REVISITING THE MEANING OF LEADERSHIP

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Abstract

During the past 50 years, organizational scholarship on leadership has shifted from a focus on the significance of leadership for meaning-making to the significance of leadership for economic performance. This shift has been problematic for two reasons. First, it has given rise to numerous conceptual difficulties that now plague the study of leadership. Second, there is now comparatively little attention to the question of how individuals find meaning in the economic sphere even though this question should arguably be one of the most important questions for organizational scholarship. This chapter discusses several reasons for the shift, arguing that one of the most important has been the lack of a clear definition and operationalization of meaningful economic activity. As a first step to redressing this shift, we offer a definition and operationalization of meaningful action, and we propose a typology of executive behaviors as a foundation for a systematic exploration of the meaning-making capacity of leaders. We conclude with a discussion of the relationship between the capacity of leaders to infuse meaning and the capacity of leaders to impact on performance.

Section snippets

INTRODUCTION

Through the 1960s, leading organizational theorists regarded the concept of leadership to be worthy of serious intellectual inquiry. Scholars such as Weber, Barnard and Selznick believed that one could not fully understand what those in organizations believe or how they behave without reference to the presence (or absence) of organizational leaders. Leaders are the source of institutionalized values which, in turn, condition the actions of organizational members. Yet, for at least the past 30

LEADERSHIP AS MEANING-MAKING

The preoccupation of classic social theorists with the meaning-making capacity of leaders can be traced to an even more fundamental concern with the uneasy relationship between the capitalist mode of exchange, on the one hand, and the state of modern lived realities, on the other. Early 19th century scholars, while embracing modernity, also recognized its implications for the human spirit and creativity. They were troubled by the emerging tensions between traditional meaning-making

DECOUPLING THE JOINT FOCUS ON LEADERSHIP AND MEANING

Having underscored that leading organizational scholars identified leadership with meaning-making and having noted these and other scholars’ concern with loss of meaning in modern organizations, we can now return to answering the first of the three questions posed in the introduction: if the concept of leadership was initially couched in terms of its significance for meaning-making, why and when did the concept become decoupled from meaning-making? Our answer is necessarily a speculative

DEFINING MEANINGFUL ACTION IN ORGANIZATIONS

Our earlier review of Weber, Barnard and Selznick provides some indication as to how meaning might be defined; their work suggests that meaningful action is action that is internalized as having significance beyond mere technical efficiency – as being connected to vital aspects of one’s life. However, unless the term “vital” is unpacked, it is not clear that the term has any greater analytical specificity than meaning.

We contend that there are two ways in which the vital aspects of one’s life

OPERATIONALIZING MEANINGFUL ACTION IN ORGANIZATIONS

While we can draw on the German and French traditions for a two-component definition of meaning, in order to provide a concept of leadership as meaning-making that is analytically tractable, we must move beyond a definition and consider the issue of operationalization. We noted earlier our belief that scholarship on leadership moved away from a concern with meaning creation at least in part because meaningful action is so difficult to operationalize.

One could even argue that a concern with

IDENTIFYING THE SCOPE OF LEADERSHIP ACTIVITIES

Having provided some indication as to how meaningful action might be operationalized, we can now turn to the final issue relevant to answering the second question raised at the outset of this chapter: how does one assess the extent to which a leader infuses action with meaning? This final issue involves defining the scope of activities with the potential to impact the meaning that individuals experience as part of an organization, and, within this, identifying those that can be effectively

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MEANING-MAKING AND ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE

We have now made clear our position that many of the problems that have confounded the study of leadership can be addressed if a focus on leadership is decoupled from a focus on economic performance and instead coupled to a focus on meaning-making. However, because so much of the leadership literature currently focuses on the link between leadership and performance, this raises the third question articulated at the outset of the chapter: what is the connection between meaning-making capacity

CONCLUSION

In this chapter, we have argued that leadership research went awry when the concept of leadership became decoupled from the notion of meaning and inextricably tied to a concern with performance. We considered some explanations for why this decoupling took place; there are several, but probably the most important is the lack of clear definition and operationalization of the meaning that individuals derive from work. Through some illustrations and through guidelines derived from the field of

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Rod Kramer, Mike Tushman, Barry Staw and Jeff Pfeffer for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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