to indi-
cate where the journal was based and the country
location of the rst author. Because the purpose of
this enquiry is to examine conceptual and empirical
material, only those journals that ranked one to four
in the Association of Business Schools Academic
Journal Quality Guide (ABS) were included, leav-
ing aside popular and trade journals. Although the
ABS list has been subject to criticism on several
fronts (Willmott 2011), its claim to be pluralistic
and comprehensive, and [. . .] widely seen as captur-
ing the consensus in relation to journal rankings
(Rowlinson et al. 2011) suits present purposes.
However, the likelihood of a positivist and function-
alist bias, as reected in the 2008 RAE (Research
Assessment Exercise), should be noted (Tourish
2010). Articles were not included in the review if
they specically referred to the training of managers,
to leadership development in a classroom setting and
where the paper dealt with leadership more generally,
with implications for leadership development only
made in passing.
Having established the broad sweep of leadership
development literature in terms of dominant dis-
courses, the sections that follow discuss in more
detail a few papers that populate the four respective
discourses introduced earlier. Naturally, this alloca-
tion of papers to one of the four chosen discourses
tends to oversimplify the matter and, indeed, some
published work might happily sit in more than one
discourse or another discourse entirely. The inten-
tion, however, is not to be denitive, but rather to
illustrate the very different ways in which authors
approach their paper: what subject is chosen and
omitted, what methods are employed, what assump-
tions propel the study and what implications are
arrived at for the practice of leadership development.
Finally, the review comes to the question of stand-
point. The authors own position is that of critical
realism, coming closest to that of interpretive dis-
course. This construes leadership as a contextually
based process of social inuence and, as such,
it is not possible to arrive at universal, replicable
leadership theories (Fleetwood and Hesketh 2006).
However, this critical realist stance, parts company
with more extreme constructivists who propound
multiple realities, by maintaining that there is a
single reality, but that it is perceived and interpreted
differentially. In other words, the social world is real
in the sense that it generates affect and exists inde-
pendent of its identication (Ackroyd and Fleetwood
2000). So when discussing the design and impact of
leadership development activities, one might refer to
common practice and even similar language, but at
the same time recognize that the impact and inu-
ence of this intervention will vary according to
other inuences within a particular organizational
context (Kempster and Parry 2011). For example,
in the study of tailored personal development in
a UK-headquartered multinational catalysed by a
capability framework (Finch-Lees et al. 2005), the
authors note that context is constituted, on the one
hand, by structures: namely, the nexus of leadership
ideology within the company, the quasi-religious
meanings invested in documents launching the
programme and the relationships prescribed by
accompanying learning workshops, assessment
and appraisal processes. Yet, on the other hand, these
meanings, practices and relationships are sustained
by the agents themselves as they participate in the
programme: in some cases aligned with the organi-
zations ideology and in other cases directly, though
implicitly, opposed to it.
In short, the authors contention is that there are
no inherently right or wrong answers in terms of
how leadership development should or should not be
studied or practised. To make such recommendations
would be to inevitably fall into the kind of mono-
discourse thinking that this paper is advocating one
avoids. Each discourse brings its own fascinating
and distinctive lens through which to view leadership
development and each actor in that process, whether
sponsor, tutor, practitioner, researcher or participant,
will be drawn towards the discourse(s) that appear
appropriate for them at any one point in time. Of
course, we are all embedded within and subject to
competing sets of discursive assumptions; however by
becoming more critically reexive and attuned to the
constraints associated with these discourses, the pos-
sibility arises of being able to study, critique and draw
conclusions about leadership development in a fuller,
richer manner. Rather than arriving at a singular
judgement about the efcacy of given events, pro-
grammes and practices designed to develop leader-
ship, consideration of more than one discourse allows
us to identify varying interpretations some seen as
useful, some perhaps potentially damaging.
Leadership development discourses
Table 1 shows that of the 228 journal papers that
met the criteria discussed above, the overwhelming
362 C. Mabey
2012 The Author
majority of work addressing leadership development,
either conceptually or empirically, did so adopting
functionalist assumptions. Of these, 62.2% had their
primary location in Europe, compared with 34%
based in the US; however, in terms of where the rst
author was currently located, the majority were in the
US (58.5%) or outside Europe (22.9%). The use of
interpretive discourse features occasionally (10.5%
of the total) and, interestingly, is almost exclusively
conned to European journals and/or authors. Dia-
logic and critical leadership development literature
appears to be very much an emerging eld, conned
thus far to European authorship and journals.
Despite their uneven representation in the litera-
ture, the point of this paper is to explore the contri-
bution of all four discourses. In this section, their
characteristic features are reviewed in turn.
Functionalist leadership development discourse
The overriding consideration of the functionalist
discourse is organizational performance. So when
applied to leadership development activities, the
key theoretical concerns are how to build and retain
leadership capability in a way that maximizes the
productivity of the rm (Swanson 2001). This
mindset is succinctly summarized by Russon and
Reinelt (2004). Commissioned by the Kellogg Foun-
dation, who have a long history of investing in
US leadership development, they review 55 such
programmes, noting that the Foundation now places
much more emphasis on attaining planned out-
comes and impacts . . . [these are] . . . dened as
changes in attitudes, behaviour, skills, status, or
level of functioning expected to result from
program activities. Impact refers to long term future
social change that a program works to create.
(Russon and Reinelt (2004, p. 105)
Typically, such development activities will be
structured, they will use formal techniques, and
they will be orchestrated by the organization rather
than being initiated by the individual. Competency
frameworks, 360 degree feedback, assessment/
development centre reports, psychometrics, talent
management programmes, and so on, are all testi-
mony to this way of thinking.
Attempts to measure impact. The elite/a priori
nature of this discourse is revealed by the notion
that the requirements for leadership development
can be predetermined and delivered in a reasonably
scientic manner. The bias towards consensus arises
from the fact that such aspirations and denitions
of knowledge-gain, skills-acquisition and attitude-
shift are deemed to be mutually benecial for leaders
and followers alike. Whether expressed in terms
of quality, intellectual capital, talent pool, business
indicators or even corporate social responsibility
indices, the underlying intent is performance
enhancement (Holton and Naquin 2000). Given this
emphasis upon instrumentality, it is no surprise that
the bulk of functionalist studies are devoted to track-
ing the impact and outcomes of leadership develop-
ment interventions (see Table 2). An example is
that reported by Yeung and Berman (1997). They
evaluated a human resource programme, including
leadership development, at Eastman Kodak,
designed to change the employee mindset from one
of entitlement to one of contribution, and to focus
the whole organization more directly on increasing
shareholder satisfaction. The programme was found
to be successful in improving leadership effective-
ness, as measured by: 360 degree feedback, and the
diversity of its senior and middle managers in terms
of race, gender and nationality; participant reaction
and planned actions, degree of learning, on the job
behaviour and business results evidenced via
employee surveys. In contrast to skills training,
leadership development programmes and activities
usually target attitude and mindset; the timeframe of
application may be years, not weeks; and learning
transfer, far from being a discrete activity, will be
interwoven with a host of culturally specic organ-
izational processes. Evaluating the mercurial nature
of such programmes is challenging, prompting the
use of more sophisticated techniques to assess
impact. Two such studies are referred to in Table 2.
