Resistance leadership: The overlooked potential in critical organization and leadership studies

TLDR

Leadership studies rarely engage with critical scholarship, leaving the role of leadership in resisting and transforming domination largely unexplored. This article investigates how leadership mobilizes collective resistance in workplaces and why these fields have produced little mutual work. By applying leadership theories and a dialectical perspective, the authors theorize agency, mobilization, influence, and participant attributions to analyze resistance leadership. The study shows that leadership research gains insights into how deep‑structure power shapes leader perceptions and imposes material and symbolic limits on mobilization.

Abstract

This article examines the role of leadership in mobilizing collective resistance in the workplace. Given the scarcity of dialogue between critical scholars and leadership studies, relatively little consideration is given to the role of leadership in resisting and potentially transforming structures of domination. The article describes some of the reasons why these areas of research have produced so little mutual work. We then make the argument that theories of leadership can be useful to the study of resistance by providing a grounded approach to theorizing agency, highlighting the role of mobilization and influence in change, and emphasizing participant attributions. In doing so, leadership studies gain important insights about the influence of deep structure power issues on perceptions of leaders, as well as material and symbolic limits on mobilization. The article adopts a dialectical perspective as a way of understanding issues of resistance leadership, and then discusses how existing literatures, read with this dialectical approach, can be brought to bear on significant questions concerning the practices of resistance leadership.