The Fallacy of Misplaced Leadership

Conventional ideas of leadership tend to hold an instinctive conviction about the characteristics of key people independently from the cultural and institutional settings that shape the meanings and interpretations we use to apprehend leadership behaviour. This normative position accords an ontological privilege to the absolutely distinct individual. Contemporary management research has now begun to pay attention to leadership as a process in context. However, the full implications of this insight are seldom drawn out. The paper will explore how a perspective of process metaphysics challenges ideas of both possessive individualism and differential relations that can be simply located. The aim will be to see how the study of leadership shifts from these partial expressions to a more thorough understanding of its complete relation. The paper will explore some methodological implications of this way of thinking for future leadership research.