This article examines how political leaders construct leadership through digital impression management during electoral campaigns and how these strategies are associated with audience engagement. Drawing on leadership theory, we distinguish between universal, or generalised role-based, prototypicality and group prototypicality, and conceptualise negative opponent-focused communication as contrastive leadership construction. We analyse Facebook posts published by incumbent Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and challenger Péter Márki-Zay during the 2022 Hungarian parliamentary election. Using quantitative content analysis and negative binomial regression models, we assess how different signalling strategies are associated with total reactions and Love reactions, interpreted as indicators of engagement and affective resonance rather than direct impression formation. The findings reveal no uniform pattern of audience response. Positive universal prototypicality was associated with higher engagement in Márki-Zay’s communication but with lower engagement in Orbán’s. Group-based signalling was central to both campaigns but showed more limited and uneven associations, with positive group representation linked to stronger affective engagement in Orbán’s communication. Negative opponent-focused strategies were associated with increased overall engagement, particularly for Márki-Zay, but were less effective in eliciting positive affect. The study contributes to leadership theory by conceptualising digital impression management as a relational process in which leadership claims acquire significance through their reception within particular leader–follower contexts.
This paper examines resistance to leadership and how it operates across the hierarchy in a large organization. Based on a case study of an international manufacturing organization that needs to become more sustainable in its core business, this study identifies three dialectics: control/resistance, power/identity, and leader/follower which affected internal stakeholders’ views on the company’s sustainability improvements and, consequently, their resistance to leadership. By exploring the often dynamics at play in this initiative, the article contributes to a deeper understanding of the dialectical forces involved when leaders do not attempt sufficiently to implement strategic change, particularly in a contested arena such as sustainability.
Leadership research has increasingly acknowledged the destructive consequences of narcissistic leadership, yet existing work largely conceptualises these effects as behavioural excesses or attitudinal deficits. This paper advances a different argument: that narcissistic leadership operates through a distinctive emotional mechanism that systematically reallocates emotional regulation, affirmation, and identity maintenance from leaders to followers. We introduce Emotional Extraction Leadership (EEL) as a process-based conceptual framework describing leadership contexts in which followers are compelled to absorb, manage, and stabilise leaders’ emotional needs under conditions of asymmetric power. Drawing on an integrative theory-building review across leadership, emotion, and identity literatures, we theorise how emotional labour becomes not merely an occupational demand but a form of emotionally structured governance. Over time, such extraction generates identity harm: the erosion of professional self-concept, moral coherence, and agentic voice, extending beyond commonly examined outcomes such as burnout or dissatisfaction. By reframing emotional labour as a site of power rather than coping, this paper contributes a process model linking narcissistic power, emotional regulation displacement, and identity harm. The concept of EEL offers a generative framework for rethinking destructive leadership, foregrounding emotion as a mechanism of control and opening new directions for empirical and ethical inquiry in leadership studies.
Firms struggle to translate sustainability ambitions into innovation practices, especially in crisis contexts where leaders must navigate ambiguity, competing demands, and rapid change. This study examines how top managers use sense-related practices to cultivate an adaptive space for sustainability-oriented innovation (SOI) under crisis-induced conditions. Drawing on an in-depth, process-oriented case study of Plast, a Scandinavian plastic packaging firm responding to a business crisis amid the EU plastic ban, we investigate how such practices enable the emergence of an adaptive space as a socio-cognitive arena where novel ideas, practices, and solutions can take shape. Our findings show that leadership for crisis-induced SOI is enacted through situated interpretive and communicative practices that generate an adaptive space between formal organizational structures and emergent change dynamics. Top managers cultivate this space by framing urgency, using narratives and metaphors to reorient shared understandings, and sustaining collective engagement across the formulation, initiation, and implementation of SOI strategies. These practices enable novel ideas to be generated, negotiated, and integrated into organizational action. The study contributes to leadership research by offering an in-situ empirical account of how leaders enact sense-related practices in SOI contexts. It adds to complexity leadership theory by showing how an adaptive space is created through an intersubjective process of sense-related episodes, offering a processual and context-sensitive understanding of leadership in sustainability transitions. It also provides empirical insight into how language, framing, narratives, and collaborative meaning-making can support strategic change in response to sustainability challenges.