Watkins et al. (2011) incorporated theories of action
and workplace learning in their study of two execu-
tive development programmes in the US and Europe.
This theory of change evaluation, which relied on
in-depth interviews with a wide range of actors,
proved effective in tracking critical incidents of new
behaviours and demonstrable change in the work-
place, including outcomes from less formal, more
experiential learning.
Noting the increasing shift towards collaborative,
networked, peer-working organizations, Drath et al.
(2008) question the widely accepted leadership
ontology of leaders, followers and shared goals. As
an alternative, they propose that leadership theory
should seek to explain how people who share
work in collectives produce direction, alignment and
2012 The Author
commitment (Drath et al. (2008, p. 636). Drawing
upon distributed leadership, complexity theory and
relational approaches, they promote a more contex-
tual conception of leadership development, while
maintaining that their ontology remains rmly
functionalist. The advantages of this approach are
twofold. First, the direction, alignment, commitment
(DAC) focus integrates leadership development
outcomes across levels of analysis: combining
the various structures and processes operating at
individual, dyad, group and organizational levels.
Second, outcomes can be realized in multiple ways,
bridging cultural differences in different contexts.
While there are undoubted advantages to a DAC
approach, the authors admit that it remains ill-
equipped to differentiate outcomes from the struc-
tures and processes that produce those outcomes,
not least the unanticipated outcomes; to capture the
informal and embedded episodes of learning; and to
fathom the ethical/moral dimensions that are neces-
sarily part of such development.
Contextualizing leadership development. Some
researchers have attempted to reconnect individual
leaders with their social context. Casey (2005), for
example, argues that neither adult learning nor
organizational learning theories alone explain the
way organizations learn and the way leaders operate
effectively in a strategic planning context (see
Table 2). She links the two levels of learning together
by invoking Parsons general theory of action. As
Casey admits, however, her model does not take into
account the dynamics of power and, in particular,
differentials of power held by various groups includ-
ing executives who may be involved in the formal
and informal learning activities (Casey (2005,
p. 142). In a similar vein, McCallum and OConnell
(2008) helpfully draw upon the notion of social
capital to augment understanding of leadership; they
then reduce this to a set of individually owned capa-
bilities, such as adopting an open-systems organic
mindset, building networking and story-telling skills.
This appears to miss the point that power, inuence,
resistance, cynicism, envy and dependence ow
among constituent players in a given context, and
it is more realistic to see the leaderfollower relation-
ship as one of interdependence, a dynamic tension
between like and dislike of the leadership, between
varying degrees of dependence and denigration
(Western 2008, p. 54).
What these examples illustrate is that, despite
attempts to resituate leadership development theory,
there remains a persistent functionalist preoccu-
pation with enhancing the qualities of individual
leaders, as if they are personally capable of turning
organizations around (Bennis and Thomas 2002;
Table 2. Selected examples of leadership development (LD) literature reecting functionalist discourse
Authors Research aim Type of study Key points/ndings
Yeung and
Berman (1997)
To monitor the impact of leadership
development at Eastman Kodak
Empirical LD interventions benet from: clearly dened success criteria,
including customer feedback; linking development with
other HR policies such as reward systems, performance
tracking and diversity management.
Holton and
Naquin (2000)
How to implement a
performance-based LD model
Theoretical Proposes a change process to enhance LD; this involves
validation of the leadership model, identifying development
gaps, gaining stakeholder agreement, planning and
implementing system improvements.
Casey, 2005 Uses an organizational learning
model to demonstrate how
learning needs are identied and
addressed
Empirical By bridging two learning theories (adult learning and
organizational learning), shows that evaluation of LD
activities requires a much wider set of questions than is
usually posed, including micro- and macro-level analysis.
McCallum and
OConnell
(2008)
Reviews 5 leadership studies to
demonstrate the role of social
capital in LD
Empirical LD initiatives can benet from a specic focus on social
capital skill development, including leveraging relational,
networking and story-telling skills.
Drath et al.
(2008)
To advocate a new approach to LD
based on Direction, Alignment
and Commitment (DAC)
Theoretical LD refers to developmental processes in which the whole
collective engages; instilling beliefs and practices that
produce DAC, the creation of a new leadership culture.
Watkins et al.
(2011)
Applies a Theory of Change
approach to evaluate the complex
outcomes of two LD case studies
Empirical It is possible to capture emerging programme outcomes
arising from experiential, informal LD via a robust
approach which identies critical incidents of new
behaviour with various stakeholders.
364 C. Mabey
2012 The Author
Kanter 2003; Pernick 2001). In a recent review of
the eld, Day (2011) notes that the revised edition
of the Centre for Creative Leadership Handbook of
Leadership Development (McCauley and Van Velsor
2004) devotes 13 chapters to leader development and
just two to leadership development. Yet, in his own
attempt to advance the eld (Day 2011), the majority
of the empirical focus remains upon individual and
social psychological variables.
It is perhaps in the arena of how to leverage
maximum learning and enhance strategic impact that
functionalist writing is most theoretically insightful.
Less satisfactory is the tendency in functionalist
accounts to assume leader/ship to be a self-evident
entity, needing only to be improved upon or devel-
oped to the mutual interests of both the individual
and the organization. Such terms remain uninterro-
gated except in so far as this will contribute to
improved effectiveness (Fournier and Grey 2000).
Indeed, so taken-for-granted is the economic impera-
tive and the push for performance that alternative
discourses tend not to get considered. The paper now
moves on to assess three non-functionalist dis-
courses, to see what insights each yields in relation to
understanding of leadership development.
Interpretive leadership development discourse
In contrast to the functionalist discourse, with its
decit model of objectively dened leadership
skills, prompting a predictive framework of specied
competencies (often disaggregated into component
parts) and an emphasis on individual accomplish-
ment, the interpretive discourse sees leadership as
socially constructed, co-created and evolving with an
emphasis upon systemic context and inter-subjective
appreciation. In the more uid conditions of the
knowledge-based economy, leadership is rarely
invested in a single individual, there will be times
when it is not clear where leadership is emanating
from and, indeed, it may well be attributed after
the event. This alerts us to the idea of leadership
as performance (Peck et al. 2009) and the power of
leaders arising from the actions of followers rather
than the cause of it (Grint 2005, p. 38).
The social construction of leadership development.
The interpretive leadership development discourse,
in a sense, works backwards to elucidate how devel-
opment and learning are produced via a combination
of variegated interests in the organization. There is a
shift in focus from behaviourism to a broader, more
transformative conception and application of learn-
ing, spurred in part by the need for continuous learn-
ing in the workplace, requiring informal, embedded
and incidental learning strategies (Marsick and
Watkins 1997; Raelin 2000). Giving a central role to
social actors, and the mediation of meaning through
language and symbols is indicative of symbolic inter-
action theory, and lending credence to the mutually
constitutive nature of unfolding events in organiza-
tions invokes sense-making theory (Pye 2005;
Weick 1995). Among other things, such analysis
highlights cultural divergence in the way leadership
is manifested and the way, by implication, leadership
development might be oriented. For example,
Bolden and Kirk (2009) conduct a study of leader-
ship development in an African context (see Table 3).
