Abstract
We seek to “bust out” ghost leaders, narrated leader(ship) characters manifesting leadership influence, to discuss the inherent challenges related to leaderless management. By taking the non-corporeal aspect of leadership into account, we challenge the notion of leaderless management—which we argue has turned out to be more of an inspiring and empowering idea rather than a standing practice. We illustrate, with a Finnish high-tech organization, how organizational members narrate leader characters into existence in the non-corporeal realm during an organizational change to fill the void of a corporeal leader. While organizations may declare themselves to be leaderless, they, in fact, are not as such. According to our findings, a certain kind of leader always exists—the non-corporeal ghost leader. Thus, leaderless management is a myth.
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Auvinen, T., Sajasalo, P., Sintonen, T., Takala, T. (2022). Ghostbusters! On the Narrative Creation of (Absent) Leader Characters. In: Hertel, F., Örtenblad, A., Jørgensen, K.M. (eds) Debating Leaderless Management. Palgrave Debates in Business and Management. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04593-6_14
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