Identifying discursive resources for pluralising leadership: Looping chief executive officers and the frontline across hierarchy

Abstract

The promise of leadership being spread across levels and parts of an organisation beckons scholars and practitioners alike, yet the theory and practice of it remains partial and elusive. We show how cross-hierarchical leadership understanding and practice might be better embedded in organisations through discursive resources with the potential to connect groups, even temporarily, across asymmetrical power relations. Our study empirically draws on a rare leadership development workshop bringing together chief executives and frontline leadership to explore the complexities of leadership in a health and safety context. This inquiry draws iteratively between workshop interactions and subsequent interviewing of those present to identify discursive resources firstly hindering and secondly contributing to moments of pluralising and spreading leadership. Whereas frontline leadership drew on discourses of embedding, collaborative and grounding leadership, and chief executives alternatively on analytic, overseeing and cascading discourses, our interest was provoked by the shared discursive resources of reframing identities, constructing intermediaries, overcoming distance, sparking engagement and inviting translation with the potential to loop hierarchy and bring power relations across hierarchical differences into (re)negotiation.