This reveals a number of culturally distinctive
approaches to and beliefs about the nature of leader-
ship, implying that leadership development in this
context needs to be strongly relational, participative,
inclusive and community oriented. Kamoche (2000)
uses, in part, an anthropological perspective to
understand participant views of an international
leadership development programme at the compa-
nys prestigious training institute. He notes the way
the programme acted to inculcate a common and
integrative culture, epitomized by the importance of
informal networking, political lobbying and getting
noticed by ones superiors.
Developing leadership by accessing the lived expe-
rience. What, then, is distinctive about interpretive
leadership development? First, it would seem to offer
a more imaginative means of accessing, interpreting
and understanding the lived experience of leaders
and, more particularly, leadership teams, in their
everyday work environments: the way they learn,
interact, build their networks and develop their
collective expertise. Based on his interpretive study
of engineers at Volvo, Sandberg (2000) found that
development activities were best designed and con-
ducted in a way that actively promoted changes in
the individuals conception of their work, as against
having new targets imposed, which would simply
impel them to intensify their effort to achieve in the
ways they had done previously. Second, interpretive
research addresses leadership activity in all its
implicit and extant forms at the level of the collective
rather than removing individual leaders from their
context for development purposes. It can be seen
from Table 3 that, employing different methods in
this tradition, researchers are interested in how the
2012 The Author
ascriptions of leader and led come to be attributed
and by whom, and they explore alternative narratives
whereby the leadership mandate might be recon-
structed in a way that increases the chances of shared
leadership (Currie and Lockett 2007; Van der Haar
and Hosking 2004). Because there will be different
renderings of real and suspect, exemplary and poor
leadership, this might invite exploration of fables/
stories in the organizations folklore of those teams/
individuals deemed to be inuential and how local
language serves to co-construct these social realities
(Gold and Smith 2003).
Dialogic leadership development discourse
Whereas functionalism takes the concept of leader-
ship or even the leader as pre-constituted founda-
tion points for development, the dialogic discourse
focuses on the socially and historically situated ways
in which these foundations have come to be con-
ceived in the rst place (see Figure 1). In his work
on organizational discourse, Deetz (1996) was an
early adopter of the term dialogic, which covers
approaches that might elsewhere be labelled as either
postmodern or poststructuralist. The term dialogic
denotes that discourse can only exist both in relation
to prior discourse and in anticipation of future
discourse (Bakhtin 1981; Fairclough 1992). Any text
or utterance is therefore inherently intertextual
(Kristeva 1986) in that it forms part of a dialogue that
establishes the conditions of and the potential for all
meaning (Wehrle 1982). It regards the self, including
the self as leader, as a multiple, fragmented and
discursive accomplishment, one that is continually in
a state of becoming as opposed to anything more
xed or stable.
The disciplinary nature of dialogic leadership
development. This deconstruction points to a quite
different understanding of the activities associated
with leadership development. As well as develop-
ment being understood as a means of improving
personal and organizational effectiveness (as in func-
tionalism), it also becomes a means for the exercise
of discipline. Two specic technologies of the
self (Foucault 1988) are pertinent to the disciplining
nature of leadership development. These are the
examination and the confession, which, respec-
tively, have the effect of rendering individuals
both objects of and subjects of knowledge at one and
the same time (Townley 1998). So for example,
any assessments (formal or informal) within a given
Table 3. Selected examples of leadership development (LD) literature reecting an interpretive discourse
Kamoche (2000) To demonstrate the
non-functionalist agendas
associated with LD
Empirical From an anthropological perspective, LD has symbolic value by
conferring status, initiating newcomers via a rite of passage
into an elite and reinforcing cultural norms.
Gold and Smith
(2003)
To understand the rationale for
LD among winners of the
National Training Awards
(UK)
Empirical Uses story-telling technique to observe how key actors were able
to draw rhetorically upon the resources and language of the
learning movement and related discourses in order to attribute
benets arising from LD in their organizations.
Sandberg (2000) To understand how participants
make sense of/invest in their
development
Empirical Effective development is not explained primarily by a set of
attributes possessed by an individual, but by the meaning they
invest in their idiosyncratic, context-specic ways of working.
Van der Haar and
Hosking (2004)
Use a relational constructionist
approach to assess the place
of appreciative inquiry (AI)
Theoretical AI, and by implication LD, is a process not a product, ongoing
not event-focused, evolving not predetermined, socially
reconstructed not individually achieved, drawing upon multiple,
not singular, expertise and embedded in local-cultural history.
Currie and
Lockett (2007)
To investigate the way leadership
within public services
interacts with institutional
context and moral approaches
Empirical Principals resist the narrow, managerialist variant of
transformational leadership being promoted by government.
Understanding the way leadership is co-created and enacted at
the local level is an essential precursor to the design of LD
activities.
Bolden and Kirk
(2009)
To reveal an Afro-centric
perspective on leadership and
the implications for LD
Empirical Beliefs about, and approaches to, leadership are culturally
contrived, so LD needs to promote relational, constructionist
and critical perspectives and provide a forum within which
delegates can generate shared understandings and culturally
appropriate forms of leadership.
366 C. Mabey
2012 The Author
programme, such as 360 degree feedback, develop-
ment centre reports and psychometric tests, serve to
objectify individuals, by providing ways in which
they can be rendered visible, knowable, calculable,
discussible and, therefore, governable. Confessional
practices refer to episodes where the aspiring leaders
actively participate in discussion or disclosure of the
self according to the organizational norms, catego-
ries and rules that emerge from the examination. By
doing this, employees participate in the constitution
of their own subjectivities (Fenwick 2005) by
embracing, to the point of taking for granted, tech-
nologies that become part of their basis for self-
knowledge and identity. Forums for this might
include appraisal and career discussions, job inter-
views, coaching, mentoring and certain types of
self-revelatory or psycho-therapeutic development
(Ackers and Preston 1997).
Identity regulation. Table 4 summarizes some
studies that explicitly use, or imply the use of, dialogic
discourse to explore the phenomenon of leadership
development. In an ethnographic study of a culture
change programme in an international knowledge-
intensive rm, Sveningsson and Larsson (2006) track
a middle-manager entrusted with leading change
through a series of facilitated workshops. Consistent
with dialogic discourse, they note how this individu-
als participation in developmental activities serves
to fuel identity work by instilling an idealized, mana-
gerial vision of the future, feeding what the authors
call fantasies of leadership.
Further evidence of this comes from a study of
31 leaders in ve commercial organizations (Clarke
2006). The author observes that one way in which
leaders chose to assuage the dissonance between
their individual needs and organizational outcomes
was to blur the boundaries between the two such that
some came to see themselves as the organization.
The effect of this enforced democracy is subtle iden-
tity control whereby individuals apparently adopt
independent behaviours but which ultimately align
with the rm. This dialogic approach is also evident
in the study by Cullen (2010), in which he examines
the textual, discursive and socio-cultural practices
in the work of Stephen Covey. This deconstruction
not only explains the popularity of his leadership
development programmes, but also the conservative,
Table 4. Selected examples of leadership development (LD) literature reecting a dialogic discourse
Sveningsson and
Larsson (2006)
Explore the way potential
leaders talk about, attempt to
practice and create meaning
for themselves
Empirical Participation in a culture change programme and MBA
contributes to identity formation and regulation of the
individual leader concerned, who participates in the illusion of
an idealized vision of leadership, without actually being
endowed with any substantive inuence.
