Leader Centric Versus Leader Relational

Abstract

This chapter explores the presence of two distinctive sociological perspectives regarding educational leadership which are often portrayed as a binary or a dualism. On one side is the historical and dominant view known as “leader centric.” The other side has been called “leader relational” or constructivist (Eacott S, Evers CW, New directions in educational leadership theory. Routledge, New York, 2016; Offermann LR, Relational leadership: creating effective leadership with diverse staff. In: Uhl-Bien M, Ospina SM (eds) Advancing relational leadership research: a dialogue among perspectives. Information Age Publishing, Charlotte, pp 361–380, 2012). Intellectual practitioners and some academic leaders sometimes speak of these differences as sharply at odds with one another, even intractable.For example, Emirbayer (1997) saw the intellectual divide as rational-actor and norm-based models, diverse holisms and structuralisms, and statistical ‘variable’ analyses—all of them beholden to the idea that it is entities that come first and relations among them only subsequently—hold sway throughout much of the discipline. But increasingly, researchers are searching for viable analytic alternatives, approaches that reverse these basic assumptions and depict social reality instead in dynamic, continuous, and processual terms. (p. 281) Ospina and Uhl-Bien (2012) observed that “learning and sharing across perspectives is still rare in the leadership field as a whole” (p. 8). This chapter highlights the conceptual and ontological differences in the traditional mainstream views and theories in leadership compared to what is called critical leadership studies (CLS) and it also acknowledges that “premature paradigmatic closure in the field has privileged the entity perspective as ‘the legitimate’ type of leadership scholarship” (Ospina SM, Uhl-Bien M, Introduction – mapping the terrain: convergence and divergence around relational leadership. In: Uhl-Bien M, Ospina SM (eds) Advancing relational leadership research: a dialogue among perspectives. Information Age Publishing, Charlotte, pp xix–xivii, 2012, p. 9).Finally, the research of Michael Mann (2003) and his sociological work on social power within the critical leadership studies field is advanced as a theoretical bridge which connects the two rival perspectives and argues that they occupy a common ontology and two points on a single continuum instead of being considered as incommensurate theories.KeywordsLeader centricLeader relationalThe unschooled mindMyth of individual achievementEntitismTheory movementMyth of individual achievementCritical leadership studiesTheory of social powerRank societiesSocial stratificationCivilizationThe social cageCoercive power