Abstract
The role of business leadership in defining, and enacting, societal values and providing consolidating influences relative to change processes is increasingly being recognised. This role is best defined as one of “stewardship”, embracing the securing of social, political and economic futures. For business leadership, the increased recognition of the ability for it to influence the trajectory of change, and indeed the expectation that it should do so, brings with it a need to revisit contemporary understandings of leadership and how that leadership is best engaged so as to facilitate desirable outcomes.This paper adopts a critical position relative to the conventional “leader, follower, situation” configurations of leadership thinking. Drawing on theory located within the knowledge domain of systems thinking and network theory, leadership is redefined at a conceptual level, hence to understand the processes by which it is enacted and experienced and how, therefore, it can be better practiced in the broader socio-political domain. Leadership is considered as an emergent phenomenon that creates definitional distinction between actors and process so as to provide new insights.The paper includes outcomes of a research study that was conducted amongst business leadership in South Africa. The study covered the period 1984-1994, a period of considerable large scale change in South Africa, during which time lessons about leadership were learned. These lessons validate the significant potential that business leadership has for monitoring and influence beyond the immediate concerns of business itself. The assumption of the role of “steward” typified much of what emerged from that engagement, but also gave opportunity for reflections about revised theoretical frameworks for leadership practice in the 21st Century. The case material arising from this research also provides demonstration of the appropriateness of the theoretical propositions that form the conceptual basis for the paper.
Highlights
The role of business in society, and the diverse interpretations of that role, has generated much debate
Using an emergent study design conducted from a constructivist perspective (Lincoln & Guba, 1985 & 2005; Lincoln, Lynham, & Guba, 2011) and descriptive phenomenological methodology (Van Manen, 1990), the lived experience of business leadership of a particular group of SA business leaders during the decade preceeding the end of apartheid was studied
The directing research question for this study was: “What was the lived experience of leadership of this particular group of business leaders during the mid1980s to mid-1990s?” In keeping with the inquiry perspective, methodology and subsequent design, participants—business leaders instrumental in the formation and leadership of the Consultative Business Movement (CBM) during the targeted decade—were identified through purposive, snowball sampling (Lincoln & Guba, 1985) and interviewed
Summary
The role of business in society, and the diverse interpretations of that role, has generated much debate. Wood (2005) explains leadership in terms of the processual nature of the “real” – an inter-relatedness that holds and sustains processes best defines the world that, according to his reasoning, is more about “becoming” (or emergence) than it is about “being” (or existence) In this view, leaders, followers, and situation, are convenient constructs that represent the surface elements of an underlying process that relies on relationships, collective sense making and continuous flow to form the real basis for understanding leadership practice. The proposition of this paper is that the process by which business leaders engaged amongst itself and with others during the period 1984-1994 illustrates the claim “...that leadership itself is a system, meaning it consists of interacting, interdependent inputs, processes, outputs, feedback and boundaries” (Lynham, 2000:49) and that this informed their understanding, practice and sense of responsible stewardship. It provided lessons about leadership that departed significantly from the deeply held understandings of business about how responsible leadership should be practiced
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