School Leadership & Management,

Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 267–290, August 2003

Leadership: who needs it?

Peter GRONN
Faculty of Education, Building 6, Monash University, Victoria 3800, Australia

ABSTRACT This article provides a critique of leadership. The thrust of this critique is focused
on the discourse of leadership as a vehicle for representing organisational practice. In particular,
the article identifies a series of important conceptual inadequacies, most of which are rarely
addressed by leadership commentators. These include: difficulties in distinguishing leadership
from management; tensions between leadership, influence and power; the potential redundancy
of leadership in the face of possible substitute factors; leader–followership’s presumption of a
division of labour; the prevailing myth of exceptionality; and disciplined subjectivity achieved
through emergent forms of designer leadership. Embedded in each of these criticisms is the claim
that, if leadership is to retain its conceptual and practical utility, then it has to be reconstituted
in a distributed, as opposed to a focused, form. A series of suggestions as to how this
transformation might be accomplished is outlined in the final section of the article.

From Acorns to Oak Trees

For approximately the last two decades, I have been teaching, researching and
writing in the area of leadership. At the outset of this article, I would like to refer to
a few aspects of what, for the most part, has turned out to be almost a career-long
love affair with leadership. Various points in this protracted odyssey touch on issues
which I want to develop in more detail shortly.
It was during a sabbatical leave of seven delightful months in 1983–4, at what
is now the Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol, that my initial
interest in leadership developed, following which I returned to Monash to teach the
subject for the very first time. Unlike the last decade or so, in the early 1980s
leadership tended not to be in vogue, so that use of terms such as ‘educational
leadership’ and ‘school leadership’ was very much more muted than is the case at
present. Rather, educational ‘administration’ was the well-worn vocabulary with
which my peers and myself were familiar (although occasionally the field was
referred to as educational ‘management’). No messianic or apocalyptic leadership
epiphany occurred for me at this time, only emerging flickers followed by a
quickening of interest from that point on. Thanks to the presence of a couple of
marvellous bookshops just around the corner from my temporary abode in Berkeley
Square in Bristol, I purchased and devoured in quick succession three recently
published works on leadership: Burns’ (1978) Leadership, Hodgkinson’s (1983) The
Philosophy of Leadership and Mant’s (1983) Leaders We Deserve. I also read a
ISSN 1363-2434 printed/ISSN 1364-2626 online/03/030267-24  2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1363243032000112784
268 P. Gronn

biography: Edinger’s (1965) Kurt Schumacher, his account of the life of a rather
intense, tempestuous, doggedly persistent and combative German Social Democrat
politician. I had no particular interest in the subject of this book. As an example of
my professional reading, however, the choice of Edinger is instructive, for at that
time I was nurturing a recently acquired interest in biography, and Edinger was a
highly reputable psycho-biographer. Indeed, part of my reason for going to England
(as I would again in 1988) was to gather archival and interview data for a biographi-
cal project of my own on the life of J. R. Darling, an English-born Australian school
head.
The particular stimulus for my nascent biographical interest had been Alan
Fraser Davies who, until his sudden and untimely death in 1987, was Professor of
Politics at the University of Melbourne. It was Davies’ (1980) magisterial work
Skills, Outlooks and Passions on which I relied to frame my understanding of
leadership. Davies was an exceptionally kind man who gave generously of his time
to, and was highly supportive of, young scholars. He had a highly creative and
stimulating mind. Such was the infectiousness of his enthusiasm for understanding
the role of personality in leadership that, despite what I am about to say shortly by
way of critique of the contemporary field, under the aegis of Davies and his
colleague, Graham Little, a distinctive psycho-social approach to social and institu-
tional analysis prospered for a decade or more in Melbourne. Davies and Little were
part of a burgeoning international diaspora of scholars building connections between
the fields of psychology, political science and sociology. The broad local cross-
disciplinary network of academics, graduate students, psychologists and psycho-
analysts informally headed up by Davies was known as the Melbourne psycho-social
group. His particular passion was political psychology, and this found expression in
a long-standing interest in the deeds and motivations of political leaders, civil service
mandarins and other public notables. Davies saw his academic mission as communi-
cating an understanding of what made such people ‘tick’. The psycho-social group
convened regular seminars and colloquia, and it was thanks to Davies that I retained
a loose affiliation with it. For some reason, as an undergraduate student in political
science at Melbourne, I had not encountered Davies as a teacher, but we had made
contact and discovered mutual interests in the early 1980s. At this time I was dimly
aware that there existed an extensive heritage of research literature on leadership, the
bulk of the findings of which was dominated by behavioural psychology (and which
was mostly dismissed by the people whose work I was becoming familiar with as
dreary, dull, unremarkable and badly in need of a makeover). But the highly
stimulating developments on the fringes of political science, for which Davies had
been one of the prime movers, was where the real action was to be found.
Such, in essence, was the broad formative milieu in which my nascent under-
standing of leadership began to gestate. It is fair to say that, from this time until the
early 1990s, I took leadership pretty much at face value. That is, leaders were
self-evidently leaders. There was no conceptual mystery about leadership and
leaders, be they in schools, school systems, universities or the political process, for
‘leader’ was simply the label by which they were known. The scholarly challenge to
which I became committed, therefore, was to try to communicate such leaders’
 Leadership: who needs it? 269

views of the world and the impact of those views; to seek to ascertain the unique
circumstances of their biographical formation which resulted in their adherence to
these views; to interpret their actions as leaders; and, finally, to provide a causal
(albeit psycho-biographical) explanation for those actions. This agenda was largely
consistent with the spirit of Davies’ project in Skills, Outlooks and Passions and,
clearly, it still retains its scholarly and practical significance. The realisation that
dawned on me, however, was that these matters comprised only part of the
explanatory picture, rather than the whole of it. As I read and delved, it became
increasingly evident that a significant amount of the field’s understanding of leader-
ship is grounded in highly dubious and problematic assumptions. The purpose of
this article, therefore, is to address some of these issues, a number of which I have
been wrestling with in recent and forthcoming manuscripts. Such is the depth of my
reservations that the questions I am asking should cause us to consider whether any
justification remains for the continuation of leadership as a scholarly field. Hence my
title, ‘Leadership: who needs it?’.
There are six matters of particular concern. These, briefly, are: first, the
relationship between leadership and management; second, the connection between
leadership and power; third, whether there are explanatory substitutes for leader-
ship; fourth, the typical assumptions we make about the division of leadership
labour; fifth, the problems generated by the prevailing cult of leader ‘exceptionality’;
and sixth, the consequences, intended and unintended, of the recent emergence of
leadership design prototypes, an intimation, perhaps, of a new Foucauldian-style
disciplinary regime. After developing each of these six points, I offer some sugges-
tions about possible future directions for leadership.

Leading or Managing? [1]

The first concern is one of definition or, better still, distinction. I began by
suggesting that, two decades or so ago, terms such as ‘management’ and ‘adminis-
tration’ had as much currency as, if not more than, ‘leadership’ in educational
circles. Had I the time and space, this claim could be substantiated by a historical
review of course names, journal titles, departmental labels and the like from this
period. All of that, as should be self-evident, has recently changed. There is now a
vast leadership industry out there of truly staggering proportions (in which govern-
ments, corporations, academics, schools and school systems have a huge material
vested interest), such that the discourse of ‘leadership’ has become ubiquitous. This
discourse is evident in course and subject retitling. It has been evidenced by the
mushrooming growth of leadership centres. It is to be found increasingly in the
wording of advertisements for job vacancies. It is also manifest in an enormous body
of conceptual and research literature. These examples could readily be multiplied.
What do these developments mean? Shortly, I shall try to show how, in the
mid-1980s, as part of leadership exceptionalism, commentators began to canonise
leadership and to demonise management. For the moment, however, a key question
is: what changes, if anything, when commentators begin to privilege words such as
‘leader’, ‘leading’ and ‘leadership’ as discursive modes of representing reality,
270 P. Gronn

instead of previously favoured terminology such as ‘manager’, ‘management’, etc?

