A constructivist perspective on leadership thought among Brazilian and North-American scholars

Abstract

This paper presents the results of an exploratory, inductive cataloguing of the views of Brazilian and U.S. academics regarding current leadership theory and development. Semi structured interviews with academics from a variety of institutional settings in Brazil and the U.S. were content analyzed to identify major themes and tendencies across the two countries. Our analyses revealed that neither Brazilian nor U.S. academics adopted the bulk of current formal leadership thought uncritically. Instead, both the Brazilian and North American business education fields adopted theories selectively and formulated idiosyncratic approaches to the field. The U.S. interviewees appeared to vary much more from one another than the Brazilian scholars, whose positions were more critical but more homogeneous overall. There was also considerable variation across the two national settings. We found Bourdieu's practice theory useful in interpreting our results, particularly the concepts of field differentiation and heteronomy, habitus, and cultural capital. Still, much research remains to be done to disentangle the purely historical and cultural factors from the impacts of the social construction of the field of business education in the two countries.

A Reciprocidade entre Estrutura (organizacional) e os Agentes (líderes e liderados): um estudo sobre liderança relacional a partir da teoria da estruturação de Giddens

“…Tanto Giddens (2009) quanto os autores que trabalham com liderança relacional (ABELL; SIMONS, 2000;BRADBURY;LICHTENSTEIN, 2000;HOLMBERG, 2000;UBL-BIEN, 2006;2011;KURUCZ et al, 2016;SMIT;SCHERMAN, 2016, REITZ, 2017) defendem a premissa de que a organização é uma estrutura de relações complexas e contínuas que se modificam ao longo do tempo.…”

Leadership, personal values, and cultural context in Brazil, China, and the USA

“…The research question posed above runs parallel to important themes that have permeated leadership studies. A large amount of the leadership literature and research of the past century can be summarized as belonging to three strands: trait, behavioral or contingency (A. D. S. Sant'Anna, Nelson, Campos, & Leonel, 2010;Yukul, 2006;Zaccaro, 2007). Although recently these three strands have seen efforts at integration and dialogue, they are intellectually distinct, and all three have historically focused their research efforts in the U.S. and Northern Europe.…”

“…Behavioral theories of leadership arose in response to the predominance of trait theories and argued that people of great personal and psychological diversity have successfully played leadership roles, but these diverse people have exhibited common sets of actual behaviors (A. D. S. Sant'Anna et al, 2010;Yukul, 2006). The dominant behaviors in the classic behavioral studies were an emphasis on task and an emphasis on relationship, present in varying mixtures.…”

“…those with direct subordinates, and those without. While it seems clear that those who have secured a position which commands direct subordinates, by definition exercise leadership of some kind, this emergent leadership need be neither effective nor homogenous (A. D. S. Sant'Anna et al, 2010;Druskat & Wheeler, 2003;Kotter, 1990). We thus can make no affirmations that the fairly robust profile of personal values that we associate with managerial incumbency is also related to leader effectiveness.…”