Resistance leadership: The overlooked potential in critical organization and leadership studies

Abstract

This article examines the role of leadership in mobilizing collective resistance in the workplace. Given the scarcity of dialogue between critical scholars and leadership studies, relatively little consideration is given to the role of leadership in resisting and potentially transforming structures of domination. The article describes some of the reasons why these areas of research have produced so little mutual work. We then make the argument that theories of leadership can be useful to the study of resistance by providing a grounded approach to theorizing agency, highlighting the role of mobilization and influence in change, and emphasizing participant attributions. In doing so, leadership studies gain important insights about the influence of deep structure power issues on perceptions of leaders, as well as material and symbolic limits on mobilization. The article adopts a dialectical perspective as a way of understanding issues of resistance leadership, and then discusses how existing literatures, read with this dialectical approach, can be brought to bear on significant questions concerning the practices of resistance leadership.

Critical leadership studies: The case for critical performativity

“…Leadership does not have to be about further reinforcing problematic authority relations, but can also call authority relations into question (Zoller and Fairhurst, 2007). By making managers accountable to espoused leadership ideals, va progressive changes can sometimes be supported.…”

“…In this paper we argue that we need to move beyond naïve celebration or earnest interpretations of leadership. Responding to Zoller and Fairhurst's (2007: 1354) call for 'more dialogue between leadership and critical researchers' by, we developing a critique of leadership. This involves recognising many of the negative consequences implicit in leadership theory and practice that are all too often masked or even wilfully ignored in today's leadership obsessed culture.…”

“…va Leadership may have a role to play in these contexts. After all, some elements of leadership can be pivotal in pursuing the goals of autonomy and emancipation as a collective project (Zoller and Fairhurst, 2007). But at the same time, placing a messianic faith in leaders and leadership needs to be critically addressed.…”

(Still) Up to No Good: Reconfiguring Worker Resistance and Misbehaviour in an Increasingly Unorganized World

“…Studies into the regulation of workplace relations traditionally focused on the institutions of job control, most importantly trade unions and collective bargaining (Zoller and Fairhurst, 2007). Conventions around pluralist industrial relations essentially saw the modification of workplace behaviour through collective bargaining and joint consultation as a process to institutionalize conflict (Flanders, 1970).…”

The EU energy and climate package: a showcase for European environmental leadership?

“…environmental problems ' (deLeon and Varda, 2009, p. 60). Because the focus is further on how leadership is co-constructed by different actors that participate in fi nding solutions to collective environmental problems, leadership is here treated as being 'not about the person in charge but about the way one or more actors engages the community and its mores in collective action' (Zoller andFairhurst, 2007, p. 1339).…”