Taking the (Heroic) Leader Out of Leadership. The In Situ Practice of Distributed Leadership in Decision-Making Talk

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in distributed approaches to leadership which place the emphasis on team processes rather than harping back to heroic notions of leadership with the leader , usually the hierarchic superior, influencing his/her followers to pursue the goals that he/she sets. Yet, despite this upsurge of interest in distributed leadership , there have been few empirical studies that have attempted to show distributed leadership as in situ practice. Using transcripts of naturally occurring talk taken from a decision-making episode during a meeting in a training organisation and taking a constructionist approach to identity , in which leaders and followers are considered to be professional identities that are talked-into-being, this paper seeks to provide a fine-grained analysis of sequences of talk through which such identities are constructed. Findings indicate that a monolithic dichotomy of leaders and followers is difficult to sustain and that, rather than focussing on the entities of leader and follower, a relational and processual approach to leadership, in which incumbency of leader and follower identities can shift on a turn-by-turn basis, is more able to catch the doing of leadership in flight.