This article introduces civilizational depth as an undertheorized dimension of context in critical leadership studies. Through a comparative analysis of three Nobel Prize–associated peace processes of the 1990s—Northern Ireland, South Africa, and the Oslo Accords—it argues that institutional design, rational-choice incentives, and leadership agency are necessary but insufficient conditions to explain why the first two processes culminated in negotiated settlements, whereas the third ended in implosion. The missing variable is the civilizational environment (sacralized territory, metaphysical claims, and millennial temporal horizons) within which leadership is enacted. Drawing on Braudel’s longue durée , the article demonstrates that leadership effectiveness varied with the civilizational depth of the context. Peace-making was feasible in the ‘thin’ contexts of the first two processes, where identity claims could be politically reframed, institutionally mediated, and embedded within wider structures of democratic legitimation. By contrast, the Israel–Palestine conflict remained constrained by civilizational spoilers that rendered negotiated settlement unattainable. The article reconceptualizes leadership as a situated and discursive practice whose possibilities are conditioned by historically sedimented symbolic environments. In ‘thick’ civilizational contexts, leadership is less about resolving conflict than containing antagonism and sustaining political possibility. ‘Civilizational’ leadership involves the disciplined practice of working within the constraints. Its primary objective is navigating and reframing inherited structures; and its deployment hinges on sensitivity and fluency in the discursive management of civilizational meaning. The implications extend beyond the context of peace-making to contemporary politics, where identity conflict, religion, and quasi-religious forms of political mobilization are becoming increasingly salient.
This article contributes to critical leadership studies by building on Dennis Tourish's (2023) call to confront the authoritarian and fascistic dimensions of contemporary leadership. Focusing on the case of an Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, it explores how emotional control, symbolic performance, and epistemic closure are used to consolidate power within democratic fa & ccedil;ades. While dominant leadership theories often celebrate charisma and moral vision, this paper critiques their normative assumptions by showing how such traits can legitimise exclusion and suppress dissent. Through a critical analysis of Edi Rama's leadership, this article illustrates how populist authority is sustained through affective and narrative practices. In doing so, it extends current debates by offering a non-Western case that highlights how democratic structures may enact authoritarian-populist rule.
Purpose: The aim of this paper is to explore how business managers in an academic medical centre experienced and talked about their work and leadership practices during the COVID-19 crisis, with particular attention to relational practices and role attribution. Design/methodology/approach: We conducted a qualitative-interpretive study in a Dutch university hospital, drawing on at-home ethnography, in-depth interviewing, elicitation techniques, and member check focus groups. Findings: When business managers describe leadership in general, they tend to draw on the language of skills and competencies. Yet, when reflecting on their own crisis practices, they foreground relational practices and emphasize how colleagues and senior leaders attributed leadership to them. Three themes stand out: (1) crises magnify existing organizational strengths and weaknesses; (2) listening, shielding, and supporting team members become central practices; and (3) decision-making is inseparable from building trust and connecting internal networks. Originality/value: This study contributes to leadership research by showing how everyday managerial activities - such as listening, supporting, making decisions, protecting, and connecting - were enacted and recognized as leadership during crisis. We argue that these practices gained significance not through individual competence alone but through relational processes of role attribution, thereby offering a more situated understanding of leadership in healthcare crises.
In this essay, I argue for the development of regenerative business leadership as a means of supporting systems-wide change. Doing so requires addressing a root problem: the tendency to anchor the purpose of business leadership primarily in profit and self-interest. I first examine how this profit orientation has often been attributed to Adam Smith, and I offer an alternative reading of his work centred on enlightened self-interest. I then draw on the tragedy of the commons and the interconnected "grand challenges" facing humanity to argue for a regenerative approach to business grounded in good growth. I briefly contrast good growth with degrowth, and explain why degrowth can, paradoxically, also be understood as threatening to human flourishing. To add empirical texture to these arguments, I summarise a case drawn from ongoing work. Throughout, I adopt an explicitly normative and optimistic stance, on the premise that addressing contemporary challenges requires the imagination and pursuit of radical hope in the possibilities such as regenerative business leadership.
While leadership theories often celebrate empathy and accommodation, this exploratory quantitative study reveals how the excessive manifestation of these behaviours-defined here as niceness rather than genuine kindness-crosses into toxicity, undermining organisational health. Based on a survey of 380 Jordanian employees, I exploratorily map excessively accommodating leadership as a passive-toxic style marked by: (1) chronic conflict avoidance; (2) pathological indecisiveness, delaying decisions; (3) reliance on a narrow inner circle, marginalizing dissent; (4) self-aggrandizing narratives; (5) failure to enforce accountability; and (6) exploitable leniency, undermining productivity. The six factors align with the toxic triangle framework: conflict avoidance, pathological indecisiveness, and accountability failure represent leader-driven behaviours; exploitable leniency and inner-circle reliance reflect enabling environmental conditions, such as weak accountability systems and informal relational favouritism; and self-aggrandizing narratives, alongside subordinates' perceptions, mediate the transformation of seemingly benign behaviours into toxic outcomes. Findings demonstrate that leaders who are too nice inadvertently foster environments where manipulative subordinates thrive, high performers disengage, and mediocrity becomes entrenched. By integrating toxic leadership theory with critiques of servant leadership, I reframe excessive accommodation as a passive-toxic behaviour distinct from overt aggression, providing the first structural mapping of this novel construct. Practical implications urge organisations to train leaders in courageous kindness-balancing empathy with the resolve to enforce standards.
