The Spines of Leaders: Complicating One's Self

• In Event: Using Weick to Understand, Explore, and Sense-Make: Implications for School Organizations and the Development of Educational Leaders

Abstract

Purpose of the Paper

Our aim is to contextualize Weick's (1978) chapter, "The spines of leaders," and to examine its application within organizational studies, including educational leadership. We consider several connections between this chapter and Weick's later works that have profoundly affected the field of organizational studies.

Conceptual Framework

When people refer to leaders as spineless, they usually mean that leaders are weak, ineffectual, or indecisive. Yet with gentle humor and careful analytic thinking, Weick’s (1978) chapter indicated how thinking about leaders as spineless could help us better understand what distinguishes better leaders from poorer ones and discover what they do. Using three kinds of spines (steel, plastic, and bony) as a metaphoric framework, Weick questioned conceptualizations of leaders at the time and turned underlying assumptions upside-down.

Put into historical context, this chapter was published early in Weick’s career and at the cusp of a paradigm shift in how people viewed leaders (e.g., McCall & Lombardo, 1978). Weick was intrigued with the complexity of the role of leaders and the chapter foreshadowed his ever-evolving thinking and long-term interest in leadership, organizations, and sensemaking (Weick, 1995).

Data Sources

Selections of Weick's early and later literature were reviewed, as well as reviews of his work. Also examined was scholarship from organizational learning and educational leadership literatures to illustrate Weick’s influence on education.

Results

The authors trace linkages between this chapter and Weick’s later contributions to the fields of organizational studies and education. Over time, Weick remained committed to a deepening of scholarship on key ideas introduced in this chapter through provocative metaphors. They represented a call for openness, sensemaking, and problem solving within organizations. He suggested that researchers were themselves limiting understanding of leaders and suggested avenues that might be useful in understanding what leaders actually do on the job. His subsequent in-depth treatments of the topics introduced in the chapter showed that he was perfectly willing to change his own thinking, just as he advised leadership researchers to do in 1978.

The authors also indicate how concepts in this early contribution have informed the study of organizational learning and leadership in the field of education (e.g., Collinson & Cook, 2007); Hart’s (1990) discussion of docile or "passive" principal leadership; and Scribner, Crow, López, and Murtadha's (2011) case studies of principals denoting leaders who can absorb and transmit more valuable information from the environment.
Importance

Weick's influence has been "profound," turning the "attention of organization scholars from structures to processes, from the relevance of academia to the relevance of the field, from mystification to imaginative interpretation" (Czarniawska, 2005). Weick’s (1978) chapter foreshadowed the complexity of leadership and the importance of open-mindedness and sensemaking for problem solving, relationships, and interdependence among leaders and followers. It also foreshadowed the “logic of attraction” (Weick & Quinn, 1999), organizations as “interpretation systems” (Daft & Weick, 1984), and the intersection of organizational leaders, members, and the environment.

Authors

• Sharon C. Conley, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Vivienne R. Collinson, Michigan State University