The interplay of heroic and post-heroic leadership: Exploring tensions in leadership manifestations in the oscillations between onstage and offstage contexts

Post-heroic heroism: Embedded masculinities in media framing of Australian business leadership

“…Similarly, post-heroic leadership is associated with behaviours and characteristics culturally ascribed to women and feminized images and stereotypes. These definitions are often interpreted and presented in literature as dualisms or binary categorizations of leadership (Arnulf et al, 2012; Drysdale et al, 2014; Fulop, 2012; Ryömä, 2020).…”

“…Although post-heroic leadership offers new perspectives to meet evolving expectations and, to a degree, even aligns with the egalitarian notion of ‘mateship’, media representation of post-heroic leadership remains relatively underexplored in an Australian business context. Given the turn to post-heroic leadership in global contemporary leadership debates (Collinson et al, 2018; Ospina et al, 2020; Ryömä, 2020), there is a need to explore the extent to which Australian business media discourse and representations are responding to and engaging with these emerging post-heroic conceptualizations of leadership. In this paper, we explore how Australian business media responds to debates on newer forms of leadership by asking: How is leadership framed in contemporary Australian business media?…”

“…Post-heroic leadership therefore is understood as a conceptualization of leadership associated with feminized attributes (Fletcher, 2004). There is also evidence of post-heroic models of leadership emerging in organizations (Collinson et al, 2018; Ospina et al, 2020; Ryömä, 2020). Media coverage has begun to recognize the call for new forms of leadership, specifically acknowledging loss of public confidence in current leadership and reporting on changing societal expectations (Rimmer and Cosoleto, 2018).…”