Reconciling Critical and Prescriptive Approaches to Public Sector Leadership

Critical approaches to leadership studies are beginning to make their mark on the analysis of and the development of practices within business organisations – but what of public sector organisations? In this paper we will... [ view full abstract ]

Critical approaches to leadership studies are beginning to make their mark on the analysis of and the development of practices within business organisations – but what of public sector organisations? In this paper we will review several of the more of the influential critical leadership approaches and assess their relevance and applicability to public management. In particular, we will highlight inter alia accounts of leadership viewed as intrinsically iconoclastic or ‘destructive’ (Krasikova, Green and LeBreton 2013); a theory of ‘violent innocence’ (Vince and Mazen 2014) or alternatively a reading of contemporary hagiography that resides in CEO biography as morally dubious (Halsall 2015). Alternatively, leadership conceived as an essential technique of the governance (see Esmark 2015) of organisations continues to hold out the promise of positive transformation as well as nailing down the hatches for the everyday operation of all organisational forms, as a perusal of any introductory text would validate (see, for example, Schermerhorn et al 2011). While the taxonomic distinction between critical and prescriptive approaches is at least partially a ‘straw-person’ the putative gulf appears to be broadening and the heightened sophistication of the former a feature of contemporary writing. Yet are they intrinsically dialogic? This paper juxtaposes the powerful and appealing resuscitation of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic undertaken by Harding (2014) with Moore’s (1994) defence of the attentive (if perplexed) public administrator. Following an exposition of both, we argue that while on the one hand these accounts of leadership can be readily juxtaposed, not least by way of critical intent, on the other hand both perpetuate the ‘enduring romance’ of leadership studies (Jackson 2005) by way of their construction of leaders that are not merely ethically fraught, but ontologically challenged and as such intrinsically appealing to our very fallible selves. Further, if we accept that Hardy’s (2014) theory posits a theory of ‘powerlessness of the powerful’ and (as we argue here) that Moore’s theory ought to be construed as the construction of ‘the powerfulness of the (relatively) powerlessness’, the two can be strangely reconciled.