Conventional theory, which dominates current understanding of leadership in the police, neglects to consider leadership as a complex and dynamic social process. This chapter explores the key principles of critical leadership studies and the theories of followership and shared and distributed leadership as alternative perspectives, and considers their relevance to police leadership. We argue that a social-constructionist approach to leadership, where leadership is considered as a product of historical, cultural and institutional processes, has an important contribution to the understanding of leadership in the police.
Influenced by the principles of critical management studies, critical leadership studies, as an emerging strand of leadership research, represents a body of work that ‘denaturalises’ the basic assumptions of conventional theory (Collinson, 2005a; Grint, 2005b; Ford, 2010). Rather than being concerned with effectiveness or efficiency in leadership, critical leadership scholars consider leadership as a dynamic, negotiated, emergent and contested process. As Hosking (1997: 293) explains:
We need to understand leadership, and, for this, it is not enough to understand what leaders do. Rather, it is essential to focus on leadership processes: processes in which influential acts of organising contribute to the structuring of interactions and relationships, activities and sentiments; processes in which definitions of social order are negotiated, found acceptable, implemented and renegotiated; processes in which interdependencies are organised in ways which, to a greater or lesser degree, promote the values and interests of social order.
The work of critical leadership scholars is influenced by Meindl et al’s (1985) concept of the ‘romance of leadership’, which refers to the ‘false assumption making’ of the exaggerated importance of leadership in mainstream discourse and a leader-centric understanding in which leadership is romanticised, idealised and understood as essential (Meindl, 1995).
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