The gift of leadership

Philosophy Today

Volumn 54, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 66-77

  Dunne, Stephen ^a   Spoelstra, Sverre ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LEICESTER   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77951710105     PISSN: 00318256     EISSN: 00318256     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/philtoday201054136     Document Type: Article

References (38)

1. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, trans. Ephraim Fischoff, Hans Gerth, A. M. Henderson, Ferdinand Kolegar, C. Wright Mills, Talcott Parsons, Max Rheinstein, Guenther Roth, Edward Shils and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1121
2. Jean Luc Marion, "On the Gift: A Discussion between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc-Marion, " in John Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, eds., God, the Gift, and Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 63
3. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (London: Verso, 1994), 10
4. Serge Christophe Kolm and Jean Mercier Ythier, eds., Handbook of the Economics of Giving, Altruism and Reciprocity (Amsterdam: North Holland, 2006)
5. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 6-7
6. Weber, Economy and Society, especially 212-307 and 1111-57
7. For an overview of the development of (organizational) leadership studies see: Alan Bryman, Leadership and Organizations (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986)
8. Gary Yukl, "Managerial leadership: A Review of Theory and Research, " Journal of Management 15 (1989):251-89
9. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Routledge, 2002), 3-4
10. Derrida, Given Time, 24
11. Jean-Luc Marion, "Sketch of a Phenomenological Concept of the Gift, " in The Visible and the Revealed, trans. John Conley, S. J., and Danielle Poe (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 81
12. While our discussion in this essay focuses mostly upon Marion's "Sketch of a Phenomenological Concept of the Gift" and Being Given, it should be pointed out that Marion's phenomenology of the gift is unfolded more broadly across a variety of works, principal among them: Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998)
13. Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002)
14. and In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002)
15. Marion, "Sketch of a Phenomenological Concept of the Gift, " 88
16. Marion, "On the Gift, " 65
17. Marion, Being Given, 103
18. For example, Max de Pree writes, in Leadership is an Art (New York, DoubleDay, 2004): "when we think about leaders and the variety of gifts people bring to corporations and institutions, we see that the art of leadership lies in polishing and liberating and enabling those gifts" (10). Similar ideas are offered by proponents of a coaching style of leadership, which has gained much popularity since the late 1980s
19. For an overview, see chapters 4 and 5 by Bernard M. Bass, in Bernard M. Bass and Ralph M. Stogdill, Handbook of Leadership: Theory, Research, and Managerial Applications (New York: The Free Press, 1974)
20. See especially Ralph M. Stogdill, "Personal Factors Associated with Leadership: A Survey of the Literature, " Journal of Psychology 25 (1948):64
21. See, for example, Bernard M. Bass and Paul Steidlmeier, "Ethics, Character, and Authentic Transformational Leadership Behavior, " The Leadership Quarterly 10 (1999):181-217
22. Thomas Maak and Nicola M. Pless, eds., Responsible Leadership (New York: Routledge, 2006)
23. Alan Bryman, "Leadership in Organizations, " in Stewart R. Clegg, Cynthia Hardy, and Walter R. Nord, eds., Handbook of Organization Studies (London: Sage, 1996)
24. Bernard M. Bass, Leadership and Performance Beyond Expectations (New York: Free Press, 1985) introduced transformational leadership into a business context
25. The most comprehensive account of charisma in organizations is Alan Bryman, Charisma and Leadership in Organisation (London: Sage, 1993)
26. Jay A. Conger and Rabindra N. Kanungo, "Toward a Behavioral Theory of Charismatic Leadership in Organizational Settings, " Academy of Management Review 12 (1985):640
27. See also Jay A. Conger and Rabindra N. Kanungo, "Charismatic Leadership Organizations: Perceived Behavioral Attributes and Their Measurement, " Journal of Organizational Behavior 15 (1995):439-52
28. See, for example, Brad Jackson and Ken Parry, A Fairly Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book About Studying Leadership (London: Sage, 2008)
29. Bernard M. Bass, 'Two decades of Research and Development in Transformational Leadership, " European Journal for Work and Organizational Psychology 8 (1999):10
30. Bernard M. Bass and Bruce J. Avolio, Improving Organizational Effectiveness through Transformational Leadership (London: Sage, 1994)
31. Johan Verstraeten, "From Business Ethics to the Vocation of Business Leaders to Humanize the World of Business, " Business Ethics: A European Review 7 (1998):111-24
32. Mats Alvesson and Stefan Sveningsson, in their article "Managers Doing Leadership: The Extra-Ordinarization of the Mundane, " Human Relations 56 (2003):1435-59, report that managers attribute extraordinary qualities to mundane activities, such as listening or being cheerful, which they present as "doing leadership. " They conclude that "leadership discourse [makes] managers invest a strong symbolic, even magical, meaning in mundane acts and talk" (1457). The primary function of leadership discourse, then, is to make phenomena that readily give themselves to our understanding (we can easily identify a listening manager when we see one) appear as if something remains hidden. In reality, Alvesson and Sveningsson suggest, leadership in the cases they have studied is as mundane as "ordinary" management
33. Amanda Sinclair, Leadership for the Disillusioned: Moving Beyond Myth and Heroes to Leading that Liberates (Crows Nest: Allen and Ulwin, 2007)
34. Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 21
35. James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner, The Leadership Challenge, 4th edition (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007), 351
36. Bernard M. Bass, 'Leadership: Good, better, best', Organizational Dynamics 13 (1985):26-40
37. Max de Pree, Leadership is an Art (New York: Dell, 1990), 28
38. One interesting (and provocative) analysis of the way images of the non-economic can function within an economy is Mark C. Taylor, "Capitalizing (on) Gifting, " in Edith Wyschogrod, Jean-Joseph Goux, and Eric Boynton, eds., The Enigma of the Gift and Sacrifice (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 50-73