Nadine Steingruber
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Steingruber
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Nadine
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nadine.steingruber@student.unisg.ch

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  • Publication
    Why do heroic leadership and gender inequality persist? A paradox lens on change towards post-heroic leadership and gender equality
    ( 2023-07)
    Julia Nentwich orcid-logo
    ;
    Harald Tuckermann
    ;
    Nadine Steingruber
    The notion of leadership has changed dramatically over the last two decades. There is an increasing need for “post-heroic” leadership to approach complex, uncertain and interde-pendent tasks (Škerlavaj, 2022). Such “new” leadership is said to be more team-based (Yammarino et al., 2012), shared (Pearce, Conger & Lock, 2007), relational (Sanfuentes et al., 2020), more empowering followers (Collinson, 2005, p. 1422) and more participatory (Yukl, 1999). This “new” leadership is often referred to as “post-heroic” as it is focused on the relation, and not so much on the leader performing in any way (Collinson, 2005, p. 1422). However, the heroic leader is still prominent in today’s companies. One source of the resilience of heroic leadership is its association with masculinity (Fletcher, 2004). Depicting heroic leadership as masculine and post-heroic as more feminine associates gender and lead-ership to this gender binary. Hegemonic masculinity (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005) maintains heroic leadership and explains the exclusion of women from leadership positions. Gender equality in leadership hence remains a stalled revolution as long as the power effects of hegemonic masculinity are not up for reflection and change (Friedman, 2015). How can leadership be changed and gender equality facilitated? We have explored this question in 15 group discussions with Swiss male and female leaders. Investigating their sense-making revealed that these leaders are locked-in manoeuvring this topic in paradoxical ways. First, they consider heroic leadership ‘as old-fashioned and post-heroic leadership as a necessity of our times’ with the former ‘still powerful and often taken for granted’. Second, they discuss leadership as both ‘masculine’ and excluding women from leadership positions as well as ‘gender neutral’ and geared to organizational goals. Third, the participants believe that changing leadership will come naturally but also elaborate the need for leaders to be-come agentic. Applying a paradox lens, we zoom in on the above tensions. First, our analysis high-lights that post-heroic leadership and gender equality are not separate from but embedded in heroic leadership and gender inequality, respectively. Hence, agency is distributed asymmet-rically even for leaders due to power differences of their personal agency and that of others (Berti & Simpson, 2021). Second, our data suggests that unfolding the above tensions invites a context-specific experimental approach. Third, such an approach starts with leaders’ in-sight of being part of the problem in order to be part of the solution (Kahane, 2017). We the-orize this insight as a self-referential both/and approach of male leaders to depict the situa-tion in which they find themselves in when experimenting with post-heroic leadership and gender equality. Experimenting within the realm of their domain results not only from the surrounding dominance, but also from their own positioning within that setting.
    Type: conference paper
    URI: https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/handle/20.500.14171/117679
  • Publication
    Paradoxes of Post-heroic Leadership: Why do heroic leadership and gender inequality persist?
    ( 2023-09-08)
    Julia Nentwich orcid-logo
    ;
    Harald Tuckermann
    ;
    Nadine Steingruber
    The notion of leadership has changed dramatically over the last two decades. Particularly “post-heroic” leadership is said to be needed when it comes to approaching complex task that come with uncertainty and interdependence (Škerlavaj, 2022). However, while new leader-ship seems to discard the heroic notion of leadership, heroic leadership appears to be resilient still today (Fletcher, 2004). Furthermore, leadership is still strongly connected to masculinity. Depicting heroic leadership as masculine and post-heroic as more feminine associates gender and leadership according to the well-trodden path of the gender binary. Obviously, gender equality in leadership remains a stalled revolution as long as the power effects of hegemonic masculinity are not up for reflection and change. How can leadership be changed and gender equality facilitated? We have explored this question in 15 group discussions with male and female leaders in Switzerland. Investigat-ing their sense-making of leadership and gender equality revealed that leaders are locked-in manoeuvring in paradoxical ways. Zooming in on the paradoxical structure of the problem of changing leadership and gender we show that both post-heroic leadership and gender equality are not so much stand-alone alternatives but embedded within heroic leadership and gender inequality respectively. Hence, agency is distributed asymmetrically, and it is the power dif-ferences that need to be taken into account more thoroughly (Berti & Simpson, 2021). Theorizing the persistence of gender change and post heroic leadership with a paradox perspective we are contributing several important insights. First, moving to an both/and ap-proach contributes fresh insights to the literatures on promoting post-heroic leadership and the stalled revolutions of gender change. So far, the debates here heavily relied on either/or approaches that the paradox lens predicts to fail. Furthermore, and with regards to the litera-ture on paradox we are contributing an empirical example of the restrictions and possibilities that emerge when promoting a marginalized element – post-heroic leadership and gender equality – within the hegemony of masculinity and heroic leadership.
    Type: conference contribution
    URL: https://www.hslu.ch/de-ch/soziale-arbeit/agenda/veranstaltungen/2023/09/07/new-work-2023/
    URI: https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/handle/20.500.14171/117676