TY - JOUR
T1 - Being more with less
T2 - Exploring the flexible political leadership identities of government ministers
AU - Lees-Marshment, Jennifer
AU - Smolović Jones, Owain
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgments This research was financially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 21403257).
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2018.
PY - 2018/8/1
Y1 - 2018/8/1
N2 - The paper focuses on the identity work of government ministers, exploring how they experience themselves in relation to contemporary demands and discourses of leadership and democracy. We note a substantial number of studies seeking to develop theories of political and public leadership, particularly in more collaborative directions, but no studies that seek to explore how such demands are experienced by the political leaders who occupy leadership roles. We adopt a poststructuralist approach to identity as a means of empirically exploring how government ministers construct their identities. Drawing on 51 interviews with senior politicians, we propose a model of flexible political leadership identity, which argues that just as public agencies in these austere times are asked to do more with less, so political leaders seem to need to be more but with less perceived discretionary power. We propose four identities that answer quite different leadership demands: ‘the consultor’, ‘the traveller,’ ‘the adjudicator’ and ‘the master.’ These are semi-occupied identities, partial fulfilments of contemporary but contradictory leadership discourses. We conclude the paper with a reflection on how our findings might inform future research and leadership development interventions.
AB - The paper focuses on the identity work of government ministers, exploring how they experience themselves in relation to contemporary demands and discourses of leadership and democracy. We note a substantial number of studies seeking to develop theories of political and public leadership, particularly in more collaborative directions, but no studies that seek to explore how such demands are experienced by the political leaders who occupy leadership roles. We adopt a poststructuralist approach to identity as a means of empirically exploring how government ministers construct their identities. Drawing on 51 interviews with senior politicians, we propose a model of flexible political leadership identity, which argues that just as public agencies in these austere times are asked to do more with less, so political leaders seem to need to be more but with less perceived discretionary power. We propose four identities that answer quite different leadership demands: ‘the consultor’, ‘the traveller,’ ‘the adjudicator’ and ‘the master.’ These are semi-occupied identities, partial fulfilments of contemporary but contradictory leadership discourses. We conclude the paper with a reflection on how our findings might inform future research and leadership development interventions.
KW - government ministers
KW - identity
KW - Political leadership
KW - power
KW - public input
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85051827819&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/1742715016687815
DO - 10.1177/1742715016687815
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85051827819
VL - 14
SP - 460
EP - 482
JO - Leadership
JF - Leadership
SN - 1742-7150
IS - 4
ER -