This article explores a new approach to researching leadership in organizations through drawing on psychosocial accounts of the lives of managers as leaders. This study of managers’ lives through a critical, psychosocial analysis presents a different account of leadership identities and how these are constructed and how they function in oppressive ways. The analysis concludes that managers are not transcendental and are not homogeneous. Managers construct multiple, competing and ambiguous narratives of the selves. Key to this more critical approach is the contextual location and partiality of accounts of leadership, and the recognition that our sense of selves are not only entwined within the context and the situations in which they are performed, but also within the hegemonic discourses and culturally shaped narrative conventions.
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