Shared leadership : A post-heroic perspective on leadership as a collective construction

Abstract

Within the field of leadership practices, there is an emergent movement towards viewing leadership in terms of collaboration between two or more persons. At the same time, traditional literature on leadership and organization theory has been dominated almost exclusively by the perspective that leadership is something that is exercised by a single person—the idea of unitary command (Pearce & Manz, 2005). This has been challenged by the theoretical perspective of postheroic leadership, of which one practical consequence is to view leadership activities as collective rather than individual. In this paper, we argue that by shifting perspective from viewing leadership as a single-person activity to viewing it as collective construction processes, we will see new patterns in how leadership is exercised in practice. Thematic data from four qualitative case studies of organizations are presented. A discussion towards future research agendas where the articulation and questioning of the foundations of leadership practices and leadership research are central to the development of postheroic leadership ideals concludes the paper. Within the field of leadership practices, there is an emergent movement towards viewing leadership in terms of collaboration between two or more persons. Increasingly, the public debate recognizes states, corporations, and organizations as led by several persons rather than by a single charismatic person, a “Great Man ” (Reicher, Haslam, & Hopkins, 2005, p. 550). What