Clarke (2006) Proposes a representative
leadership model and tests this
in ve case study
organizations
Empirical Most participants attribute some form of identity formation to the
leadership development: some were able to negotiate the
resulting dissonance in a way that encouraged democratic
leadership.
Ford (2006) Analyse the dominant discourses
following a year-long LD
programme
Empirical Charismatic and masculine discourses of leadership continue to
be valued despite LD favouring more feminine qualities of the
post-heroic discourse. Individuals exhibit complex, plural and
ambiguous leadership identities.
Gagnon (2008) Examine the dynamics of power
that shape identities of those
taking part in LD programmes
Empirical High degree of conformity to corporate norms arises from two
LD programmes studied, due to (i) inter-subjective pressure via
ranking, peer judgements and criticism, and (ii) internal
pressure, or work-on-self to comply with required identity
expressed in local discourse.
Cullen (2010) Deconstruct Coveys 7 Habits
book to analyse the discipline
of effectiveness that is
propounded
Theoretical The 7 Habits approach to LD attracts aspiring leaders by cleverly
creating dissonance before providing the lifeline of universal
truths; this is accomplished by feeding off the socio-cultural
trends of post-modernism, soft capitalism and unmediated
individualism.
Carroll and Levy
(2010)
Explore the possibilities of
identity work in LD settings
Empirical LD frequently serves to regulate actor identities, but LD can also
provide a space of action whereby individuals can exercise
agency in negotiating, rejecting, reframing and constructing the
identities on offer.
2012 The Author
universalist mindset and mini-industry that supports
them.
A dialogic discourse of leadership develop-
ment draws attention to not just a singular identity
being constituted by such activities, but to multiple,
shifting and, at times, simultaneously antagonistic
leadership identities (Ford 2006). This may explain
much of the participant ambivalence surrounding
leadership development. It can be a very promising
means for organizational leaders to secure effort,
commitment and conformity, yet prove to be inher-
ently divisive, discriminatory and illusory in terms of
anticipated impact (Gagnon 2008). Indeed, both may
be claimed simultaneously, given that discourse-
driven subjects may be politically astute language
users, and therefore able to tell the right kind of
stories to the right audiences at the right moment
(Alvesson and Karreman 2000). Carroll and Levy
(2010) explore the leadership development narratives
of participants in an online, virtual learning pro-
gramme over 18 months. They uncover different
identity strategies by which individuals craft a self
that is their own; these are uid, overlapping and at
times contradictory and lead to the learners refram-
ing, accommodating and/or rejecting in different
degrees. This illustrates how dialogic discourse use-
fully extends more rational accounts by examining
the circumstances under which participants construe
leadership development as both illuminating and con-
straining, liberating and stress-inducing, condence-
boosting and alienating.
Critical leadership development discourse
The term critical theory is sometimes used in a
broad sense to denote any form of self-conscious
theorizing aimed at emancipatory social change.
However, it is also frequently used more narrowly
to refer to the body of theorizing emanating from
the Frankfurt School of critical theory (Carr 2000;
Johnson and Duberley 2000), and it is with this more
narrow meaning that this paper is primarily con-
cerned here. The Frankfurt scholars developed their
notion of dialectical reason in response to what they
saw as the cultural dominance of positivism and
its exclusive focus on instrumental reason (Rusaw
2000). Instrumental reason caters only for means
ends calculations and positions itself as apolitical
and value free (Johnson and Duberley 2000). This
sties any consideration of justice and ethics as
legitimate ends in their own right, subordinating
them instead to notions of economic efciency, pro-
duction and growth. At one level, there tends to be
a good deal of tension between the dialogic and the
critical discourses. For example, critical discourse
makes clear epistemological distinctions between,
say, freedom and oppression, free will and structural
constraint, whereas the dialogic discourse regards
each side of such dualisms as mutually constitutive
of the other. This leads critical discourse theorists to
argue that the dialogic position, taken to its extreme,
means that there is ultimately no point in struggling
towards a better social order as any supposedly
emancipatory alternative will only result in different
forms of oppression (Parker 1999). However, com-
parison of the dialogic and the critical discourse
is clouded by the way in which the critical label
is often attached to both perspectives. For example,
the term Critical Management Studies acts as an
umbrella term for studies that draw from both dis-
courses, whether explicitly or implicitly.
Ideology and leadership development. Connected
to dialectical reason is the notion of ideology,
which has been dened and applied to training and
development in a number of different ways: as propa-
gating knowledge and ideas that serve particular
sectional interests (ODonnell et al. 2006); as a
means of socializing individuals to accept un-
questioningly norms as guides to everyday thinking
and behaviour (Rusaw 2000); convincing people that
existing social arrangements are naturally ordained,
self-evidently true, empirically accurate, personally
relevant, and morally desirable (Brookeld 2001).
Authors in this eld (e.g. Brookeld 2001; Fenwick
2004; Raelin 2001; Willmott 1997) tend to advocate
more critical forms of project-based, action or
organizational learning. For example, Willmott
(1994, 1997) notes that much development of man-
agers and leaders is largely done to them rather than
done by them, via processes that treat them almost
like patients as opposed to agents. At a more macro
level, Contu et al. (2003) characterize the whole
learning discourse, including leadership develop-
ment, as both individualizing and individualistic
inasmuch as it transforms social subjects into learn-
ers who become uniquely responsible for their own
employability.
Exploitative and emancipatory aspects of leadership
development. Critical discourse has received a
good deal of attention in relation to the teaching and
training of managers in a classroom setting, which is
not the central concern of this paper. However, given
368 C. Mabey
2012 The Author
that leadership development often employs similar
pedagogies and technologies, three studies are
worthy of inclusion here. James and Arroba (2005)
and Trehan (2007) adopt psycho-dynamic and
psycho analytic perspectives respectively in their
studies of classroom-based leadership development.
Both explore the important role of emotions in
the way leadership is developed and exercised;
this encourages a critical mindset, which invites and
equips participants to challenge orthodoxies, indeed
to question the tutors and take more responsibility
for the leadership development process itself. The
point of Sinclairs (2009, p. 277) analysis is that such
is the performance of mastery and power by male
presenters in the classroom (supported as it is by an
unspoken gendered regime) that dissent is regularly
mufed and marginalized (see Table 5). The other
studies in the table feature leadership development
in an organizational setting. Kamoches (2000) study
of an international programme is included again
because he goes on to observe how participants
largely acquiesced in the supposedly integrative
values it espoused. In his view, embedding such
values within a development programme that simul-
taneously determined career advancement effectively
emasculated potentially deviant and non-conformist
individual interests.
