‘Free to Do What I Want’? Exploring the ambivalent effects of liberating leadership

Abstract

This study examines the phenomenon of ‘liberating leadership’, an emerging trend promising self-mastery and collective unity, resonating with the literature on post-heroic leadership. We evaluate the claims of liberating leadership from a psychodynamic perspective, using a Lacanian approach. We examine how post-heroic forms of leadership reconfigure symbolic and imaginary aspects of follower identification, with ambivalent effects. Drawing empirically on the case of a Belgian banking department, we trace how a ‘liberating’ leader was able to garner intense psychological attachment among followers, accompanied by the ‘dark sides’ of personal exhaustion and breakdown, normative pressure to be overly happy, and the scapegoating of contrarian managers representing symbolic prohibition.

Workers' Rites: Ritual Mediations and the Tensions of New Management

“…These diverse expressions of new management are symptomatic of a ‘new spirit of capitalism’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005) that emphasizes cultural participation, self‐development and employee expression. Scholars have struggled to understand how new management ideology, in its different forms, shapes organizational domination, mobilizing discourses of positivity and well‐being to give cover to new forms of control (Cederström and Spicer, 2015; Fleming and Sturdy, 2011; Picard and Islam, 2020). Such controls extend beyond traditional bureaucratic forms (see Morris et al, 2016; Reed, 2011) and are referred to as ‘neo‐normative’ because of their displacement of normative demands onto the subjective desires of employees (Fleming and Sturdy, 2011).…”

“…Such scholarship, caught between critiquing neo‐normative control and recognizing (sometimes begrudgingly) its emancipatory potentials, led researchers to interrogate how participants themselves experience and enact the tensions of new management (e.g., Endrissat et al, 2015). This ‘sociology of critique’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005) approach uses empirical work to explore the ambivalences (Picard and Islam, 2020), tensions (Callaghan and Thompson, 2002; Kinnie et al, 2000) and contradictions (Deery et al, 2002) of new management in practice.…”

Affective Control in New Collaborative Work: Communal Fantasies of Purpose, Growth and Belonging

“…By tracing the emergence of a communal Other, we advance current Lacanian theorizing on organizational control in new work settings that has so far focused on how the big Other of the hierarchical manager is undermined by ‘seductive discourses of love, harmony and completeness’ (Costas & Taheri, 2012, p. 1208). Our study highlights that collaborative work has at least partially moved on from a naïve celebration of ‘positive’ leadership practices that simply obliterate traditional symbolic authority and, therefore, seduce people into even stronger and more enticing fantasies of wholeness (Picard & Islam, 2020). While we identified three interrelated subconscious fantasies that projected (unreachable) communal wholeness into an imaginary future, our findings suggest that people are not necessarily trapped in them.…”

“…While various studies (e.g. Costas & Taheri, 2012; Ekman, 2013; Picard & Islam, 2020) have applied a Lacanian framework to investigate control dynamics of non-traditional leadership and post-heroic management practices (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2016), we propose a Lacanian perspective to study the re-emerging trend of working collaboratively. In doing so, we pay particular attention to how affect-laden fantasies of community involvement underpin collaborative work.…”

Elusive Domination and the Fate of Critique in Neo-participative Management: A French Pragmatist Approach

“…Against understandings of domination based on acceptance of the status quo and reproduction of sameness, as conveyed by organization studies drawing on Gramscian or Bourdieusian perspectives, we propose change as the normative base of managerial domination, encapsulated in recent trends of ‘less-hierarchical organizing’ (Lee & Edmondson, 2017), such as holacracies (Robertson, 2015) and other heavily decentralized and de-bureaucratized experiments (Getz, 2009; Laloux, 2014). These organizational forms, which we classify as falling under the umbrella of neo-participative management, celebrate worker autonomy and the decentralization of authority (Hamel, 2011; Hirschhorn, 1998; Lee & Edmondson, 2017; Picard & Islam, 2019). Job titles are replaced with (supposed) consensual decision-making based on decentralized working, whereby workers are expected to act entrepreneurially in their specialized area.…”