To illustrate part of the problem arising out of distinctions between leadership and
management, I now cite an extended extract of interview dialogue from some recent
research [2]. Here, a first-time leading teacher in an Australian secondary school is
outlining for me the nuts and bolts of his newly assumed role responsibilities [3]. At
the time of the interview (December 2001), LT#4, as I refer to him, was 35 and, as
a mature-age entrant to teaching, he had spent six years as a mathematics and
science teacher. Previously, LT#4 had worked as a surveyor. The Years 7–12
secondary college in which he had been teaching for three years had an enrolment
of about 1800, and employed 120 teachers and approximately 30 auxiliary staff. By
any standards, then, this was what, in the terminology of traditional organisation
theory, would have been known as a ‘complex organisation’. The questions I now
want to ask about these extracts are: How should we characterise what they say? Is
what is disclosed evidence of leadership, or is it management (or, possibly, some-
thing else)? Why leadership or why management? What are the criteria, if any, for
deciding whether it is one or the other? And, finally, does it really matter which way
it is characterised?
1. GRONN: Did you have particular expectations of yourself when you took the
job [of leading teacher] on?
2. LT#4: Yeah, I had the expect, well I had a certain, I had positive goals that I
had to achieve during the year, which obviously are get the timetable up and
running, and initiate any changes in staffing and conditions, and things like that, and
changes, implement changes in the curriculum. So I’m, there’s not, there’s a few
things: I wanted to do the job better, I suppose, which were some of the aims to cut
it, to try and decrease the workload at the end of the year, and I’ve sort of worked
at that. But a lot of the job is implementing the changes in the school and so I’m sort
of in the tail-end of those changes a little bit, so that the curriculum committee
might come up with a change: as an example in, they want, next year they want Year
8 students to do the majority of their subjects as a home, as a form group or a home
group, which is different to everything we’ve done in the past, so I’ve had to
implement that change so, and they always seek my advice, they say: ‘Can it be
done?’, and you say: ‘Yeah, it can be done, but there’ll be consequences. These are
a couple but there will also be some I don’t know’.
3. GRONN: I guess you and the daily organiser are the two critical people, really,
in making the, ensuring that the system, sort of, you know, moves on appropriately,
isn’t it, really?
4. LT#4: Yeah. So, you know, day one next year there’s got to be, there’s 1800
kids arrive at the door, and you’ve got to make sure that there’s rooms and classes
and teachers for everyone.
5. GRONN: The daily organiser has got to make sure they’re all staffed and
covered, and what, you have, and you’ve got to make sure they’re all mapped and
clear?
 Leadership: who needs it? 271

6. LT#4: Yeah.
Timetabling goes to the heart of the arranging of pedagogical practice for teachers
and students. In the duality of structure and agency (Archer 1995), LT#4 and his
colleagues are negotiating structure. As utterance 2 reveals, LT#4 is constrained by
colleagues’ initiatives, and, as utterance 4 shows, his latitude for discretion is also
very strongly circumscribed by time-bound imperatives. In this sense, LT#4’s
agency is reactive rather than proactive. Indeed, as he notes later on, in utterance 24,
there is very little scope for proactivity in school timetabling.
7. GRONN: Okay, well what about the expectations of your colleagues: did you
have a sense of what they were, you know what they were expecting of you?
8. LT#4: I work quite closely with the principal because he’s the one who’s
always, you know, staff coming and going, he wants to know how many staff we
need. So, his expectations are that he gets as much inform, feedback from me about
staffing as early as possible so that he can start changing, so… so, he wants to know
as early as possible what staff he’ll need so I have to go through and to work out how
many periods of art and technology and PE and science and all that sort of thing,
and compare it to staff we’ve got and say: ‘Well, we’re going to have more phys ed
classes next year but less food tech’, or something. So, he’s got to know, he’s got to
start thinking about that change when he appoints people or puts jobs up.
Other significant constraints, as is evident in utterance 8, are the expectations and
needs of his principal. Interestingly, however, the principal is dependent on and
constrained in his own actions by the information provided by LT#4. Fore-
shadowing a later point about distributed work practices, then, utterance 8 is a good
illustration of the interdependence of two role incumbents and of their mutual need
to coordinate. One further significant constraint on LT#4, as is evident below in
utterance 14, is the school’s inability to be able to finalise its staffing establishment
until early in the new school year.
9. GRONN: Do you enjoy doing the role?
10. LT#4: Sometimes it’s a lot of hard work, but there is a certain amount of
satisfaction getting, at the start of the year when everything works, or you hope that
everything works. You don’t get too many thanks from the staff members, they, they
sort of come and complain when things aren’t going their way but, you, they expect
it all to work properly and they’ve got their classes in the rooms that they want, and
so you usually only hear the complaints rather than anything positive, but, but I
would now take the fact that if, the less people come and complain the better it is.
11. GRONN: So, to have it all in place when the gong goes at the start of day
one … to have it all in place and ready to go, ready to rock and roll, how much work,
I mean what, what does it entail for you to do that, I mean you are obviously
working on it now, I suppose?
12. LT#4: Yeah, well at the moment I’m working on it full time for the next, the
next two weeks, and I’ve been fairly flat chat [i.e. very busy] since about October.
272 P. Gronn

13. GRONN: Is that right?

14. LT#4: Yeah, I’ve been planning. You know, before that, like the term break
we had five staff turn over, so that was sort of, change in itself, but basically this term
is fairly heavy going, but I still won’t be able to get it finished before the end of the
year because we won’t have our staffing finalised. Like today, I found out that
another staff member is leaving, so we won’t have all our staff till January, so I will
be here for the last couple of weeks of the holidays.
15. GRONN: So, I mean you, you won’t have firm, when do you get firm Year 7
enrolment numbers?
16. LT#4: They are very accurate quite early. The junior school coordinator and
the Year 7 teachers go out and they do a, visit the local primary schools and they,
all the grade 6 kids have to put their applications in and they are all processed by sort
of, early October I suppose.
17. GRONN: Right, yeah, well that’s okay then.
18. LT#4: So you, those numbers might increase by.
19. GRONN: Your numbers are fairly, so it’s really the staffing variable that’s the
unknown, isn’t it?
20. LT#4: Yeah, and we can model how much, what the retention rate is from
year to year, so we roughly know that if we’ve got 300, say 300 Year 10s, we know
that we’ll have about 78% of those next year. So we, going on previous retention
rates we can plan for those.
The dialogue in utterances 9–20 highlights the unromantic nature of the unremitting
hard grind endeavour associated with LT#4’s role. This is the stuff of ‘small
pictures’, with the devil in the detail, rather than of mesmerising, broad brush, ‘big
picture’ visions extolled as the hallmark of late-twentieth-century leaders (e.g.
Bennis & Nanus 1985). Yet the work consumes LT#4’s time and energies, and a
satisfactorily smooth start to the succeeding school year depends on months of his
and others’ hard labour, for, as he says in utterance 22, ‘you’ve got to get it right’.
Yet, despite his limited scope for proactive agency, LT#4 indicates (in utterances
24, 26 and 28) that he is predisposed to introducing new procedures.
21. GRONN: It sounds like a learned science …
22. LT#4: We, we just don’t have the flexibility of staff. Everyone has to be
teaching their allotted classes within one or two, but you just don’t have any
flexibility at all, yeah, so you’ve got to make, you’ve got to get it right.
23. GRONN: So, have the expectations you had, have they been confirmed for
you now that you’ve been at it for 12 months?
24. LT#4: Yeah, because I’d done the job a little bit before for six months while
the previous timetabler was overseas, it gave me a taste for it and I basically knew
what the expectations were when I took the job on. It seems to have got harder
 Leadership: who needs it? 273

