Paradoxes of Power and Leadership

Miguel Pina e Cunha, Stewart R. Clegg, Arménio Rego, Marco Berti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351056649
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

Why do great companies and other organizations fail, sometimes abruptly? Why do admired leaders fall from their organizational pedestals? Why do young and promising managers derail? Why do organizations create and reinforce rules that manifestly damage both them and those that they employ, serve and sustain? Leadership is a much-discussed but ill-defined idea in business and management circles. Analysing and understanding the skills and behaviours exhibited in leadership practice reveal that leaders exhibit paradoxical activities that challenge our understanding of organizations.

In this text, the authors identify leadership behaviours that compete towards business equilibrium: selfish versus selfless, distance versus proximity, consistency versus individuality, enforcing professional standards versus flexibility and control versus autonomy. These paradoxical dilemmas require a reflexive and analytical approach to a subject that is tricky to define. The book explores the paradoxes of power and leadership not as a panacea for solving organizational problems but as a lens through which leadership and power are seen as an exercise in dynamic balance. Read this book as an invitation to the paradoxes of power and leadership that frame organizational life today. Be prepared to find surprises – and some counterintuitive arguments.

Providing a thought-provoking guide to the traits and skills that will help readers to understand and navigate paradoxical leadership behaviour, this reflexive book will be a useful reading for students and scholars of business, management and psychology globally.

1

Leadership and paradox

Neither a morality tale nor a Manichean view

How are we going to get things done if we start asking people to do stuff rather than telling people to do stuff?

(A manager, in Hill, 2020d, p. 12)

Leadership has of late been presented as a morality tale (Pfeffer, 2016a). Morality tales often imagine that the best is possible, with their stories aiding its accomplishment. In these morality tales, leaders are described not only as effective in getting things done but also as people who care about their followers’ development and well-being, who are authentic, build trust, protect the natural environment and promote diversity in the workplace. Given all these requirements, one might be tempted to term it a fairy tale, in comparison to the harsh reality of practice. Few would contest the importance of these claims and the need for positive leadership while many would find that the exigencies of situations make expendable the piety of these tales.

Positive leadership, where striven for, is paradoxical in the sense that being positive is not necessarily being personable, agreeable or doing things that will benefit others (Cunha, Rego, Simpson & Clegg, 2020). Positive leadership is difficult because it entails a paradoxical relational competence. The discrepancy between what leaders are supposed to do in positive prescription and what they actually do (or have to do wisely, considering the specific circumstances in which they operate; Ardelt et al. 2013; Grossman, 2017) in harried practice can be a yawning chasm. Pfeffer (2021) explains that the framing of leadership as a moral endeavour constitutes an oversimplification of the dilemmas faced by leaders. An essay on the 500th anniversary of the writing of Machiavelli’s The Prince (Scott & Zaretsky, 2013) reminded us once more that, so long after Machiavelli coined his advice, it remains sometimes necessary to do bad things to achieve good results, that winning and keeping power implies political savoir faire (Pfeffer, 2016a), and that naïve leadership can never be great leadership. Machiavelli did not urge evil for the sake of being evil. As a citizen of Medici Florence, he was well aware of the infinite capacity for intrigue, treachery and deceit that rulers could provide. In modern organizational theory parlance, his view of leadership would be that it was contingency based: leaders do Whatever it takes (Richardson, 1994), depending on the situation. Modern leadership theory reflects this view inasmuch as it imagines that effective leaders display complex combinations of styles, instead of consistently displaying a singular style (Goleman, 2000). The mix of styles includes support as well as command, care as well as a measure of fear. As Kramer (2006) observed, some respected leaders are great intimidators; moreover, some feared leaders are greatly respected for the terror that they can produce.

There is a Manichean view of leadership, often transmitted by Hollywood movies, perhaps none better than Patton: Lust for Glory (Schaffner, 1970). But even Patton-the-Hero conflicted with Patton-the-Administrator (see Spillane & Joullié, 2015). It seems that, as Burns (1978, pp. 38–39) remarks, “leadership is … grounded in a seedbed of conflict. Conflict is intrinsically compelling; it galvanizes, prods, motivates people … Leaders do not shun conflict; they confront it, exploit it, and ultimately embody it”. In this book we aim to discuss leadership not as a Manichean act in which leaders embody an individualistic good, but as a complex, nuanced and paradoxical relational process. We argue that leaders should strive to be virtuous but neither be moralizers nor tyrants. If the reader wants morality tales, they should go to church or read the gospels of management’s best practice. There are such tales aplenty and tellers hungry for an audience. As for tyranny, it has no place in a decent civil society, albeit there are many leaders for whom that lesson would be timely. Virtue is a balancing act deployed by those leading to persuade others to do what needs to be done; virtuous leading is an exercise in balancing opposing demands (Rego, Cunha & Clegg, 2012). From this perspective, even leading as if one was a servant leader serves to preserve and reinforce one’s power position by posing as a steward of collective interests. The strong can sometimes pose as servant of the weak, while indeed being in control of their lives, as illustrated in the Harold Pinter–scripted and Joseph Losey–directed movie classic, The Servant (Losey, 1963).

There is thus a paradox to power relations, which derives from a duality that it is intrinsic in the concept of power (Clegg & Haugaard, 2009). Power can be understood as the capacity to enforce one’s will over others, a form of oppression and control exercised through manipulation, coercion, domination, and constraint. At the same time, it can be seen as the ability to achieve something in concert with others (Arendt, 1970), highlighting the positive, generative aspects of enabling, supporting, and facilitating collective action. The former aspect has been labelled as power-over, the latter power-to (Gőhler, 2009). In organizational leadership, the relationship between power-to and power-over becomes paradoxical. Achieving complex, collective objectives requires individual drive and initiative but also alignment of behaviours. Thus, it both calls for individual empowerment and for control and direction. It is not possible to harness the generative, enabling and transformative potential of power-over, without invoking the oppressive.

