Leadership and Change Management: Examining Gender, Cultural and ‘Hero Leader’ Stereotypes

Abstract

It can be argued that one important criterion for evaluating leadership is the management of innovation and change. But there are many different ways of accomplishing organisational change and effective leaders select strategies that are sensitive to the specific sociocultural contexts in which they are operating. Conceptualised within a social realist framework, this chapter examines the way leadership is discursively constructed in workplace meetings, with specific consideration of how each of three leaders responds to the challenge of managing innovation and change in their particular workplace environment. The three case studies provide material which facilitates consideration of ways in which society-wide gender and culture stereotypes interact with traditional ‘hero leader’ stereotypes (Jackson and Parry, The hero manager: Learning from New Zealand’s top chief executives, Penguin NZ, Auckland, 2001) in specific contexts. The data is drawn from the Wellington Language in the Workplace Corpus, focussing on interviews and recorded meetings in three different New Zealand organisations where the CEO or Managing Director is present, and where there is evidence of forward planning. The analysis focuses on potentially gendered and cultural dimensions of leadership behaviour, and challenges the stereotype of the ‘hero leader’ with evidence of dynamic distributed leadership.