rather than easier this year because of other factors out of, out of my control. There’s
been quite a few curriculum changes and there’s been staff changes and that’s, that
sort of things, but you’ve got to go with the flow a bit, I suppose, you, it’s very much
a, you know you got to, you can’t be proactive, you can’t sort of plan for changes,
you’ve just got to make sure what changes there are that you can implement.
25. GRONN: So you are reacting in a way, aren’t you, I suppose, rather than sort
of, so have you been able to bring something new to the job, do you think?
26. LT#4: Well, being my first year I thought I would take it on, and there’s a
couple of things, I want to make the job easier, like I felt we repeated a lot of
procedures last year and a lot of the information I put out I didn’t think was
required, so I’ve sort of, it’s just basically information sheets that I have produced
about what staff there are in faculty and all that sort of stuff, and what classes they’ve
got, and I’ve just used, I’ve condensed that so I don’t have to keep repeating a lot
of information.
27. GRONN: Refined a few things?
28. LT#4: Yeah, to make the job easier and, I think that’s, that’s my aim next year
is to make that go further and try and work out how, make the job more efficient and
I, I think I’ll have to have a chat to a couple of the IT guys to design a couple of
Excel programs to make it a bit easier.
29. GRONN: So, has CASES [4] been helping?
30. LT#4: CASES is a good tool, but because it’s fairly new there are still bugs in
it … and it’s still just a tool, there’s a lot of forward planning that it doesn’t take into
account.
31. GRONN: Right, so that’s why you have to do these extra spreadsheets?
32. LT#4: Yeah, yeah.
This five minutes or so of dialogue raises some important issues concerned with
the validity, utility and worth of binary or dualistic distinctions. At face value,
because LT#4’s description of the work associated with his role appears to be
mainly concerned with the resourcing of the school, rather than with its spiritual or
emotional well-being, then for commentators such as Bennis and Nanus (1985) that
is sufficient to define LT#4 as a manager rather than a leader. But how meaningful
is such a resource/emotion divide, for delivery of the kind of outcome to which
LT#4 is committed (i.e. getting ‘it’ right) would no doubt be seen by many
colleagues as a necessary precondition of their emotional well-being anyway (as
LT#4 himself implies in utterance 10 with: ‘they all expect it to work properly …’)?
Moreover, according to what rationale does a focus on resource procurement count
only as management rather than leadership? Viewed from the perspective of attri-
bution theory (Calder 1977), such arbitrary adamantine distinctions make little
sense, for the question of LT#4’s status as a manager or leader depends entirely on
the qualities colleagues ascribe to him on the basis of an alignment between their
274 P. Gronn

perceptions of him and their prior cognitive prototypes of organisational roles.

Leadership is in the eye of the beholder. Some commentators have even queried
whether anything is gained by differentiating leaders and managers. Nicholls (2002),
for example, proposes that formal position-holders are employed as managers and
that members of this cadre who manifest the behaviour typically associated with
leadership need simply to be thought of as more high profile managers than their
peers. ‘Creating an effective organisation that is viable in the long-term requires
managers with extraordinary talent’, such as LT#4, ‘but why refer to these talented
managers as leaders’, asks Nicholls (2002: 15)? Finally, to foreshadow a point made
later on, to define the apparently mundane and inglorious detail of LT#4’s
timetabling work as management, but not leadership, is to risk residualising activity
which, on any test of significance, is basic to the well-being, vitality and productivity
of schools.

Leadership, Influence or Power?

Turning to the second area of concern, leadership is part of a family of terms of
closely related usage, a number of which overlap in meaning, thereby suggesting
possible redundancy. These terms are used to distinguish different modes of human
conduct and engagement. Apart from leadership, the other members of this family
or grouping are: authority, power, influence, persuasion, manipulation, coercion and
force. Now, within this discursive family, leadership is the favourite and most
prominent offspring, in both education and beyond. None of its siblings, it seems to
me, have ever really commanded anything like the reverence and respect with which
leadership has been adorned. To my way of thinking, however, this hallowed status
is rather puzzling, for while leadership shares some of the defining attributes of its
family members, it alone gets singled out for special treatment.
How might the relations between these family members be illustrated? Unfortu-
nately, there is no ideal schematic arrangement for doing so. If we take a continuum,
for example, it is difficult to conceive of these terms as located along a hypothetical
line. Such an apparatus presupposes a set of relationships partitioned between two
end-points or extremities, in which case one has to ask: extremes of what, and what
about the spaces between the concepts? Should these be equidistant or uneven and
irregular? In his classic discussion of power, Lukes (1974) inserted this family of
terms into an L-shaped conceptual space as a means of illustrating their overlap and
interconnection. Interestingly, Lukes excluded leadership from his arrangement
while including inducement and encouragement. Rather than reviewing the merits
of alternative diagrammatic arrangements, such as grids, matrices, cubes or (as
employed by Davies to good effect in Skills, Outlooks and Passions) spheres, I shall
begin slightly arbitrarily with power which, along with influence, at least in regard to
usage and meaning, is the closest family relative to leadership.
During the years immediately preceding the emergence of my interest in
leadership that I outlined earlier, power had been the main focus of my research. For
my doctoral thesis, for example, I drew extensively on a burgeoning political science
literature in which theorists of elitism and pluralism debated the merits of their
 Leadership: who needs it? 275

respective conceptual and methodological approaches to power analysis. To the

best of my knowledge, little of this discourse penetrated the field of leadership,
and leadership also rarely found its way into these debates. In short, there were
two parallel intellectual conversations occurring. Sadly, for the most part there still
are.
Consider the discourse of power. It is not uncommon to hear power broached
in the following ways: power structure, concentrations of power, powerful persons,
empowerment, power elites or pluralities of power and, interestingly, the distri-
bution of power. Unlike leadership, it is standard practice for political scientists to
research patterns of power distribution in political and social systems. Taking as an
illustration Dahl’s (1975) Who Governs?, a classic account of power in a US city,
Dahl (1975: 90) described his focus as ‘the distribution of influence’ in his case
study community. While the expression ‘distributed leadership’ does not appear in
Dahl’s text, his investigation provides what is, in effect, an account of the distri-
bution of leadership, in the sense that community influence was dispersed amongst
a number of influential groups, rather than concentrated in one small elite and, from
time to time, was expressed directly and indirectly by elite and sub-elite power
groups across a range of community-wide issues. But what about the leadership of
organisations: are there not similar patterns of organisational leadership correspond-
ing to the dispersal of power and influence across a society? I shall return to this
question shortly. The final observation to make about power and the remaining
family siblings is that one other feature of usage differentiates them from leadership:
none of them generate binary categories. The closest approximation to a dualism is
‘powerful’ and ‘powerless’, which is nowhere near as entrenched in popular con-
sciousness as ‘leader’ and ‘follower’. A question that needs to be asked, then, is: why
does the discourse of leadership differ in this respect?
If power is considered in relation to authority, there is some similarity or
equivalence of usage. That is, as with power, it is common to refer to such
phenomena as authority structures, authority figures or authoritative persons. On
the other hand, authority and power are not equivalent phenomena, for authority,
unlike power, provides a constitutive basis for legitimating human conduct. That is,
authority establishes an order for action derived from a legal foundation or similar
framework of legitimacy (Coleman 1990). In this sense, authority is a defining
attribute of management, although not leadership, for management is grounded in
an employment contract, a legally binding document that defines an employee’s
duties, responsibilities and accountabilities. An employment contract establishes a
division of rights (as opposed to a division of labour) in respect of work allocation.
This contractual arrangement, for example, is the basis of LT#4’s authority as a
manager with the title of ‘leading teacher’. By convention, this division of authority
is vertical and known as a hierarchy. A hierarchy is a device for arranging levels or
grades of authority from a minimum, at the base, to a maximum or superordinate
level, at the top. In accordance with the principle of subsumption, the authority of
incumbents at each succeeding level may substitute for and override those beneath
them. A system of hierarchically arranged responsibilities is often known as an
executive system or (figuratively) as a chain of command. In the absence of
276 P. Gronn

