Thesis
Posthuman leadership
- Creator
- Rights statement
- Awarding institution
- University of Strathclyde
- Date of award
- 2022
- Thesis identifier
- T16342
- Person Identifier (Local)
- 201365935
- Qualification Level
- Qualification Name
- Department, School or Faculty
- Abstract
- Traditional hierarchies and related ways of working are increasingly being challenged in face-to-face and virtual team environments and calls for alternative process-oriented leadership concepts are increasing. To support organisations in exploring new ways of doing leadership requires a departure from traditional leadership development approaches. Existing concepts oftentimes fail to speak to everyday concerns of practitioners and there is a need to develop more dynamic approaches and methodologies that are better suited to engage with the continuities of leadership practice and leadership development. Leadership-as-Practice is one emerging concept that seeks to re-theorise leadership in ways that reflect its processual dynamics, collective orientation and its appearance in daily, banal routines from which possibilities and direction emerge. This study seeks to remedy the scarcity of empirical research on leadership practice by exploring how appreciative inquiry workshops effected leadership in one face-to-face and one virtual project team, in which team members developed new ways of doing leadership. The results are compared to developments in one face-to-face and one virtual team who did not participate in these workshops. The study radically reconceptualises leadership by adopting an agential realist perspective to move beyond the binary separation of social and material spheres, which encourages a holistic view of how temporality, environments, matter and discourse intermingle and create moments of leadership practice. From this perspective of vibrant materiality, a diffractive research method is developed, which is applied to analyse team meetings throughout the workshop process to explore emerging leadership moments, which produce direction and (re-)define boundaries within the spaces and relationships of the teams. This method is used to trace the temporal unfolding of the material-discursive practice of leadership through its sub-phenomena of producing positions and issues and their material effects. Findings indicate that: (1) the workshops directly facilitated a reconfiguration of boundaries in human-non-human and human-human relationships, which created new capabilities for action and transformed the ways in which leadership was enacted; (2) the transformation of leadership practice was different in face-to-face and virtual teams; (3) the progress that the workshop teams made spread out like waves over space and time and affected relationships and boundaries in the teams not participating in the workshops. This study demonstrates the potential of appreciative inquiry to transform leadership practice in face-to-face and virtual project teams and the analysis shows the potential of using a research philosophy of vibrant materiality and a diffractive research method to study leadership practice.
- Advisor / supervisor
- Simpson, Barbara
- Resource Type
- DOI
Relations
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PDF of thesis T16342 | 2022-10-05 | Public | Download |