ABSTRACT

The current crisis makes leadership more visible and allows us to reflect on how leadership is conceived. In this essay, we consider how leadership has been represented during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic in articles published in the business and general press. We show that, while images of heroic leadership are prevalent in this popular discourse – reminding us vividly of the romance of leadership – other elements, such as references to plural and decentred forms of leadership can be seen as also coexisting in this discourse, while not necessarily being explicitly acknowledged. Opting for a plural, relational and processual conception of leadership allows us to reveal these under-recognized elements. This leads us to propose that these elements are not specific to leadership in times of crises, but are always constitutive of leading in practice. We conclude by arguing that renewing understandings of leadership may require that we acknowledge simultaneously the inevitable presence of romance(s) in how we approach this phenomenon as well as its collective and relational accomplishment. Referring, in turn, to the central phenomenon as leading rather than as leadership may help us reach beyond the seductiveness of the romance(s) of leadership to capture its inherent relationality.

摘要

当前的危机使领导力更加明显，并使我们能够反思领导力的构想。在这篇文章中，我们考虑了在 COVID-19 大流行的头几个月里，商业和一般媒体发表的文章中如何体现领导力。我们表明，虽然英雄领导的形象在这种流行的话语中普遍存在——生动地提醒我们领导的浪漫——其他元素，例如对多元化和去中心化领导形式的提及，也可以被视为在这种话语中并存，但并非如此。必然得到明确承认。选择多元的、相关的和过程性的领导力概念使我们能够揭示这些未被充分认识的元素。这使我们提出，这些要素并不是危机时期领导力所特有的，但始终是实践领先的组成部分。最后我们认为，更新对领导力的理解可能需要我们同时承认在我们如何处理这种现象以及它的集体和关系成就中不可避免地存在浪漫。反过来，将核心现象称为领导而不是领导可能会帮助我们超越领导浪漫的诱惑，以捕捉其内在的关系。