organisational hierarchy, there would be parity (or equality) of authority. But, why
hierarchy? There are a number of reasons, both cultural and historical, for its
adoption, including traditionally inherited notions of ‘chiefdom’, the recognition
that there are different levels of human competence, and an acknowledgement that
not all organisational work is of equal worth or value. The critical point about a
hierarchy is that the higher the level, the greater the amount of authority and weight
of responsibility borne by role incumbents.
Authority, then, differs from power in that it is concerned with the governance
of conduct through such vehicles as legislative frameworks, regulations, rules,
conventions, etc. Slightly confusingly, perhaps, an authority structure also confers
‘powers’ on office-holders, such as legislators or members of the judiciary. Like
leadership, managerial authority has spawned it own binary: ‘superior’ (or, strictly
speaking, ‘superordinate’) and ‘subordinate’. This shorthand, which has wide cur-
rency, refers, ostensibly, to persons to whom a role incumbent might be answerable
or over whom one exercises authority or command. Due to its inherent vagueness,
however, such terminology is unhelpful (for it does not designate particular hier-
archical positions or job titles). Moreover, the earlier problem of distinguishing
leadership from management is compounded by such indiscriminate labelling when
some commentators (e.g. Dansereau et al. 1995: 415, 418) employ ‘leader’ and
‘superior’, and ‘follower’ and ‘subordinate’ interchangeably.
During the radical critique of behaviourist and liberal social theory during the
1970s and early 1980s, disputes about power oscillated between claim and counter-
claim that it was a capacity or attribute of persons, or was evident in relationships
between persons and the social structures that framed their actions. In the thirty
years’ war (or thereabouts) between the paradigms, the relational view has prevailed.
But this was not so in the case of leadership where, until recently, a mostly
under-determined agency view of leadership has held sway (Hunt & Dodge 2001).
An under-determined perspective on agency is dismissive of the constraints on
individual or collective actions, while simultaneously exaggerating the capacities,
possibilities and opportunities for attaining preferred outcomes. On the other hand,
leadership has this much in common with power: while power has become a term
of critique over the last two to three decades or so (thanks, initially, to Lukes and,
latterly, to Foucault), leadership is usually associated with the targets of that
critique: the powerful, whose actions are legitimated by authority.
Turning specifically to leadership, the Shorter Oxford Dictionary devotes almost
an entire three-column page of definitions and etymological detail to ‘lead’ and its
various derivatives: ‘leader’, ‘leading’, etc. To ‘follow the leader’, for example, is said
to date from 1863, and ‘to give a lead’, as when the front rider in a hunt leaps a
fence, originated in 1859. The point of these and the numerous other examples cited
in the dictionary is that they illustrate precisely Calder’s (1977) point that leadership
is a lay, everyday knowledge term, and not a scientific construct. Precisely when
words such as leader, follower, leadership and followership became part of common
usage is difficult to know. On the other hand, the uptake of such terms within the
scholarly community, which have become veneered as ‘science’ (Calder 1977),
increased dramatically during the twentieth century. There is, however, a peculiar
 Leadership: who needs it? 277

discursive feature of leadership, for in its relations with its fellow family members it
is unable to stand on its own feet. That is, it has always needed a fellow sibling,
‘influence’, to support it, so that when commentators define leadership, almost
invariably they invoke influence, although Burns (1978: 12, 19), for whom leader-
ship is ‘a special form of power’, while influence is ‘an unnecessary and unparsimo-
nious’ concept, is a notable exception. Typical of those who see an affinity between
leadership and influence is Rost (1993: 102, italicised original) who, in his exhaus-
tive conceptual review, defines leadership as ‘an influence relationship among
leaders and followers who intend real changes that reflect their mutual purposes’.
But this definition begs some questions: if leadership is a type, or aspect, of
influence, doesn’t that make ‘leadership’ unnecessary? That is, if it is influence we
are really talking about, then why not stay with that word? Why do commentators
feel the need to grace the influential conduct they have in mind with the status of
leadership? In short, when describing and analysing the flow of collective action and
the conduct of persons as part of that process, why is it leadership we are talking
about rather than influence or power?

Revisiting Substitutes for Leaders and Leadership

The third issue about leadership concerns its privileged explanatory status. When
they criticised leadership theories in the late 1970s, particularly cross-sectional
statistically designed studies, for their inability to account for significant amounts of
criterion variance, Kerr and Jermier (1978) were not only challenging that status,
but they were raising the possibility of more powerful alternative or substitute
explanations for actions and event outcomes. Evidence of the field’s resistance to
their critique may partly have accounted for their initial difficulties in securing a
publication outlet. Two decades later, in a Leadership Quarterly symposium on their
substitutes article (now touted as a classic in the field), Jermier and Kerr (1997)
remained disappointed at the lack of uptake of their original proposal.
What Kerr and Jermier (1978) had done, in effect, was to canvass the potential
redundancy of leadership. There were occasions, they claimed, when the leadership
of an individual could be nullified, substituted for or rendered irrelevant. They had
suggested, for example, that because there was a range of possible explanatory
factors in accounting for workplace behaviour (including individual predispositions,
the inherent nature of tasks, workplace processes and relations with supervisors),
researchers were faced with ‘a taxonomy of situations where we should not be
studying “leadership” (in the formal hierarchical sense) at all’ (Kerr & Jermier 1978:
377). Thus, feedback from peers or clients, or an employee’s self-motivation, could
substitute for the (direct or indirect) influence of a formally designated leader. In
LT#4’s case, for example, utterances 10, 24, 26 and 28 provide strong evidence of
self-generated enthusiasm and ability to learn from experience, so that no-one had
to drive him. Kerr and Jermier (1978) also thought leadership was unnecessary
when the work tasks were routine, well-rehearsed, unambiguous and learned by
heart. In fact, in a series of experiments, they suggested that in 12 of 24 posited
occasions characteristics inherent in a task (e.g. its intrinsically satisfying nature) or
278 P. Gronn

