Power of Words: How Do Employee Narratives Shape Our Understanding of Managerial Incompetence?

Abstract

Incompetent leaders are all around us. The notion of managerial incompetence has received some, but insufficient attention from organisational scholars with existing studies treat incompetence either as an inevitability, or as an outcome of senior managers’ deliberate efforts to create that impression. Missing from these accounts is an explanation of how and when employees perceive leadership incompetence, or how employee perceptions might impact an organisation’s functioning. In this research, we build on and extend prior work on employee narratives to specifically examine the narrative construction of leadership incompetence, addressing the research question: what is the process through which employee narratives shape their perceptions and understandings of incompetent leaders and lead to different outcomes? To do so, we used ethnographic methods to study employee narratives at an English hospital’s critical care centre. Our study led to theoretical insights about employees, the perceived incompetence of their managers and the employees’ consequent actions.