 RESEARCH AT CRANFIELD SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT
RESEARCH SUMMARY
LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT: CRISIS, OPPORTUNITIES AND THE LEADERSHIP
CONCEPT
Kim Turnbull James
Professor of Executive Learning
leadership
and automatically
compareheld
their
There is a need to move beyond thinking about
leadership
as set of individually
competencies and on to seeing it as a shared
conceptof
built
on common
assumptions.
experience
leadership
as practiced
with
For organizations in crisis, effective leadership
is critical to survival. Simply repeating past
good practice may not work as that very
practice could have landed the organization in
difficulty. Crises demand a context driven
approach to leadership yet this has been
largely ignored by the leadership development
literature. Instead, the field is dominated by
competency frameworks espousing the “great
person” theory while paying scant attention to
the emotional, relational and moral subtleties
of leadership. This paper argues instead for a
focus on how assumptions about leadership
made by organizations, and the people in
them, strongly influence how it is perceived
and evaluated. These unconscious and
collective assumptions should then inform
leadership development and in turn be
renewed through the leadership development
process.
The authors describe leadership as something
that is socially constructed and sitting in the
‘eye of the beholder’. It rests on the idea that
people carry with them a mental image of
their own picture. Equally, their picture can be
influenced by memories of, and interactions
with, past leaders. If these experiences have
been shared with others they can produce
concepts of leadership that are held in
common. Cultural archetypes, myths and
stories can add to this resulting in a socially
held concept of what leadership should look
like.
When people come together in an
organization two things are happening. Firstly,
organizations tend to attract people who share
similar values and culture. Secondly,
perceptions of leadership become socialised
as people move towards a merged mental
picture of it. This results in organizations
having assumptions about leadership
embedded in their culture.
In the event of a “crisis”, and “crisis” here
means a significant change such as a merger
or shift in strategic direction, the organization’s
normal expectations of leadership are likely to
be activated. But the change can result in new
RESEARCH AT CRANFIELD SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT
ways of doing things and this can challenge
the assumptions held by organizational
members in dealing with one another leaving
people having to make sense of, and re-frame,
what is happening to them. In response to this
the authors assert that, rather than reinforcing
leadership as practiced, these new
uncertainties should trigger leadership
development. Key to this would be a
conversational process, described elsewhere
as “sensemaking”, through which the
organization evaluates, and possibly renews,
its leadership concept.
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For the practitioner this means moving beyond
thinking about leadership as set of individually
held competencies and on to seeing it as a
shared concept built on common assumptions.
Awareness of these assumptions, and being
willing to change them, could enable an
organization to emerge successfully from a
period of instability with a renewed
understanding of leadership.
Probert, J., & Turnbull James, K. (2011)
Leadership development: Crisis,
opportunities and the leadership concept,
Leadership, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 137-150.
For further details on this research paper
please contact: k.james@cranfield.ac.uk
Management Theme: Leadership
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