Bell and Taylor (2004) examine themes of religi-
osity by investigating the ideological assumptions
underpinning a number of management development
courses that either explicitly or implicitly invoke
notions of spirituality. The authors main conclusion
is that, by focusing exclusively on deep personal
transformation as the route to development, such
courses deect attention from political and structural
barriers to organizational change. As such, these
types of programmes need, in the authors view, to
be seen as potentially repressive rather than enlight-
ening. In their analysis of a competency-based
programme of a large UK-based multinational
Finch-Lees et al. (2005) discuss the ideological char-
acter of the programmes documentation: by repre-
senting as factual claims that could never be reliably
proved; by seeking to naturalize shareholder interests
as being in the universal interests of all; by relying
exclusively on economically instrumental reasoning
in getting its message across (reference to share-
holder value, investing in self-development); and by
portraying competency development as a scientic
and politically neutral technology.
Table 5. Selected examples of leadership development (LD) literature reecting a critical discourse
Kamoche (2000) To research the corporatist
purposes served by LD
Empirical The international development programme exercises normative
control, whereby participants commitment to corporate
ideology is manufactured and then secured via the careerist
promise of upward mobility.
Bell and Taylor
(2004)
To uncover the ideological
assumptions and outdoor LD
Theoretical By focusing on deep, personal transformation which invoke
notions of spirituality as a route to development, outdoor LD
can unhelpfully deect attention from the political and
structural barriers to change in organizational settings.
Finch-Lees et al.
(2005)
To explore the potentially
repressive nature of
competency-based LD
Empirical Programme documentation portrays LD as being politically
neutral, justied in terms of shareholder value and using
scientic technology, leading to some ambivalence and some
scepticism among participants.
James and Arroba
(2005)
To focus on the role of
reading and carrying
emotion and emotionality in
the LD process
Empirical Elevating the gestalt (the emotions, reective responses,
feelings) of LD processes can provide a welcome source
of social intelligence rather than an irritating disturbance,
and moves away from arid intellectual theorizing and
model-building.
Trehan (2007) To illuminate the contradictions
and tensions inherent in LD
Theoretical A psycho-analytic lens on LD helps to surface the social and
moral (alongside the cognitive and skill-based) issues inherent
in leadership practice as well as the forces of power and control
that constrain the development process.
Sinclair (2009) To examine the seductive style
of LD delivery
Empirical While gender and power are dening elements and constraints in
the way seductive pedagogical relations are constructed within
LD programmes, there are opportunities for experimentation
and display that potentially subvert such stereotypes.
2012 The Author
Four leadership development
discourses: contribution and critique
Functionalist discourse
Functionalist discourse helps to illuminate the per-
formative possibilities of leadership development,
but is ill-equipped to deal with the non-consensual
reality of organizations. There is a need for more
receiving-end research to get beneath the skin of
organizations and build understanding of the pur-
poses and meanings that people attach to leadership
development experiences and activities with which
they are involved. Methodologies that rely on inex-
ible research instruments leave little room for pursu-
ing the unexpected and can take only limited account
of context. More context-sensitive research methods
pay greater attention to interdependencies, settings
and complexities of behaviour in organizations
because they focus on naturally occurring, ordinary
events in natural settings, so that we have a strong
handle on what real life is like (Miles and Huberman
1994, p. 10; italics in original).
The difculty with functionalist leadership devel-
opment discourse is the inability to be reexive, or in
other words to actually regard itself as a discourse.
Reexivity involves self-questioning by turning
back on our own knowledge, truth claims, language
and so on in order to scrutinize the various impacts
that our research may have on constructions of the
social world (Cunliffe 2003). Those operating exclu-
sively within the connes of this discourse are, by
denition, unable to do this, owing to their objectivist
stance on reality (ontology) and their similarly objec-
tivist stance on the production of knowledge about
such reality (epistemology). For the committed func-
tionalist, there is a clear and unquestionable onto-
logical separation between the researcher and the
world being researched. As an example, in the very
act of coining such terms as human capital and
social capital (Day 2001; McCallum and OConnell
2008; Rock and Garavan 2006), researchers appear
not to consider how the appropriation of such lan-
guage from the arena of accounting might contribute
to a certain (contestable) construction of the world
and the individuals within it.
There is no doubt that a collective fascination
(from government agencies, professional institutes,
employers, business schools and consultants) in
leaders and their development has spurred a steady
stream of research dedicated to improving methods,
and securing cost-benet for the large sums invested.
There is also no doubt that, where such studies have
invoked theories, these have tended to reect a strong
instrumental bias. For a mix of reasons, the effect
has been to leave unexplored other interpretations
of activity that goes under the name of leadership
development.
Interpretive discourse
In contrast, interpretive discourse pays close attention
to the contextual nature of leadership development
with its tacit, irrational and emergent properties. It
switches attention from orchestrated events to the
gaps between them, fromone-way knowledge transfer
to tacit knowledge exchange, from the planned to the
unintended, from the programmed to the processual,
from the anticipated to the reconstructed. However,
two criticisms might be levelled at this discourse.
First, with some exceptions (e.g. Kempster and
Stewart 2010), such accounts have a tendency to
underestimate the constraining nature of contextual
arrangements, because no matter how loose the
networks in question, institutional context sets
parameters around the forms of ritual and forms
of (re)iteration, respectively, that will be plausible
(Peck et al. 2009, p. 32). As found in a study that
examined an international leadership development
programme (Kamoche 2000), such initiatives may be
usedas a means toinculcate a commonandintegrative
culture; so although informal networking is encour-
aged, it is found to be part of an elitist socializing
process facilitating normative control by the company
concerned.
A second criticism of this discourse is that, by
privileging a multiplicity of local meanings, it has the
potential to unravel into endless relativism and defy
any attempt at concerted leadership development.
There are two counters to this. The rst is to see the
catalytic role of leadership development, much like
the ethos of appreciative enquiry (whereby the whole
organization or community undergoes a multi-phase
review to nurture a collective sense of destiny), as
creating the space among organizational members to
recognize their different constructions of reality, to
make them explicit and understandable rather than
to try to explain and resolve them in some way
(Van der Haar and Hosking 2004). By engaging with
emotional, moral and spiritual (rather than simply
cognitive) issues, this can be an effective means
for surfacing implicit assumptions concerning the
activity of leading in an organizational context. The
value of this approach is that it helps individuals
370 C. Mabey
2012 The Author
to look critically at the corporately choreographed
narratives of leadership in which they and others
participate.
Another counter to endless relativism is for leader-
ship development to recover the moral self. Senge
(2002) proposes that deep learning and sustained
change are driven by desperation, crisis or aspiration
and the real territory of change is in here with the
consequences being out there, deeply private yet
inherently collective.
2
Quinn and Sonenshein (2008)
note that personal integrity is derived from reduced
defensiveness, addressing personal hypocrisy and
committing to a self-transcending strategy. The risk,
of course, is that by reinstating consideration of the
individual leader in this way, one slides back into the
functionalist territory of charismatic leadership with
all its attendant ambushes. However, by decoupling
character and charisma, leadership development can
begin to explore more fully what individuals in all
their relational and ethical richness, bring to the
leaderfollower dynamic. As Jackson and Parry
conclude in their review of leadership development:
We really must look past the charisma and into the
motives of the leader. We must look past leader
behaviours and into the heart of the leader. We really
need to have an insight into leadership for a higher
purpose (2008, p. 98).