an employee (e.g. her or his abilities) could substitute for both task-oriented or
relationship-oriented leader behaviour. One implication of this claim was that other
influences on task performance replaced face-to-face interaction with leaders.
Another was that leaders influenced employees more indirectly through a variety of
processes ‘by making decisions that minimise[d] the need for the face-to-face
exercise of power’ (Jermier & Kerr 1997: 99). While such findings narrowed
significantly the scope of, and need for, direct leader influence, they also compli-
cated the identification of its locus and form.
If this argument is valid, then the possibility of substitute effects should prompt
a reconsideration of work practice research. Leadership, per the agency of individual
leaders, tends to be positioned at the front or input end of the explanatory template
normally used to account for the flow of action. With remarkably few exceptions,
leaders are conventionally constructed as causal agents of work outcomes. An
alternative perspective on the role of leadership, however, might be to begin the
analysis and explanation at the opposite, rear or back end. That is, a different
approach would be to begin the analysis of work practice or the outcomes to be
accounted for and then to comb back through the universe of explanatory possibil-
ities, of which leadership may (or may not) turn out to be just one. From this
perspective, two alternative questions are likely to provide a more accurate and
robust understanding of the place of leadership within the universe of candidate
causal explanations: For any period of time under review or consideration, what is
the totality of the work that is to be performed by an organisation (e.g. department,
school or university)? And, within that time frame, what is required as part of that
organisation’s totality of work practices, to accomplish that body of work?

Dividing the Leadership Labour

The fourth item of concern is the leader–follower binary alluded to earlier. Such is
the strength of the presumed symbiosis between these two analytical constructs that
they are like the horse and carriage in the song about marriage: i.e. there cannot be
one without the other. But why not? Why, for example, do commentators assume
that organisation members must be slotted into either of these binary categories?
To claim, as is often said, that there can be no leaders without followers, is to try
to naturalise, a priori, a division of labour. In this case, however, to naturalise an
aspect of reality by dichotomising its representation is to presuppose what needs to
be demonstrated. That is, if leadership is a form of influence, as was highlighted
earlier, then a construction such as ‘leader’–’followers’ seems to imply that one
person monopolises all the influence while all of the residualised non-leaders are
supine.
This binary creates a number of difficulties, some of which have been con-
sidered elsewhere (see Gronn 1999, especially 2–19). Here, I want to emphasise the
point that, in any organisation there is rarely ever just one leader and a number of
followers, and that these designations are unlikely to apply to the same persons in
fixed perpetuity. As Gibb (1958), originator of the term ‘distributed leadership’,
acknowledged, the grounds on which external observers apportion organisation
 Leadership: who needs it? 279

members to either category are entirely arbitrary. As an illustration of how ‘leader’–

‘follower’ constructs a misleading description of reality, consider the following
passages from Follett’s (1973: 120–121) essay ‘The illusion of final authority’, where
(in 1926) she discusses delegation:
In a large bank, a separate man [sic] has the responsibility for new business,
exchange, deposits, credit loans, and so on. But the separation of function
does not mean the delegation of authority. The unfortunate thing in
writing on business organization is that our language has not caught up
with our actual practice. As distribution of function has superseded hier-
archy of position in many plants, delegation of authority should be an
obsolete expression, yet we hear it every day.

Although Follett’s focus here is not leadership, per se, she recognises, nevertheless,
that unless analytical terminology reflects current practice, it imposes an outmoded
discursive template on reality which, as with ‘leader’–’followers’, I suggest, obscures
the actual division of workplace labour. In contrast with over-simplified binaries and
dualisms, the reality of the operation of executive functions, as articulated in this
next segment, is that they are distributed processes in which a number of persons
coordinate their joint endeavours to accomplish work:
I say that authority should go with function, but as the essence of organiza-
tion is the interweaving of functions, authority we now see as a matter of
interweaving. An order, a command, is a step in a process, a moment in the
movement of interweaving experience, and we should guard against think-
ing this step a larger part of the whole process than it really is. There is all
that leads to the order, all that comes afterwards—methods of administra-
tion, the watching and recording of results, what flows out of it to make
further orders. If we trace all that leads to a command, what persons are
connected with it, and in what way, we find that more than one man’s
experience has gone to the making of that moment—unless it is a matter of
purely arbitrary authority. Arbitrary authority is authority not related to all
the experience concerned, but to that of one man alone, or one group of
men.
For Follett, then, there is little justification for singling out individuals (such as
presumed ‘leaders’) for special status:
The particular person identified then with the moment of command—
foreman, upper executive or whoever it may be—is not the most important
matter for our consideration, although of course a very important part of
the process. All that I want to emphasize is that there is a process. A
political scientist writes, ‘Authority co-ordinates the experience of man,’
but I think this is a wrong view of authority. The form of organization
should be such as to allow or induce the continuous co-ordination of the
experience of men. Legitimate authority flows from co-ordination, not
co-ordination from authority.
280 P. Gronn

An increasing number of commentators are dissatisfied with or are disavowing

the leader–follower binary (see Gronn 2002a). In light of this development, the
point about Follett’s example is that, although written more than 70 years ago, it
resonates with recent analyses by sociologists of work practices across a range of
occupations, particularly in the area known as ‘the visibilisation of work’, that have
important implications for leadership. ‘Visibilisation’ refers to the de-reifying of
abstract terminology that masks or glosses the processes and properties of real world
phenomena. Such abstractions ‘temper the clutter of the visible by creating invisi-
bles’, remarks Star (1991: 265), for they ‘stand quietly, cleanly, and docilely for the
noisome, messy actions and materials’. The attribute of ‘greatness’, which, until
Stogdill’s critique of ‘trait theory’ in the late 1940s (Bass 1990: 59–77), had wide
currency in the field of leadership, is a good illustration. Shapin (1989) has shown
how, in the case of the English gentleman chemist, Robert Boyle, after whom
Boyle’s Law of Gases is named, the myth of a so-called ‘great’ scientist was erected
on the foundation of the (historically invisible) division of labour and moral
economy of the seventeenth-century scientific laboratory. At the rear of his house in
Pall Mall, London, stood Boyle’s scientific laboratory. A number of support person-
nel (all males) were employed there. They were known as ‘chemical servants’, but
the exact identity and number Boyle employed at any one time is difficult to
ascertain. This is because, in Boyle’s account of his laboratory and in the historio-
graphy of laboratory science, they are mostly absent. This invisibilising of distributed
laboratory work practice intrigued Shapin (1989: 557) who discovered that ‘a very
substantial proportion of Boyle’s experimental work was done through prolonged
experimentation and very hard labour on his behalf by paid assistants’. In fact, Boyle
was doubly dependent on the judgements of the hands and eyes of these people
because both his eyesight and his health were poor. Collective endeavour, then,
became masked by an individualistic bias in western historiography towards the
‘solitary individual in contact with reality or with sources of inspiration’ (Shapin
1989: 561).
Mindful in my own case of what I referred to at the outset of this paper as the
acuity of A. F. Davies’ mental apparatus, in the genealogy of science, young Turk
scientists, and scholars generally, are socialised to position themselves as the disci-
ples of a so-called ‘great mind’. As with the attribution of ‘followership’ in organisa-
tions generally, as part of the ‘leader’–’followers’ binary, however, the assimilation of
such a self-imposed workplace status is part and parcel of the identity politics of the
academy. On the other hand, the reality of laboratory life, notes Mukerji (1998:
275), defies such categorisation:

Laboratory discussions caught in transcripts simply do not show infor-

mation passing up a chain of command, and analytical insight passing
down along the same chain. The system is much more complex, and much
more a distributed system of learning, where different technical skills and
analytic abilities are arrayed around a joint project. Distributed cognition is
masked behind a system of social performance, developed to reinforce the
social power of science by giving to groups the problems that individuals
 Leadership: who needs it? 281

could not solve on their own, and attributing the solution to select individ-
uals.

