University of Tasmania, Australia

In this UTAS Open Day public lecture, Professor Jeff Malpas argues that the prevalent idea of leadership in Australian society involves a problematic conception equating leadership with the exercise of power. This form of leadership is shown to be antithetical to genuine ethical conduct and also to the real essence of leadership when properly understood.

Text from slideshow:

The Challenge of Minority Government

What is politics if not the practice of negotiation in the face of a multiplicity of interests and opinions concerning the public ordering of our lives? Thus minority government merely brings to the fore the essentially negotiatory character of politics as such.

So why the concern over minority government?

Because politics is increasingly seen not as a practice of negotiation but as the operation of control or the attempt to gain control –politics as negotiation, with the power sharing that it requires, has become something to be avoided and even feared.

Leadership and the Desire for Control

Fear of minority government is connected with a conception of leadership that has become dominant in contemporary organisations

Leadership is understood as:

• The capacity to exercise power and influence on the part of individuals and organisations
• Part of a rhetorical and motivational structure designed to ensure compliance and control

Contemporary leadership is also closely tied to an increasing individualisation in contemporary culture.

Case Study: Leadership in UK Supermarkets

Conclusion from a 2010 study of UK supermarket management and organisational practices:

Leadership appeared to be a euphemism for the demand that managers mobilise their personal physical, emotional and social resources to make up for the discrepancies between targets and resources and be ardent pursuers of the employer’s end of the wage-effort bargain – Irena Grugulis, Ödül Bozkurt and Jeremy Clegg, “‘No place to hide’? The realities of leadership in UK supermarkets”, SKOPE Research Paper No. 91 May 2010.

Mintzberg: ‘Communityship’ not Leadership

Henry Mintzberg, Financial Times, October 2006:

We have this obsession with ‘leadership’. Its intention may to be to empower people, but its effect is often to disempower them. By focusing on the single person, even in the context of others, leadership becomes part of the syndrome of individuality that is sweeping the world and undermining organisations in particular and communities in general.

Isn’t it time to think of our organisations as communities of cooperation, and in so doing put leadership in its place: not gone, but alongside other important social processes … This obsession with leadership is the cause of many of the world’s problems. And with this, let us get rid of the cult of leadership, striking at least one blow at our increasing obsession with individuality.

Leadership in the Public Sphere

Leadership tied to a culture of control and compliance:

• Increased internal control over government and public sector organisations
• ncreased external control over public debate and opinion

Working through a range of mechanisms:

• Politicisation of public and state services; the rise of the political ‘advisor’; increased emphasis on audit and localised accountability
• Identification of the public interest with governmental interest
• Reliance on ‘spin’; obsession with media management; denigration of expertise; and dominance of mere ‘opinion’
• ‘Pragmatic’ conception of policy tied to electoral interest and driven by reliance on focus groups and polls
• Leadership and individualisation
• Individualisation does not relate merely to the focus on the individual leader
• Individualisation amounts to a narrowing down of identity and interest to the smallest possible compass (usually individual self-interest)
• Individualisation occurs through:
  • Use of competitive systems that emphasise individual performance and reward
  • Use of individual contract and performance management as basis for organisational relationships (the dominance of ‘agency theory’)
  • Use of audit and assurance systems that require individual conformity even while they undermine the capacity for judgment

Leadership and the Demise of Ethics

• Ethics is based in our relatedness: it concerns the establishment and maintenance of our relations to self, others, and world
• Individualisation, whether through loss of control and disempowerment or through excessive empowerment and control, is almost always associated with a corrosion in ethical practice and commitment – the more we are apart from others the more we lose touch with ethics.
• The contemporary cult of leadership and its associated systems is contributing to a loss in genuine ethical sensibility in organisational and public life – and more broadly?
• Leadership and ethical leadership
• Genuine leadership as not apart from ethics, but integrally connected with it – the mere exercise of power is not leadership
• The willingness to relinquish control is a condition of leadership itself – leadership thus requires a willingness to trust andrespect others, and thereby enable others to have trust in and respect for the one who leads

Ethical Leadership and Minority Government

• Minority government requires a willingness to share power and to relinquish a degree of control, and so should be seen as bringing attention back to the underlying ethical foundations on which good government, and all forms of human activity, essentially depend
• The difficulties of minority government stem from certain deep-seated flaws in our contemporary modes of politics and forms of organisation rather than from minority government as such