Abstract
How can leadership result in dysfunctional and toxic consequences at work? How are leaders imbued simultaneously with emotionality and rationality? How do they concurrently act in ideal and flawed ways? Jeanette Lemmergaard and Sara Louise Muhr gather together a fascinating set of essays that attend to these questions in their edited book, Critical Perspectives on Leadership: Emotion, Toxicity, and Dysfunction, published as the 12th volume of Edward Elgar’s New Horizons in Leadership Studies book series. Although research on emotions at work is one of the fastest research growing areas in leadership and organizational behavior (Ashkanasy and Cooper, 2008; Rehn and Lindahl, 2011), this book provides a major step forward in terms of examining how leadership toxicity and dysfunctionality influence organizational life—in ways that are not just negatively repressive but also can be productive, nurturing, and enabling.
The book is divided into three sections, the first, authored by the editors, synthesizes research related to moods, feelings, and emotions as related to leadership. Their essay provides a persuasive rationale for the book, suggesting that many supposedly successful leaders are incompetent, narcissistic, uncivil, and emotionally toxic.
Part 2 of the book consists of five empirical case studies—most of them making use of field and interview data—exploring emotions, toxicity, and dysfunction in leadership. Michael Walton discusses how power can blind leaders to their own problematic behavior. Lemmergaard and Howard present a case study of leadership succession illustrating the importance of context for determining preferred leadership style and how considering personality type can help people tolerate undesired emotive styles from others. Emma L. Jeanes shows the dark side of a patriarchal leader who moves between the roles of father-figure, naughty boy, and victim in a family-owned business. In a study of high-tech sector engineers and managers, Schaefer and Paulsson suggest that the co-presence of negative emotions and positive emotions interact, like a roller coaster ride, to impact organizational innovation. Finally, Yvonne Due Billing, in a chapter aptly named, ‘Happily Working Until They Drop’, demonstrates how employee autonomy can lead to self-entrapment, resulting in burnout.
The third part of the book offers critical theoretical reflections. Nathan Harter, inspired by Socrates, demonstrates the folly of leaders who suppress criticism. Sverre Spoelstra historically traces how the ‘business’ and profit-making component of leadership has increasingly been replaced by moral and amorphous aspects of leadership (such as charisma and transformation) that are almost impossible to measure. Mats Alvesson and André Spicer suggest that leadership is largely about narrowing focus and reducing the cognitive load on followers, in essence stupefying and subordinating them. Furthermore, they argue that the activities of leadership consultants are often simply grandiose motions that have little organizational power or impact. Finally, Alf Rehn shows how vanity, although once considered immoral and inappropriate, may now be a requisite quality for leadership, especially in a world that increasingly rewards self-branding and high Internet Klout scores.
Several aspects of the book are particularly noteworthy. First, the editors do a fine job of not just introducing each of the book sections, but providing smart, original, and valuable syntheses of the material within. Second, the book points out a number of counterintuitive and sometimes paradoxical aspects about leadership in organizational life, for example, that negative emotions can lead to innovation, that positive emotions like optimism can suppress attention to crucial environmental warnings, that employee autonomy may lead to less freedom, that the people most exalted in the business leadership industry (e.g. Gandhi, Mother Theresa) are not business people, that leadership might cause stupidity, and that this stupidity can create valued organizational outcomes. Third, over and over, we are reminded that no single leadership style is preferential; the context is decisive, and the best organizational teams are made up of members with a variety of skills and attributes. Perhaps most importantly, the book shows how many supervisors do not engage in behaviors typically associated with leadership. An overall theme of the book is that organizational power can corrupt, stupefy, and strangle the self and others.
I also have some lingering questions and limited critiques of the book. The essay contributions could have valuably been more geographically dispersed as well as included voices from those in the field of organizational communication who study critical approaches to leadership (Zoller and Fairhurst, 2007) and bullying behaviors by supervisors (Lutgen-Sandvik, 2013). Second, the pragmatic side of me was sometimes left scratching my head, asking whether I was any better a leader for reading this book and wishing the authors had spelled out clearer pathways for potential transformation. At the same time, the book is clearly framed as critical in nature, ‘not meant to inspire managers with good news fables’ (p. 172) and ‘not entering the debate to solve puzzles, but to raise awareness and critical thinking’ (p. 151). Finally, I felt the book could have done a better job of differentiating the conceptualization of leader versus leadership. Spoelstra, for instance, suggested that ‘leaders are leaders because they have followers’ (p. 171), and this framing focuses on leadership as a role rather than as an ongoing process and activity. Indeed, the title of the volume might have more accurately been, Critical Perspectives on So-Called Leaders, as the majority of the chapters focused, first, on people who held hierarchically powerful roles and then, second, studied or reflected on their toxic activities. It’s unclear, though, whether these behaviors equate with leadership.
All in all, I very much enjoyed and learned from this book, and believe it could be useful to students and scholars interested in topics of leadership, emotion, and critical organizational studies. The essays within Lemmergaard and Muhr’s volume review the latest scholarly literature, provide helpful recommendations for future research, and point out intriguing paradoxes that characterize the toxic and problematic aspects of leadership in organizational life.