Students of work practices and organisational processes require a lexicon with which
to designate agents and their conduct, but which does not institutionalise myth-
ology. The problem is to find accurate means of differentiating between contribu-
tions (for not all acts are of a piece) and modes of acting within a workforce while
seeking to account for action and, with the lessons of 1970s debate over power, in
mind, inaction. While the available options include such tried and true modes of
distinction as experience, function, occupational title, rank, status, level of responsi-
bility, etc., one possible alternative to the conventional discourse of ‘leadership’ may
be the emerging literature on ‘communities of practice’ (Gronn 2003a).

Exceptionality
Despite these strictures concerning ‘greatness’, the dominant contemporary concep-
tion of leadership remains the doctrine of ‘exceptionalism’. Exceptionalism re-
emerged in the two decades that form the backdrop to this discussion, during which
command-and-control line managerialism was supplanted by rhetorics of integration
and control achieved through the management of culture. ‘Re-emerged’ because,
notwithstanding both Stogdill’s initial (up until 1947) and subsequent (1948–1970)
critique of trait theory (Bass 1990), leadership personality factors, in the form of
clusters of traits, unlike the previously atomised traits dismissed by Stogdill, are
asserted by neo-trait theorists to account for statistically significant proportions of
variance in behaviour. Bass (1998: 120), a leading neo-trait theorist, claims that
‘both improved conceptualization and improved methodology stimulated the return
of the trait approach to the study of leadership in the 1990s’.
Exceptionalism assumes that leadership is the monopoly of individual role
incumbents or, at best, a handful of strategically positioned actors in organisations.
This doctrine is legitimated by the earlier normative discursive dualism of leadership
and management which constructs leaders as visionary, charismatic or transforma-
tional champions who, unlike mere managers (or followers), add value to organisa-
tions. Leadership that is exceptional is presumed to be manifest behaviourally in
individual deeds of heroic proportions, as is evident in the popular discourse of
transformation in which states of so-called organisational turn-around, revitalisation
and performative excellence are attributed causally to the deeds of high-profile,
larger-than-life figures. Exceptional leadership, then, is individually ‘focused’ leader-
ship and in this sense is the antithesis of distributed leadership. The popularity of
focused exceptionalism stems from its attraction as a presumed solution to the
problem of motivating and mobilising a workforce, with a view to securing enhanced
levels of employee output and productivity in a competitive global economy. Its
status is also fuelled by a wider culture of narcissism and romanticism in which
control by so-called ‘ordinary functionaries’ has proven incapable of fulfilling popu-
lar fantasies of organisational leadership (Gabriel 1997).
Despite its seductive appeal, exceptionalism rests on a false assumption. As was
282 P. Gronn

suggested earlier, while they canonise individualist leadership, the proponents of

exceptional leadership downplay or demonise management. Typical here is Bennis
and Nanus’ (1985: 21, original italicised) notorious dismissal of managers as ‘people
who do things right’ compared with leaders who ‘do the right thing’. But this
contrast between ‘things right’ and ‘the right thing’ is both epistemologically and
empirically unsound. Epistemologically, it is an attempt to resurrect the traditional
distinction between facts and values [5]. Thus, ‘things right’ reduces to competence
or technical mastery, whereas ‘the right thing’ implies desirable ends, purposes or
values. Yet, LT#4’s case highlights the falsity of this reasoning. In the dialogue
between utterances 1 and 25, LT#4 exemplifies his capacity to fulfil the complexi-
ties of his timetabling responsibilities. From utterance 26 on, however, he indicates
that timetabling is not merely a technical matter for, on the ground of efficiency,
there may be more desirable ways of doing timetabling. Thus, to ‘make the job more
efficient’ (utterance 28) might mean computerising the production of the school
timetable. Such an innovation would have significant implications for colleagues. It
might, for example, introduce new lead times for determining curriculum prefer-
ences and it might alter the format for submitting timetable requests. These
possibilities mean that all colleagues would be required to change their work
practices by upskilling themselves, especially those who are relatively unschooled in
computing. Regardless of how the particular implications might play themselves out,
LT#4 has made a value judgement about the best way for the school to do
timetabling. Since LT#4 can be shown to be concerned with ‘the right thing’ as well
as ‘things right’, he shares the characteristics of both a leader and a manager, thus
vitiating the normative division of labour entrenched in the Bennis and Nanus
distinction.
Exceptionalism also generates some unintended and unhelpful consequences,
two of which are potentially toxic. First, while highlighting the presumed superiority
of leaders, the idea of exceptionalism serves to residualise non-leaders as ‘followers’
and to infantilise them, sheep-like, within a culture of dependency. For this reason,
some critics of leadership (e.g. Gabriel 1997) highlight the experience of non-
leadership as conducive to a sense of learned helplessness and disempowerment. A
second, and potentially more damaging, consequence for systemic and organisa-
tional capability is that exceptionalism creates strong incentives for individuals to
disengage from the pursuit of career roles that carry with them expectations of
leadership. That is, if organisation members learn to associate leadership with the
kinds of superlative, larger-than-life behaviour displayed by their high profile man-
agers, they begin to feel ‘othered’. When exceptionalism becomes the overriding
expectation, it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy by normalising itself. People begin to
measure themselves according to the new norm and experience themselves as
wanting. Thus, the sheer intensity of the work patterns of leaders modelled before
their eyes prompts colleagues to question whether in their own case they have ‘what
it takes’, and also whether they want to have what it takes, for the bar to be
surmounted (in the form of numerous role demands and responsibilities) to attain
recognition as a leader is seen to be set way too high. The difficulty currently
experienced by a number of education systems in replenishing their existing stocks
 Leadership: who needs it? 283

of school principals (see Gronn & Rawlings-Sanaei 2003), for example, is a striking
illustration of what happens when teachers begin to disengage from leadership. In
this regard, while LT#4 might be cited as an exemplary organisational citizen who,
while he countenanced the possibility (later in the interview) of becoming an
assistant principal, harboured absolutely no ambition to be a principal. ‘I don’t think
I want the responsibility of running a school, and the buck always stops with the
principal’, he said.

