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Leadership: an action research approach

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Abstract

The role of leadership in the twenty-first century is challenging and varied, with changes often impacting across national borders. Leadership is a process, involving reciprocal influence. It has shortcomings and limitations, but in optimum conditions it can harmoniously harness and synthesize relevant knowledge, make sense of environmental features and changes, and co-generate new knowledge, usually in response to strategic demands and exigencies. Leadership responsibilities are all encompassing and require a holistic overview. Participatory action research is the chosen methodological vehicle, supported by various research instruments. There is ongoing active engagement, including with a non-governmental organisation ABC, where the researcher has an advisory role.

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Notes

  1. Stakeholders are those individuals or groups that experience harm or benefit from an organization’s actions (Donaldson and Preston 1995) both in the short and the long run. Primary constituencies maintain formal, official, or contractual relations and have a direct economic impact on the organization, more particularly investors, employees past and present or their representatives, e.g. trade unions, lenders, etc. Secondary constituencies and all others who can influence an organization or are affected by it (Savage et al. 1991), these include consumers, intermediaries and those in the supply chain, public authorities, monitoring bodies and agencies, as well as the future generation for whom we hold the world in trust (R. Ennals, personal communication).

  2. Discretion exists when there is an absence of constraint and when means-end ambiguity is great. It emanates from the environment, the organization and from the executive’s own orientation.

  3. “Experiential knowing means unrestricted perception and radical meeting. The former is the creative shaping of a world through the transaction of imaging it. The latter is participative empathy, through which we commune with the inner experience of beings and their modes of awareness. The transaction of imaging a world is not restricted to sense perception, but includes productive imagination and extra-sensory perception… I suggested that these kinds of knowing are a systematic whole, a pyramid of upwards support in which experiential knowing at the base upholds presentational knowing, which supports propositional or conceptual knowing, which upholds practical knowing, the exercise of skill.” (John Heron, Co-operative Inquiry, 1996, page 52).

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  1. Centre for Working Life Research, Kingston Business School, Kingston University, Kingston Hill, KT2 7LB, UK

    Nazir Walji

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Walji, N. Leadership: an action research approach. AI & Soc 23, 69–84 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-007-0162-x

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