Abstract

The study uses a psychoanalytic framework to explore how leadership identities are constructed. It advances the idea that leadership identities are imaginary constructions that invariable fail, reiterating a lack of being. Empirical material consisting of interviews with 15 leaders is used to explore the productive role this lack plays. The study suggests that leadership identities are always already subverted by unconscious desire and therefore less powerful than we might think with regard to imposing structures on others, but also much more powerful than we might think as liberating struggles with leaders’ imaginary selves.

Highlights

  • The idea that leadership is associated with lack is not a new one

  • This leaves one to wonder how such a lacking phenomenon can ever be as popular or, as powerful as both proponents and critics claim it to be. While proponents consider it the panacea of our time, the cure for all that ails us in organizations and beyond (Autry, 2001; Goffee and Jones, 2005), critics advance the idea that leadership discourse is a powerful tool for imposing ideologies and existing power structures on employees (Bowles, 1997; Fletcher, 2004; Ford, 2006; Gemmill and Oakley, 1992; Kallifatides, 2001; Knights and Willmott, 1992; Learmonth, 2005)

  • If we notice and amplify disruptions, as some have suggested (Alvesson and Spicer, 2012), we find through them not that leadership discourse exerts less power than we think (Alvesson and Spicer, 2012) but rather that it is the holes that render leadership identities desirable and impossible to achieve but enjoyable for all who participate in their construction

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Summary

Introduction

The idea that leadership is associated with lack is not a new one. Prior research suggests that leadership lacks meaning and relevance (Barker, 1997; 2001; Dubrin, 2001; Fairhurst, 2007; House and Aditay, 1997; Wright, 1996; Yukl, 1989) and that as a phenomenon leadership, despite or because of its popularity, is much to do about nothing at all (Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2003a;b). I read the narratives several times (Alvesson and Skoldberg, 2000) in view of how meaning may have collapsed and imaginary constructions were ruptured by contradictions, ambiguities, inconsistencies, expressions of seemingly opposing desires (Lacan, 1988b: 306), in short, fundamental lack.

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