Implications of power-to

If a leader had to exercise power in imperative command backed by the threat of sanction for non-compliance, this demonstrates not a leader’s strength but their essential weakness – even though decisive command may be expected in moments of crisis or danger (Grint, 2020; see Chapter 5 on how the US Navy SEALs oscillate between leadership, management and command; see also Box 1.1). Far stronger is the leader that is able to have others do what is desired without any effort in exercising power at all. Hence, the paradox is that the leader that does leadership least explicitly and least overtly through the exercise of power is not demonstrating weakness so much as strength.

Box 1.1 Excerpts from “Extreme ownership: how U.S. Navy SEALs lead and win”, authored by a retired Navy SEAL officer (Willink) and a former Navy SEAL officer (Babin)¹

Just as discipline and freedom are opposing forces that must be balanced, leadership requires finding the equilibrium in the dichotomy of many seemingly contradictory qualities, between one extreme and another. The simple recognition of this is one of the most powerful tools a leader has. With this in mind, a leader can more easily balance the opposing forces and lead with maximum effectiveness.

A leader must lead but also be ready to follow. (…) A leader must be aggressive but not overbearing. (…) A leader must be calm but not robotic. (…) Of course, a leader must be confident but never cocky. (…) A leader must be brave but not foolhardy. (…) Leaders must have a competitive spirit but also be gracious losers. (…) A leader must be attentive to details but not obsessed by them. (…) A leader must be strong but likewise have endurance, not only physically but mentally. (…) Leaders must be humble but not passive; quiet but not silent. (…) A leader must be close with subordinates but not too close. (…) A leader must exercise Extreme Ownership. Simultaneously, that leader must employ Decentralized Command by giving control to subordinate leaders. Finally, a leader has nothing to prove but everything to prove.

The paradox approach to leadership and to management, in general, is becoming mainstream. Yet, it was not always so. When, with their bestselling book In Search of Excellence, consultants Peters and Waterman popularized the idea that organizations needed to have “loose-tight” structures, academics received the idea with scepticism. As Oswick, Keenoy and Grant (2002, p. 300) observed: “How could HRM policy and practice be both hard and soft, and how could an organizational structure be both loose and tight at the same time?” Traditional management expressed a tendency to overemphasize the tight, rational, serious, linear and the sequential rather than the loose, emotional, playful, non-linear and circular. As Weick and Quinn (1999) put it, change never starts because it never stops, meaning that organizing is a circular process, marked by interdependence and circular causality, rather than by linear progression.

Social scientists that suffer from “physics envy” (Flyvbjerg, 2001, p. 1) have, for a long time, searched for unidirectional causality, the case in which an independent variable X causes change in a dependent variable Y. The holy grail of positivism is searched for without success or cessation. The Holy Grail belongs to mythology and so does the methodology of positivism as it strives to arrest time and motion, becoming and its histories, in an elaborate metaphysic of cross-sectional causality. It is increasingly recognized, however, that the social world, much as the natural world, is based on interaction and inter-dependence (Capra, 1991), circular causality being abundant (Bateson, 1972). Circular nature is itself paradoxical: if organizing exhibits circular qualities, can an organization, over time, ever be the same thing? Perhaps an organization is similar to Parmenides’ river, never stepped into as the same river in the same way on repeated occasions?

Going back to Peters and Waterman (Box 1.2), Oswick et al. (2002) observed that it was not without irony that, being practice-based, their observations contributed to the diffusion of the idea of organizations as paradoxical. The proximity of these McKinsey consultants to organizational phenomena (Ployhart & Bartunek, 2019) was probably critical in the intuition that when one approaches organizational phenomena for theory-building purposes, chances are one will struggle with tensions and contradictions. As a corollary, it seems possible to hypothesize that the only place where managing and organizing do not involve a measure of tension and contradiction is in organization theories rather than in organizational phenomena.

Box 1.2 Key (and controversial) thinkers: Peters and Waterman

The enfant terrible

Tom Peters and Robert Waterman are former consultants and authors of the best-selling book In Search of Excellence. Published in 1982, the book had a tremendous impact by defending a shared culture as the secret ingredient of excellent companies. Tom Peters subsequently became the enfant terrible of management, which perhaps devalued the contribution of this book. The fact is that on top of urging leaders to pay attention to their organizations’ culture, albeit in a shallow conception of culture as a singular and top-down driven phenomenon, the book noted the importance of what the authors dubbed tight-loose cultures, drawing attention to paradox before the theme became mainstream in academia. Ployhart and Bartunek (2019) subsequently affirmed the importance of studying management based on real world phenomena rather than only framing that reality through theories determining the structure of that reality. The importance of the tight and loose dimensions of culture is still relevant today, attested in recent work such as Gelfand’s (2019) on the tension between rule making and rule breaking, and the description of Solinger, Jansen and Cornelissen (2020) of great leaders as able to conserve and change their organization’s moral rules.

Suggestion for reading: the enfant terrible’s confessions

To get a better understanding of why Tom Peters has been considered the enfant terrible, read his “True confessions” published in Fast Company magazine, when celebrating the 20th anniversary of “In Search of Excellence”.² Here are some of his “confessions”: “Of course, there’s an official way that I tell the story ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the authors
• Glossary
• Introduction
• 1 Leadership and paradox
• 2 Paradoxes of self-leadership
• 3 Paradoxes of dyadic relationships
• 4 Paradoxes of team dynamics
• 5 Paradoxes at organizational level
• 6 Recurring paradoxes and ten lines of action
• References
• Index