Discipline by Design
Exceptionalism, then, represents the triumph of superleadership. Despite the caveats
just voiced, a graphic instance of the institutionalisation of exceptionalism is the
recent adoption of standards for school leaders. Standards-based regimes for school
leaders represent a modality of leader formation that may be termed ‘designer-
leadership’ (Gronn 2003b: 7–26). Leadership by design, where the notion of
focused individual leader causality has now become entrenched as a kind of
explanatory default option, is my final area of concern. It represents the quintes-
sence of Foucault’s (1995) notion of the disciplined subject.
Historically, for Foucault (1995), as part of a micro-physics of power, disci-
plinary regimes of control, a number of which emerged out of medieval monasti-
cism, provided means of subjugating bodies in the interests of docility and utility. By
various acts of appropriation, individual bodies or bodily attributes were codified for
distribution to a variety of disciplinary spaces, both physical (e.g. factories, cells,
wards, classrooms) and analytical (e.g. therapeutic categories, illnesses). In the
Foucauldian cosmology, ‘discipline’ is accomplished through a range of technolo-
gies, such as timetables (which, inter alia, articulate rhythms of regularity and a
moral economy of time), and supervisory and surveillance practices subsumed under
the shorthand term ‘gaze’. In this sense, presumably, LT#4 would be neither a
leader nor a manager for Foucault, but a mere technician of power. Indeed,
leadership is part of the coercive apparatus of power, for one leads ‘according to
mechanisms of coercion that are, to varying degrees, strict’, and ‘within a more or
less open field of possibilities’ (Foucault 2000: 341). So totalistic is the Foucauldian
conception of power that, from the point of view of the earlier theme of visibilisation,
the gaze, so-called, exposes every aspect of human conduct to scrutiny: for the
individual, there is simply nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. The inherently
sinister nature of the gaze is symbolised by the panopticon. But an even more
sinister form of discipline is disciplined subjectivity. This state of being is accom-
plished whenever individuals willingly subjugate their own identities and disposi-
tions to normative regimes which require the acquisition of desired aptitudes and
behaviour. For Foucault, then, power expresses itself in its most menacing in-
tensified guise when individuals position themselves in a field of normalcy and
subject themselves to a normalising judgement.
This notion of disciplined subjectivity is at once a point of the connection
between Foucault and designs for leaders, and a point of divergence. Elsewhere
(Gronn 1999, 2002b), I have argued that, historically, systems of leader replenish-
284 P. Gronn

ment have tended to be organised in accordance with one of three broad sets of
principles: ascription, achievement and, most recently, customisation. While ascrip-
tion generated a particularistic form of leadership that conformed to a class-based
male code of gentility, systems of achievement realised the idea of the pursuit of
leadership roles grounded in the impersonal, universalistic knowledge of the acad-
emy. Customisation differs from both these principles for it stipulates a predefined
type (i.e. a design for leadership) that is embodied in standards to which aspiring
and practising leaders are expected to conform and it places the judgement about
the conformity of practice in the hands of auditing and inspectorial agents accredited
by the standardiser, typically a state agency. In Foucauldian terms, the normalising
of leadership is accomplished by a regulatory rhetorical framework of a range of
anticipated behaviours such as the following which, incidentally, invokes a binary
discussed earlier in this paper: ‘A school administrator is an educational leader who
promotes the success of all students by …’ (Gronn 2003b: 15). Both prospective and
aspiring leader cohorts fall within the purview (or gaze) of the state through the
processes of initial and ongoing accreditation of school leaders. In this way, the
subjectivities of school leaders become self-disciplined, provided they decide to
subject themselves to the apparatus of control and its assumptions, for then they
have chosen to ‘normalise themselves’ by acting in conformity with a leadership
design blueprint. But this choice is theirs and theirs alone. And this is the point of
divergence from Foucault, because while discipline systems for him are penal (i.e.
punitive), in the new world order of customised leadership, the principle of volun-
tarism still applies. That is, prospective school principals and senior school person-
nel decide for themselves (albeit from within existing sets of structural and cultural
relations), as part of their career trajectories, to submit themselves to the new
leadership formation regime or, as I have suggested, they may choose not to and
instead disengage. Despite the blandishments of their peers and superiors, no-one
necessarily coerces them to be, or to want to be, school leaders. In this sense,
leadership disengagement represents a disavowal of Foucauldian disciplined subject-
ivity.
Designer-leadership, then, may be thought of in terms comparable to other
design systems as akin to the technique of cloning. As a means of disciplining
leadership practice, cloning provides a politically attractive, demand-driven alterna-
tive to the kind of supply-side self-regulated professional norms belittled by neo-
liberals as evidence of ‘provider capture’. The reconstitution of leadership through
cloning, however, as I have pointed out elsewhere (Gronn 2003b), may be conduc-
ted in accordance with at least two different sets of norms, each of which appears to
be in tension with the other. The first is the normative behaviour-based approach to
standards just discussed. The second is the attempt to privilege various forms of
empirical data or ‘evidence’ of practice to drive leaders’ decisions. Whereas the latter
may be described as selective in its appropriation of practice (i.e. all knowledge other
than cumulative knowledge of ‘what works’ can be dismissed as dangerous or
unacceptable knowledge), the former is unequivocal in its denial of practice. Thus,
in terms reminiscent of accusations of professional provider capture, Murphy and
Shipman (1999: 217) suggest that mapping existing practice ‘would not be wise’ for
 Leadership: who needs it? 285

this would ‘advantage the status-quo in the profession (which we judged as an

undesirable state)’ and marginalise teaching and learning issues. Whether, how and
when these tensions will be resolved remains uncertain.

Towards a New Leadership Imagination?

In their recent mapping of the field of educational leadership, Gunter and Ribbins
(2002) distinguished five knowledge domains: conceptual, critical, humanistic,
evaluative and instrumental. In this paper, I have confined my remarks to aspects
which relate to their first two domains. This is because I have adopted a broadly
questioning or critical stance towards the entire conceptual validity of leadership. As
was suggested at the outset, the rationale for this critique is that in trying to better
understand leadership over 20 years or so, this concept has become more and more
problematic for me. In light of the six concerns that I have just identified, my answer
to the question of who needs leadership is directed, in sequence, to three main
audiences: the general public, policy-makers and the scholarly community. The first
two are dealt with briefly and the third at greater length.
The first point is that, if the term ‘leadership’ originated in everyday discourse
and its common sense meaning was appropriated for scholarly purposes, which was
the suggestion I cited from Calder (1977) then, in the absence of a more attractive
lexical candidate, leadership will presumably retain its popular currency. Second,
until such time as leadership begins to lose its potency or its symbolic political gloss
becomes tarnished, then politicians of all persuasions are likely to continue aligning
themselves with it to help shore up the legitimacy of their policy reform proposals.
Third, in regard to the scholarly community, my plea is for intellectual modesty, and
for a much more measured and parsimonious approach to leadership. In my recent
writings I have characterised the emerging phenomenon of work intensification as a
form of ‘greedy work’. In a similar vein, leadership has been transformed into an
over-indulged ‘greedy’ concept. That is, its conceptual and explanatory space has
now become unduly stretched, inflated and bloated by commentators who, frankly,
in their accounts of how schools and other organisations might be expected to
operate and accomplish their purposes, have imposed far too heavy a burden of
expectations on it. If, therefore, leadership is to retain any explanatory purchase,
these demands will need to be dramatically scaled down.
There are a number of ways to do this. One might be to rethink or dispense
with some of our prevailing assumptions about leadership. These include its individ-
ualism, its exaggerated sense of agency, its naive realist ontology, its presumed
causal potency and, in particular, the pet dualisms I referred to earlier. In this way,
the field might begin to shed itself of the conceit of exceptionalism. I hasten to add
that to abandon exceptionalism need not mean jettisoning a belief in the exceptional
capacities of individuals per se (although Shapin’s and Mukerji’s caveats about
‘genius’ are a salutary warning here), but merely discarding a commitment to
exceptionalism as a description of, and a prescription for, sound organisational
practice. Another possibility is to rethink leadership methodologically. When under-
taking research in a school, for example, a more parsimonious approach (in keeping
286 P. Gronn