Dialogic discourse
Whereas the functionalist discourse takes the concept
of leadership or even the leader as pre-constituted
foundation points for development, the dialogic
focuses on the socially and historically situated ways
in which these foundations have arisen in the rst
place. This opens the way for alternative understand-
ings of the activities associated with leadership devel-
opment. While interpretive readings accommodate
the possibility of multiple social constructions of
leadership development, they seek out processes by
which communities might arrive at shared and there-
fore relatively stable understandings, albeit context-
specic ones. In contrast, dialogic approaches are just
as interested in the deconstruction of meaning as
they are in the processes by which meaning comes
to be constructed in the rst place. In other words,
from a dialogic perspective, the interpretive act of
recovering meaning is, in itself, another creation of
meaning (Calas and Smircich 1990), and thus ripe for
deconstruction in itself.
One possible contradiction at the heart of dialogic
discourse is the notion that, simply by participating in
leadership development, we are being disciplined,
and our identities are being constituted for us. Yet, by
engaging in so-called identity work, Beech (2008)
maintains it is possible to counteract and shape the
managerial image of self and/or creatively construct
and adopt a variety of subject positions, some of
which are aligned to the organizational ideology and
some of which are directly (albeit implicitly) opposed
to it (Finch-Lees et al. 2005). The degree of agency
seems to be ambiguous here, an ambiguity which,
although it is a hallmark of dialogic analysis, poses
difculties for those designing leadership develop-
ment. Naturally occurring communities of practice,
especially for those in small business enterprises and
engaged with a network of actors (Devins and Gold
2002) and action learning sets would seem to be an
ideal developmental means to help leaders construct
and exert power rather than having their hopes, fears
and aspirations constituted by managerial discourse
(Alvesson and Deetz 2000). This can be done by
taking regular time out with a small group of col-
leagues to question and reect on ways in which
conformity to the leadership identities constructed
by such leadership development programmes can
be enacted or resisted (Carroll and Levy 2010).
However, the degree to which such opportunities
can be managerially orchestrated, rather than arising
spontaneously, is open to question (Kempster and
Stewart 2010). Another criticism of the dialogic dis-
course is an underestimation of institutional and
political reality (Gagnon 2008). This leads us on to
consider critical discourse.
Critical discourse
As Table 1 shows, there is, as yet, relatively little
published work that adopts a critical discourse,
particularly in corporate rather than classroom set-
tings. Some studies are beginning to pioneer this
pathway by focusing on the contradictions and ten-
sions in such leadership development activity.
Although operating within a critical discourse with
its primary concern to unveil power relations, Trehan
(2007) points to the value of learning from un-
conscious phenomena (whole experience rather than
2
Naturally, there is a strong possibility that what one desires,
strives for and expends effort pursuing as a leader is
socially conditioned by managerially inspired discourses
what Alvesson and Willmott (2002) refer to as managing
the insides of employees. But leadership development can
play a valuable role in helping individuals detect the nature
of such identity regulation.
2012 The Author
simply cognitive level), engaging with emotional and
moral issues inherent in management practice and
becoming more conscious of the ideological forces
that constrain their leadership action. James and
Arroba (2005) use the notion of reading the nuances
of a given organizational context and carrying the
emotions, feelings, anxieties aroused, to help leaders
become more effective in their leadership task. The
authors note that this approach moves participants
away fromintellectual theorizing and model-building
to extended gestalt-based work, where heightened
emotion in a given situation is welcomed as a source
of social intelligence about what is going on, rather
than being seen as an irritating disturbance. This,
perhaps, explains the paucity of leadership develop-
ment research reecting critical discourse. Not only
does it potentially threaten the authority of those
commissioning and sponsoring the activity, but taken
to its logical conclusion, it requires those who are
conducting leadership development to consider how
their own leader identities are being constituted and
maintained, and to apply this criticism to themselves
as facilitators, recognizing the power imbalance
inherent in trainerparticipant relationships (Ford
and Harding 2007).
So far, this paper has reviewed four different lead-
ership development discourses. Each reading starts
with different questions and assumptions and each
leads to contrasting conclusions about the activities
undertaken in the name of leadership development in
organizations. It has been noted that each offers dis-
tinct insights, but that each also attracts a degree of
criticism. This paper now returns to its central aim.
How might each of the four discourses inform the
design and delivery of leadership development in
practice? Is it possible, indeed helpful, to adopt more
than one discourse approach to leadership develop-
ment; what might this look like in practice; and how
might it shape future research?
Implications for leadership
development practice and research
Functionalist discourse: implications for leadership
Demonstrating the measurable impact of leadership
development is a key concern and contribution of
functionalist discourse, the assumption being that
quantiable degrees of success (or failure) can and
should be evaluated in an equally objective manner
although it should be noted that not all evaluation
approaches are necessarily performative in focus
(Easterby-Smith 1994), nor is performativity the
exclusive domain of the functionalist discourse
(Spicer et al. 2009). In fact, attempts to demonstrate
the worth of such activities in tangible terms have
progressed little in recent years (Black and Earnest
2009; Collins 2001).
The difculty may lie with the methods used
to measure performance outcomes. A structured
approach to evaluation is possibly suited to training
interventions that address hard skills and have a
nite time-span. However, most leadership develop-
ment, especially that addressing more senior execu-
tives, is very different. Assessing the impact of such
activities is challenging. It requires a sophisticated
approach, which is capable of tracking shifts in atti-
tudes and mindsets, following subjects over a period
of years, not weeks, and disentangling the thread of
leadership from a host of other culturally specic
organizational processes.
An increasingly common practice is for leadership
development activity to be predicated upon an
organizationally specic framework of competencies
(Iles and Preece 2006; Rankin 2001) or capabilities
(Finch-Lees et al. 2005). Attempting to acquire iso-
lated, generic and measurable leadership attributes,
no matter how well derived and precisely articulated,
with little or no attention to organizational context,
level or culture is likely to have limited value
(Bolden and Gosling 2006). What is required is a
different style of leadership development, which
adopts more open-ended discursive, reective and
experiential approaches. A further compelling reason
for a shift away from formal, top-down leadership
development programmes to more tailored, blended
learning is the changing contours of organizations.
Recent reviews of new, more temporary organiza-
tional forms (Bakker 2010; Nahapiet 2008; Santos
and Eisenhardt 2005) call for a better theorization of
the way leadership is developed in community and
networked enterprises.
Interpretive discourse: implications for leadership
Many of the issues facing those who design leadership
development practice are similar to those researching
within this discourse. The challenge is to stay with the
here and now, to work in gestalt fashion with the
presented dynamics among a group of people, since it
is from these visceral and embodied dialogues that
372 C. Mabey
2012 The Author
real leadership learning emerges. This renders prob-
lematic any leadership development activity that is
time bound, event framed and tied to predetermined
performance outcomes, especially where superior
knowledge is invested in the tutor, the trainer, the
syllabus and so on. Perhaps the most powerful contri-
bution of interpretive discourse is to regard the
sociallyconstructednature of leadershipdevelopment
as central rather than a by-product. Thus, learning
communities might be built into the design of devel-
opment activities, places where individuals can be
exposed to the way their co-learners approach similar
intractable problems and construct coherent narra-
tives, helping to equip them to re-engage with their
problems with psychological resilience (Blackler
and Kennedy 2004). The value of such communities
of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991) is invoked by
Devins and Gold (2002) in their study of leadership
development in the small business community, and
noted by Iles and Preece (2006) in their analysis of
intra- and inter-organizational networking for chief
executives.
