Organizational Culture and Leadership: Exploring the Practice of Leadership in a Women’s Circle

• In Event: Theorizing and Making Meaning to Advance the Women and Leadership Scholarship Agenda

Short Description

This critical, collaborative ethnographic study explores the culture of leadership in a women's circle with a focus on enacted power, leadership identity, and the practices of shared leadership. The circular and interconnected structure that supports participative and inclusive leadership will be highlighted.

Detailed Abstract

With 86% of respondents to the 2014 World Economic Forum Survey on the Global Agenda agreeing that the world faces a crisis of leadership, it is not surprising that a lack of leadership is third on the list of “Top 10 Trends of 2015” (Shahid, 2015). Failed leadership along with a weakening of representative democracy (Gore, 2015) has contributed not only to our intractable global problems such as poverty and environmental degradation but also to the financial meltdown and organizational corruption. While there is some variability by world region, collaboration is consistently perceived as one of the top three leadership skills desperately needed (Gergen, 2015) along with “a prioritization of social justice and well-being over financial growth; empathy; courage; (and) morality…” (Shahid, 2015, p. 15). Inclusive leadership that embraces diversity and non-privileged participation is positioned to answer this call for new leadership. But what does this type of leadership look like? New models are needed… or perhaps old models need to be rediscovered and illuminated.

For critical researchers, styles of leadership match organizational structures and functions in a predictable way (Hughes, Ginnet, & Murphy, 2009). By attending to the symbolic and sometimes invisible boundaries of organizations in a discussion of leadership and power, it can reveal what leaders include and exclude (Rutherford, 2001). In contrast to the dominant/ conventional paradigm of “corporate masculinity” where power is asserted in a top-down manner and within which participants are expected to segment and subordinate their life interest to work and career, the participatory leader is embedded in a structure that is circular and interconnected (Maier, 2014). In this alternative paradigm, metaphorically feminine gendered, the organization is perceived as a web of relationships, of which the titular leader is but one player. Leaders at all levels perceive their organizational lifeworld fundamentally in “we” terms (in contrast to “me” terms), and see their work as but one meaningful component of their existence (Maier, 2014).

This research project explores how a shift occurs from authoritative leadership to more collaborative or participatory leadership changes organizational structure and norms (Hughes, Ginnet & Murphy, 2009). Exploring participatory leadership as it is practiced within a “women's circle” enables a rare context to examine leadership. The structures of women’s groups are designed to enable the work by being specifically leaderless, where each participant’s voice is valued and peer-equality is assumed (Walker & Schubert, 1987). The proposition of this study is that the enactment of leadership in an explicit circle structure is an alternative paradigm to conventional leadership within organizations and which has the potential to advance understanding of the current shift in leadership paradigm toward more inclusivity.

This study is a critical, collaborative, ethnography intended to explore culture as it is experienced in daily life and socially constructed within a power structure. Critical ethnography addresses processes of unfairness and injustice (Madison, 2005); because our context is a feminist culture, we took one step further toward democratization of our research, and intentionally developed the research as a collaboration. Researchers involved in collaborative ethnography not only immerse themselves in a culture to observe it, but also engage individuals in the culture to take part in the inquiry, analysis and dissemination of results (Chang, Ngunjiri, & Hernandez, 2013).

The context of the study is a women’s collective—“The Circle”—in a midsize Canadian city. The Circle’s mission as stated on its website is: “Inspired by the feminist perspective ‘the personal is political,’ The Circle also aspires to enlighten and enliven women on a wide range of issues such as activism, social justice, environmentalism, women’s rights, human rights, feminism and feminist spirituality” (www.thecircle.ca). Following Research Ethics Board approval, theoretical sampling with maximum variation (Miles & Huberman, 2014) was used to recruit eleven member informants as the collaborative research team. We employed an insider/outsider research perspective (Gioia, Thomas, Clark, & Chittipeddi, 1994) with the co-investigator as the insider (i.e., a member of The Circle) and the PI as the outsider.

Included for triangulation of data (Reeves, Kuper, & Hodges, 2008) are: written personal narratives; video recordings of eight monthly gatherings (October 2015 – June 2016); and other ethnographic data gathering techniques such as visual maps and diagrams to indicate position in the culture and decision-making processes as well as photos of artifacts used in circle processes. All audio recordings of group interaction from the video are being transcribed verbatim. Archival documents help to position The Circle within its wider institutional context. Ethnographers seek patterns and anomalies, and look for ways to explain what is being perceived in immersion. The participant research team is inductively coding the data (Mills & Birks, 2014) and the discourse is being reviewed and discussed within the gatherings. Where appropriate, this documentation is being approached from the philosophy of Foucault, which explores the ways that the subject is constructed in the dominant discourse through a scrutiny of the power structures that surround The Circle (Finlay & Ballinger, 2006).

Shared leadership was modelled from ancient matriarchy and included ceremony, the invoking of the sacred, and a structure that is circular and cyclical. Among the participants, there is growing awareness that the structure of conversation (e.g., huddle and lean in) changes the dynamic of the conversation. A key preliminary finding of the collaborative study is that to reach "resonance" (a solution arrived by authentic consensus-making), all parties must be willing to explore "dissonance" and the incongruous beliefs or experience that limit that outcome.

While this research is still underway, it is clear that the practice of leadership in a women's circle points to new understanding of collaborative leadership. We are beginning to understand how The Circle works and the value of story, metaphor, insight, and inclusion to address the most difficult problems in the world. While most literature on leadership focuses on the leader individualistically or leader relationships, our research underway includes not only inclusive group processes but also organizational structural elements that enhance inclusivity.

Participants

• Marlene Janzen Janzen Le Ber, Brescia University College

• Tracy Robinson, Western University