with the spirit of the leader substitute idea) might mean not taking the presence of
leadership (or its absence, for that matter) for granted. Instead, it would be more
helpful if researchers were to inquire of prospective informants: first, whether they
perceive leadership to be manifest in the case study site; next, what they understand
by ‘leadership’; then, what form that leadership takes (i.e. is there one leader, more
than one leader or is leadership distributed between, say, couples?) and, finally, why
leadership might take this form. In these ways, the aggregated raw material gener-
ated by a leadership researcher would comprise empirically grounded knowledge of
contextualised perceptions and understandings, as well as some measure of the
extent of informants’ agreement about those matters. This material would then
provide a useful starting point from which to construct an analysis of the processes
that have helped to determine these working assumptions and the causal contribu-
tion made by leadership in accomplishing organisational outcomes, relative to other
candidate siblings in the family of terms.
A third possibility is to provide an alternative conceptualisation to the received
instrumental wisdom in the field. A fruitful candidate in this respect, to which I have
already made passing reference throughout the paper, might be ‘distributed leader-
ship’. Gunter and Ribbins (2002) chose this term to illustrate their typology, and in
a previous article (Gronn 2002a) I explored at length some of the properties of
‘distributed’ practice. There is insufficient space here to rehearse the entire
justification for, and the meaning and significance of, distributed leadership, but
some indication of the potential it opens up might be helpful. Far from this idea
being counterposed to focused leadership, in yet another unproductive binary, or
being dismissed by critics as a kind of nerdish counter-narrative which merely
trumpets the voices of the unexceptional in the face of the hegemony of the
exceptional, a distributed perspective on leadership should assist the overall project
of visibilising work and sharpen our understanding of work practices.
There has been a recent upsurge of interest in distributed leadership. This
interest is evident in a steady and expanding trickle of publications on distributed
phenomena and in a growing frequency of usage of the term ‘distributed’. A range
of factors accounts for this sudden take-off. One particularly important cluster of
considerations is concerned with the increasing complexity of work. Self-evidently,
work in schools and universities has intensified due to the huge array of mandatory
accountability and audit requirements as part of the price paid for self-managed
institutional autonomy within a culture of performativity. Again self-evidently, much
of this New Public Management control regime, with its panoply of surveillance
techniques and imposition of disciplined subjectivity, is only possible due to the
restructuring of work by networked information technology. Computerised work
practices, for example, demand previously unimagined levels of technical mastery
and cognitive flexibility on the part of employees while simultaneously vastly
extending the scope and reach of an organisation’s collective ‘intelligence’. It is the
intersection of these kinds of trends which should be the spur for leadership
researchers to re-examine the articulation of work, for their impact goes to the heart
of an organisation’s division of labour.
How does a division of labour operate? A division of labour is a dynamic
 Leadership: who needs it? 287

imperative in which there is a tension between task differentiation and task inte-
gration or, if it is preferred, fission and fusion. In brief, from time to time, due both
to external constraints and the seizing of opportunities and possibilities, the tasks
and activities that structure workflows begin to proliferate, mainly due to pressures
to specialise and redefine functions and operations within the labour process. While
these developments are occurring, these emerging specialisms are being reconfigured
into new systems of control and new designs for work. Now in these circumstances,
regardless of whether they have as their particular focus the reconfiguring of the
work of learning in schools, universities or other educational settings, commentators
and researchers require conceptual categories which will maximise their analytical
purchase on these trends. Prescriptively static dualisms, particularly those such as
‘leader–followers’ which presume or take for granted a division of labour, are unable
to respond adequately to this challenge. The reason is that the re-articulation of
work as part of the dynamic of the division of labour modifies two key elements of
employee relations: modes of interdependence and modes of coordination. And
attention to these actualities is vital if students of leadership are to comprehend how
different forms of work get done.
Interdependence between organisational agents is concerned with the ways in
which they fulfil their role responsibilities. While some formal responsibilities may be
discrete, others may overlap or complement one another. In practice, the degree of
complementarity and overlap may be greater than is commonly acknowledged. Nias
(1987: 31), for example, in her case study of an English primary school, notes that
‘interdependence was a characteristic of the whole staff’ and was not just confined
to the relationship between Audrey Proctor, the nursery infant school head, and
Julie Harris, her deputy. Role complementarity and overlap are sure signs that the
accomplishment of workplace responsibilities depends on reciprocal actions rather
than solo performance. Coordination, on the other hand, refers to the alignment and
management of the activities which, taken together, constitute particular work
projects or the totality of ongoing work. Coordination is facilitated by a variety
of scheduling, sequencing and control mechanisms. The effect of colleagues’
coordinated effort is to facilitate ‘conjoint agency’ (Gronn 2002a: 431) through their
cognitively aligned plans and their reciprocally experienced influence patterns.
Acknowledgement of the interplay of interdependence and coordination may be
informal or it may be formalised. Informal recognition was evident in the tacitly
understood working division of labour between Proctor and Harris, for example, for
Nias (1987: 39) shows that the latter’s classroom ‘morning round’ emerged in
response to a change in morning traffic patterns which meant that ‘Miss Proctor
could no longer get in early to school and since I [lived] locally we agreed that I’d
get there first thing’. By contrast, the deliberate sharing of a role space by two
co-principals, as part of a dual authority approach to school administration within
one Australian Catholic religious order, is a good illustration of the formalising of
interdependence and coordination (Gronn & Hamilton 2004).
The final contention of this paper is that, provided leadership can rework some
of its discursive rigidities, so as to more adequately account for and represent these
components of the division of labour, it may retain its conceptual utility. The reality
288 P. Gronn

of distributed practice signalled in the preceding passages and examples, however, is

unlikely to find universal acceptance. Those tempted, for whatever reason, to cling
to a version of focused exceptional leadership, might ponder the following irony. In
a variety of settings, a well-established norm for executive level managers (such as
CEOs, vice-chancellors, deans, principals, etc.), who are appointed as leaders to do
‘the right thing’, is to surround themselves with an apparatus of secretaries, personal
assistants, advisors, deputies and support groups. Why? A clue is found in remarks
to the effect that ‘the job is too big for one person’ or ‘I could not do this job without
X, my PA’. These comments are a statement of the obvious for, surely if such people
had the capacity to accomplish everything on their own, as such shorthand as ‘While
Y was the Managing Director of Acme, he turned its fortunes around’ suggests, they
might dispense with all their helpers. But does anyone seriously suggest this as a
possibility? To do their job properly (in the sense of fulfilling the responsibilities for
which they are accountable) they rely on many other people. If the ‘obviousness’ of
their comments is an acknowledgement of the inherently distributed nature of their
work, then the challenge for leadership commentators, it seems to me, is to begin to
take that obviousness literally.

NOTES
[1] For reasons of economy, I concentrate on ‘management’ and its derivatives, and assume for
present purposes that management and administration are synonymous.
[2] This transcript was obtained as part of the Readiness for Leadership project, for which
funding was received from the Monash University Small Grants scheme.
[3] ‘Leading teacher’ is the most senior teacher class career grade. New principals come mostly
from this class.
[4] CASES (Computerised Administrative Systemic Environment in Schools) is a networked
computerised management information program which is mandatory for all government
schools. It is the vehicle for schools’ transmission of a variety of outcome target-related and
evaluative data, and for their collation against state-wide and like-school benchmarked
performance norms.
[5] I am grateful to Nicholas Allix for this point.

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Notes on Author
Peter Gronn is currently Professor and Associate Dean (Development) in the Faculty of
Education, Monash University, where he was previously Associate Dean (Teaching). Peter has
had a longstanding interest in leadership. He has taught, researched and published on organisa-
tional and educational leadership for nearly two decades, and coordinates Master’s level leader-
ship programs in the Faculty. Peter is a member of five editorial boards, including School
Leadership & Management. His most recent book is The New Work of Educational Leaders (London:
Sage/Paul Chapman, 2003).
E-mail: peter.gronn@education.monash.edu.au