The interpretive discourse amplies understanding
of leadership development practice by reasserting the
organization as a social site consisting of distinct
cultural groups, each of which is expected to have
distinct ways of making sense of the organizational
world. Viewed from this perspective, the signicance
of leadership development, its purposes, implemen-
tation and effects, is considered to be a function of the
sense-making of a range of actors, some observing,
some participating. Leadership development research
therefore requires the imaginative means to access
and understand the lived experience of leaders in their
everyday work environments, to uncover the idiosyn-
cratic ways in which they learn, interact, develop
their skills and progress their careers (Kempster and
Stewart 2010; Yanow 2000).
Dialogic discourse: implications for leadership
Conventional events or programmes designed to
develop leaders typically invoke general theories,
leadership models, key texts, case studies and aspira-
tional notions such as delighting customers, building
high-performing teams, valuing innovation and so on.
Dialogic analysis reveals many difculties with such
leadership development practices. First, such notions
are assumed to be xed, namable, reied objects
commonly and similarly understood by all concerned
(Shotter 2010). Second, such use of language and
artefact privileges certain objects, but fails to explore,
indeed relegates, exploration of alternative meanings
and messages; we remain in the world of the inten-
tional rather than the unanticipated, which is where,
after all, most learning occurs. Third, because the
discussion is usually framed in a retrospective, nal-
ized and top-down manner, this introduces a mis-
placed constancy and solidity to such terms, which
ignores the individual experience of uncertainty, inse-
curity, ambivalence, shifting allegiance and changing
circumstances. Fourth, because the engagement is
primarily cognitive and cerebral, this fails to touch
the lived experience of participants, the fact that
leadership is embodied, emotional and immanent.
Fifth, the emphasis upon the new and the revelatory
orientates us away from the familiar and common-
place (which are poorly understood): what Cunliffe
refers to as: the relational and mundane nature of
dialogue, not purely reective but also intuitive and
taken-for-granted (Cunliffe 2008, p. 130).
Shotter (2010) proposes dialogic action research
to deliberately address these fallacies. This involves
drawing participants attention to aspects of their
own activity and the language they use that they
would otherwise not notice, taking account of their
embodied readiness to respond to events in their own
unique and particular surroundings and giving
credence to the precise, bodily feelings aroused by
such encounters. Such an approach lends itself well
to leadership development, where individuals might
be encouraged to undertake an action research
project in their own or anothers organization to gain
more clarity about the world they are constructing for
themselves, rather than a world constructed for them
by academics and other theorists (Conroy 2010).
Slightly less satisfactory due to their more contrived
nature is the use of business simulations, mentoring
or work shadowing, where observers feed back peri-
odically what they see in the participants inter-
actions and discuss what learning this may prompt.
However, if well handled, and devoid of surface-
acting (which is characteristic of role plays, for
example), such developmental approaches begin
to stimulate reexive dialogical practice, which
involves: surfacing the tacit assumptions embedded
in our ways of talking and exploring how our own
conversational practices create and sustain particular
ways of relating (Cunliffe 2008, p. 134). Leaders
as co-learners resist prescribing tactics or techniques
to improve leadership practice, but rather help each
other to reach a better-articulated understanding
of their uniquely situated leadershipfollowership
2012 The Author
activity and to draw upon and expand their existing
everyday repertoire of relating skills.
Critical discourse: implications for leadership
Leadership development has the potential to be
liberating by equipping organizational members to
identify and critique managerial ideology. This might
be by simultaneously working within and yet under-
mining corporate norms via covert and irreverent
approaches and unofcial initiatives to promote
their causes (Clarke 2006, p. 442). Another example
might be to assist organizational members to discover
for themselves previously hidden forms of gender
discrimination (often of a subtle, systemic nature)
and then take incremental and practical steps to
address them (Eliott and Stead 2008; Meyerson and
Fletcher 2000). Much of the functionalist writing and
practice in the area of leadership development tends
to treat the managerial subject as an abstract, asexual,
non-raced and somehow diversity-neutral individual
(Acosta 2004; Nkomo 1992). A more radical leader-
ship development intervention, prompted by critical
discourse, would aim to change the structures and
cultures in the organization (Anderson 2004). This
goes a lot further than just diversifying the people that
do the work. The focus moves away from minority
groups being expected to learn from the organization
in terms of how to get on or t in or perform as a
leader. Instead, the leadership development prompts
the organization as a collective to open itself up to
learning from the diversity of its members (Nkomo
1992) and then facilitate systemic change as a result
of that learning.
In short, the critical discourse helps to reorient
attention towards issues of power, politics, domina-
tion, exploitation and oppression, which might other-
wise be overlooked, or be sustained by, leadership
development practice. It also provides a means by
which alternatives to the status quo can be both envi-
sioned and potentially enacted via forms of learning
that hold out the promise of being more inclusive and
more democratic. However, for the most part, such
emancipation still remains a promise. More examples
are needed to elucidate how critical leadership devel-
opment practice can help participants create spaces of
autonomy to identify and resist rather than repro-
duce entrenched power relations in the workplace
(Conroy 2010). Indeed, one major unresolved
dilemma within the discourse itself is how to avoid
criticising dehumanizing managerial practices, but
failing to offer positive alternatives that break the
cycle of entrenched power asymmetries (Spicer et al.
2009). An opposite danger is to harness leadership
development to bring about perceived positive social
change, but only by exchanging one disciplinary
universalism for another (Currie and Knights 2003).
Plural discourses: implications for leadership
So far, this paper has considered the contribution
of each discourse in isolation. Is there merit in the
leadership development professional seeking to
adopt more than one discourse when designing and
delivering leadership development in their organiza-
tion? The author would argue that, taken to their
extremes, the discourses discussed above are onto-
logically incommensurate (see Figure 1). However,
although the simultaneous adoption of competing
discourses is untenable, it is proposed that there is
benet in pausing to subject any planned leadership
development activity to the searching questions
raised in turn by alternative discourses.
Given that functionalist discourse tends to domi-
nate leadership development interventions, it might
be supposed that non-functionalist discourses have
little to offer. But despite asking provocative ques-
tions of leadership development as an activity, these
discourses and their preferred research priorities
have the potential for yielding important insights
about, and therefore improving the richness of, lead-
ership development practice. Those operating within
interpretive discourse ask: what are the conditions
under which leadership development is more, or less,
likely to be enacted and socially constructed? This
steers us away from predetermined programmes and
leadership models towards understanding the proc-
esses whereby effective leading is passed on and
learnt by others. It raises the prominence of activities
such as feedback, coaching, storytelling, since these
have the capacity to infuse the leadership narrative
for a given organization. Those favouring dialogic
discourse are also relatively indifferent towards
orchestrated attempts to build leadership capabi-
lity; they are more concerned with how leadership
identity is accomplished, negotiated and regulated
through situated practices in a given organization.
