Emerging leadership : a study of leadership thinking and its implications for business leadership and practice in the 21st century

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT:This study seeks to demonstrate the impact of late 20th century leadership literature,which is taken as the accepted embodiment of leadership thinking. Leadership thinkinginfluences both the academic study and resultant practice of leadership. A paradigmaticapproach was employed to contrast that the demands of a post-industrial, globalisedsociety would be of a different order to those of the 20th century industrial society. Thestudy seeks to challenge the intellectual climate of the business leadership discipline atthe level of the normative, which in turn would present a challenge to the conventionalstrategic focus and approach of business leadership.A challenge to the normative requires that a certain philosophical perspective beintroduced in the crossing of the boundary lines between various disciplines. As businessis part of the social sciences, the critical intellectual challenges to modern knowledgewere explored, which provided a foundation for the challenge. This required that newscientific theory, both in the pure and the natural sciences as well as certain postmodernauthors representing the humanities be reviewed. A refocusing on what has been takenfor granted, what has been neglected, regions of resistance, the forgotten, theirrational, the repressed, the borderline, the classical, the sacred, the marginal and theexcluded signifies .. The question is asked if we are able to recognise the ways in whichour lives and livelihood have been influenced by outmoded structures?Due cognisance is not taken of the unsettling shifts of mindset that will be required toexercise leadership in the post-industrial paradigm. The concept of paradigms is centralto this study where it operates' as the methodology device, given that the nature of theresearch is exploratory, open-ended and hermeneutic compared to the mensuralconvention that most business research follows. The study explores the paradigmdependency of leadership, as a sociological frame of reference, where leadership isviewed as a patterned social action and a political/structural action, so that leadership isanalysed as a socially constructed reality.A key distinction of this study is the major temporal transformation from the industrial tothe post-industrial paradigm, where post-industrial is of a magnitude far greater thaninformation technology advances. The current populist interpretation is e-commerce, theInternet and genetic engineering. The notion of the 'Limits of the Model', representingthe breakdown of the industrial paradigm, occurs when the paradigm is being pushedtoo far. The significance of this breakdown for leadership, is that leadership vision andpurpose must take its cue from an external frame of reference, which is categorised as aparadigm of the 'sociological' region, The crisis of leadership is bound to theirsociological understanding situated within a network of culturally shared knowledge,beliefs, ideals and taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature of industrial life.Three distinct crises of leadership are identified and they combine to form a majorexistential crisis which embodies the struggle of the individual to find purpose andmeaning in working life.The study provides a different concept and criteria for vision which requires thatcorporate vision would have to travel beyond the rational dimension that dominatesleadership thinking today and enter into the realm of the metaphysic. Corporate visionwould become a 'force-field', defined by organisation culture, In order to escape fromthe cultural obsolescence that surrounds most organisations today, leadership has tobecome a process that entails the capacity to create a new story about what is to bestruggled against and dreamed about. The leaders' stories would become areconceptualisation of the purpose of life which the post-industrial paradigm willdemand. Vision and purpose would be grounded in legitimacy, sustainability and ethics,creating a question mark around the organisation's current fitness for purpose.The constructs of a 'quantum worldview provide a challenge to every boundary thatleadership has tended to operate by and with. These constructs promote disorder,relationship as the basis of all definition, information as the primal creative force (andnot capital and labour) and sustainability based on meeting future generations' needs.Leadership becomes a set of principles governed by a hierarchy of imagination, ideasleadership. Leadership as stewardship on a more evolved plane of value promotes anecologicalliteracy, based on the notion of the living planet. The living planet operates asa platform of supposition which dictates that ethics will become the enablingdependency for leadership in the 21st century. This reconceptualisation of leadership isone that highlights a communal relationship, based on mutual purpose which requirestrue community, or a second-order level of communalism. Most business initiative todayis focussed on pseudo or chaos stages of community, which does not support an ethicaldimension in either purpose, strategy or operation. Ecology as an eco-philosophy goeshand in hand with the idea of spirit as an animating principle. The potential contributionof Africa with its rich cultural heritage of community through the ages, as well as thePlatonic archetype of Philosopher-Ruler to enable the magnitude of the shift to beaddressed is the hermeneutic yield of the study. The ecology metaphor of the postindustrialparadigm is a fertile source of potential and possible hypotheses that can beexplored in the identification and reformulation of the sociological paradigm necessaryto move leadership research forward.The result is a much broader, more societal 'picture' of 21st century business leadership,where globalisation is recast in a set of global ethics and global accountability, whichbusiness and its leadership has to come to terms with. The 'recasting' of businessleadership promotes a different ontology where an overarching communitarianapproach, will become the 'ground' for leadership and business models, strategies andevaluation for the foreseeable future.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University