Yet, dialogic research, by arguing that organizations
are the product of discourse, implies that inter-
vention in and through discourse is central to the
activities of leaders. This raises awareness of how
such persuasive accounts may be rendered in order to
374 C. Mabey
2012 The Author
legitimate certain forms of authority (Grint 2005),
thus comprising a potentially valuable resource
for leadership development. Finally, for critical dis-
course theorists, the very assumptions underpinning
leadership development are regarded as ideologi-
cally suspect. Yet, even this apparently subversive
discourse has its value to those commissioning
leadership development. If one takes the view
of organizations as arenas calling for micro-
emancipation then leadership development can play
a valuable role by crafting spaces of freedom from
the bottom-up (Spicer et al. 2009, p. 553). This
presents the challenge to designers and tutors, of
creating a learning environment where incremental
but signicant gains can be made toward greater
latitude for initiative and self-determination. This
would involve tutors and learners collectively explor-
ing better ways to encourage reexivity about the
contexts of power and control they (mutually) enact
and perpetuate.
The inherent tensions and incommensurability
between the four discourses can be illustrated by
briey discussing the example of informal leadership
development. All four discourses recognize that
there is more to leadership development than formal
events and programmes. Recent functionalist com-
mentary has begun to offer a leadership ontology that
seeks to explain how employees produce direction,
alignment and commitment, such that leadership
development becomes integrated with team, net-
work, community and organization development
processes in which the whole collective engages
to create a leadership culture (Drath et al. 2008;
McCauley et al. 2010). This has led to a healthy
interest in a variety of less formal development
activities including coach-supported, blended,
on-the-job and e-learning, although evidence sug-
gests that all but a fraction of the tangible benets
arising from leadership development accrue to the
individual rather than the organization (Ascalon
et al. 2004). But those regarding leadership develop-
ment from other perspectives would say this is
missing the point.
For example, those working within an interpretive
discourse would point to the cultural and systemic
factors that shape behaviour, factors that the function-
alist discourse routinely ignores or underestimates
(Raelin 2001). Interpretive discourse puts less empha-
sis on individual leaders and leadership positions
and more on processes of leading (irrespective of
formal ascription); less on organizations as instigators
of training programmes and more on naturalistic,
situated and relational leadership learning that occurs
without intervention (Kempster and Stewart 2010);
less on the control, success and predictability inherent
in much leadership development thinking and more
on the learning that arises from things like risk,
setback and spontaneity (Larsen 2004; Storey and
Tate 2000). This emergent, distributed view of
leadership development is difcult for functionalists
to contemplate, as it dees the planning-for-
performance assumptions of corporate learning
strategies.
But this emergent view would attract opposition
from other quarters too. By denition, less formal
avenues of leadership development raise the issue of
selectivity. At rst glance, promoting free choice,
self-determination and informal learning in the arena
of leadership development appears democratic and
fair. For example, Arnaud (2004, p. 1135) points to
the value of coaching interventions for providing a
symbolic locus and space for potentially counter-
cultural individual utterances and the expression of
otherness inside organizations. Yet for all the ben-
ets of such informal and/or incidental development,
critical or dialogic discourse highlights the way in
which organizations tend to open up their develop-
mental spaces to some at the expense of others
(Broadbridge 2004; McDermid et al. 2001). Far
from legitimizing diverse leadership approaches and
helping to facilitate leading, in all its myriad expres-
sions, across institutional, cultural or social networks,
critical discourses show how informal leadership
development can actually have the opposite effect of
reinforcing social boundaries, homogenizing corpo-
rate behaviour and perpetuating cultural conformity
(Frenkel and Shenhav 2006). All this illustrates the
value of exploring competing interpretations as we
interrogate the same leadership development activity,
in this case, informal leadership development.
Before leaving this section, it should be noted that
commitment to a given leadership discourse does not
necessarily imply leadership development practice
operating within the same discourse. For example, it
is entirely possible that a leadership development
programme designed by an organization primarily
out of a desire to seek legitimacy with the public
at large and gain access to a more diverse con-
sumer base and labour pool (Thomas and Ely 1996)
also serves to celebrate difference and promote the
visibility of marginalized groups. Or, take dialogic
discourse: critics may decry dialogue facilitated
in leadership development activities as ceaseless
chatter and a babble of confusion. Yet, where leader-
2012 The Author
ship development facilitates respect, responsibility
and accountability informed by some code of ethics
or universal morality, it is possible to build through
dialogue a conception of a valid reason for action,
a legitimate purpose, and an achievement that is
worth the pursuit of it (Scruton 2010, p. 48), which
is more resonant with interpretive discourse. Or as
a third example, one might cite the gravitational pull
of functionalism. So despite commitment to critical
leadership theory in the way leadership develop-
ment is conceived and undertaken, the pressure of
commercial interests, on the one hand, and micro-
political dynamics, on the other (Vince 2010),
may overwhelm the intent of non-elitist leadership
development (Meyerson and Kolb 2000).
Conclusion
This review paper set out to propose that the study
of leadership development would benet from
increased theoretical clarity and transparency, and
that discourse provides a valuable analytic lens for
this purpose. Drawing upon published work, the
intention was to examine how each of four dis-
courses, derived from Alvesson and Deetz (2000),
might offer distinct contributions to understanding of
leadership development activities in organizations.
Although these discursive readings raise irreconcil-
able differences and contradictions, the author main-
tains that such competing interpretations can actually
benet the eld of enquiry by offering insights
and posing questions that would otherwise be
missed. The primary purpose was to arrive at some
tangible principles that might guide those responsi-
ble for designing and implementing leadership devel-
opment. Here, it was found that each discourse
suggests quite different approaches to the way in
which leadership development is conceived and
undertaken. These lead to a challenging but fruitful
series of questions: How will this activity build
leadership capabilities, and when will we know it
has worked? How is the project of leadership
development construed by different players and in
what ways does it arise from an inter-subjective
framing of experience at work? As against a set
of reied and uncontroversial activities that are
assumed to benet employer and employee alike, to
what extent is leadership development inherently
fragmented, fragile and contested? Despite opening
opportunities for self-development and promotion,
does participation in leadership development ironi-
cally render participants more malleable and more
governable? Does the reective space proffered by
leadership development lend itself to doing identity
work, to raising awareness about the ideological, the
ethical and the moral currency of the organization
and to co-determining less orthodox, more creative
ways of leading?
This paper has shown that employing discourse
to examine leadership development will lead to
ambivalence, with many loose ends and paradoxical
conclusions. This comes as no surprise as, taken
to their extremes, the discourses discussed above
are ontologically incommensurable. However, the
authors assertion is that, rather than theorizing, prac-
tising and researching within singular discourses, the
consideration of alternative discourses broadens and
deepens understanding of leadership development.
It also provides an opportunity to promote (often
uncomfortable) dialogue and extend the range of
research questions. This, in turn, prompts a range of
innovative approaches that assist those responsible for
(as well as those participating in) leadership develop-
ment to approach their task more imaginatively.
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