An inhospitable world

In November 2016, the United States Republican nominee, Donald Trump, was elected to become the country's 45th President. The night that his victory was announced, former Ku Klux Klan (KKK) leader, David Duke, described the event as ‘one of the most exciting nights of my life’. Shortly after his inauguration, President Trump signed an executive order halting all refugee admissions and temporarily barring people from seven Muslim-majority countries from travel to the United States. Although the original order was forced to be rescinded after it met with immediate protests and severe criticism, the United States Supreme Court eventually upheld a moderated version of the ban that settled on immigration restrictions against people from Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.

In the year leading up to Trump's election, Britain's vote to leave the European Union (Brexit) was steered by a campaign that relied heavily on anti-immigration rhetoric. In June 2016, Nigel Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) at the time, issued a poster where ‘BREAKING POINT’ shrieked in red lettering across a photograph of thousands of refugees fleeing war and persecution in Slovenia in 2015, imploring voters that ‘we must break free of the EU and take back control of our borders’. Although this poster, which bore a startling resemblance to an anti-Semitic Nazi campaign, was widely condemned by politicians, the message tapped into an emotional undercurrent of nationalism flowing beneath this once voracious empire.

Enshrining figures like Trump and Farage in positions of power legitimized a virulent backlash to change. At a white nationalist rally in August 2017, an attendee drove his car into a crowd of anti-fascist counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, fatally injuring social activist Heather Heyer. In his response, President Trump condemned what he described in his statement as ‘hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides’, generating the impression that he saw the white nationalists and anti-fascist counterprotesters as equally culpable in the violence.

Following the Brexit vote, police statistics showed a significant increase in race-based hate crime including verbal abuse and death threats, physical assaults, arson attacks and stabbings. The targets of such attacks in the UK were primarily Eastern European migrants and Muslims. Islamophobia meanwhile remains a firm feature in the United States.

The growing prominence of female executives in the last decade appears to portend a new era for women in leadership. The success of women like Sheryl Sandberg, whose business manual Lean In calls on women to ‘forge a path through the obstacles, and achieve their full potential’, has contributed to the idea that gender equality will be won in the free market of corporate leadership. In our postfeminist times, sexism is believed to be a relic of the past. Enlightened contemporary organizations have demolished systemic gender barriers and any odd case of discrimination is the fault of a deviant manager. With fervent conviction in their inherent meritocracy, organizations hold firm to an overriding focus on individual freedom. In this feminist utopia, female professionals are exhorted to ‘lean in’ and seize the myriad opportunities to become leaders.

This optimism requires turning a blind eye to systems of power and histories of oppression. Feminism, when recast in neoliberal terms, becomes an individualistic, entrepreneurial project. For example, both academic studies and practitioner handbooks have concluded with recommendations for women to cultivate an effective leadership style that strikes a balance between masculine and feminine behaviours, such as combining assertive agency with communal qualities of kindness, friendliness and helpfulness. As such, leadership continues to promote a hyperagentic individualist ideal, where women are told that we can single-handedly transform ourselves into valued commodities to be sold and traded as ‘leaders’. Meanwhile sexism becomes popularly characterized as an ‘unconscious’ bias that otherwise well-meaning managers can learn to overcome at half-day workshops.

The limitations of this individualism was demonstrated a few years ago when Marissa Mayer was appointed CEO of Yahoo. Six months pregnant at the time, Mayer negotiated for a nursery to be built in her office so that she could balance her caring responsibilities with her work. Although Mayer was able to utilize her wealth and position at the company to her and her family's benefit, she faced intense criticism when eight months into her appointment, she issued a ban against working from home.

Leadership has been a blank canvas on which we paint the fantasies of imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism and patriarchy. Its romanticization through charismatic, transformational, authentic, servant, ethical and sustainable leaderships has been vulnerable to corruption. Even when leaders convince others and themselves that they are benevolent and inclusive, they can nevertheless enact colonial, racial, economic and gendered violence. Leadership may not, and perhaps should not, be redeemed.

Speaking within just the Anglophonic world, we have at our disposal language that more precisely and accurately captures the activities that so-called ‘leaders’ do. Administration, coordination, collaboration, communication, supervision, team-building and decision-making may be more useful descriptors for the day-to-day practices of people whose work involves responsibility to others. Relinquishing broadbrush illusions of leadership may also allow us to name the activities conducted in governments, organizations and communities that may have been obfuscated by the romance with leadership, including domination, discrimination and exclusion.

While we may imagine leadership to be exemplified in the gripping speeches delivered by charismatic CEOs or the bold decisions handed down in the executive boardroom, these activities only occasionally feature in the mundane reality of managerial work. What makes business and organizations function is the work that happens in the space between people; the unglamorous processes of coordination, collaboration and communication that knit the various and varied activities of workers together. Anti-racist feminist thinking would also remind us that what makes the seemingly heroic work of leadership possible is the oft-invisible labour that is disproportionately performed by women and people of colour as carers in the organizational and domestic spheres. Leadership and organizations are reliant on the work that happens at home, including the people who cook, clean and care for workers and their families that enable them to continue working. To celebrate individual leaders in our societies is to fixate on a narrow and relatively insignificant part of humanity. It overlooks life's rich interconnectedness in favour of a romance that serves only to bolster the status of our society's elites.

In his 1996 article, ‘Leaders who make a difference’, organizational psychologist and leadership consultant Manfred Kets de Vries sprung to leadership's defence:

Reading his impassioned plea for leadership in 2020 is a strange experience. The extensive promotion of leadership by scholars and practitioners in the last two decades has since lifted leadership to a sacred status. Leadership is now more widely assumed as a vital force for good and commonly regarded as a panacea for all manner of organizational and societal problems. Ket de Vries’ evocative words tapped into a neoliberal yearning for hyperagency. He encourages the reader to imagine ourselves as King Henry V commanding our army at the Battle of Agincourt. The hypnotic repetition about our power to effect ‘strategic transformation and change’ and ‘transform strategic constraints’ in our ‘vital role as catalysts of change’ lulls us into the seductive belief that we can and we will single-handedly change the world.

Within this romance with leadership is a love song to white masculinity. The early formation of leadership studies took shape around the values of the European Enlightenment, which instated rigid gendered and racial hierarchies. At the centre of leadership stood the figure of the autonomous European man from whom leadership gloriously emanated. He represented ‘orderliness, rationality and self-control’ while the Others he colonized and enslaved represented ‘chaos, irrationality, violence and the breakdown of self-regulation’.

We are living in times beset by the seemingly constant reporting of ethical scandals and corruption. The start of this century saw the collapse of corporations including Enron, HIH Insurance and WorldCom due to the fraudulent actions of their leaders. During the 2008 financial crisis, banking leaders were accused of hubris, greed, and even of being psychopaths. As the news stories of unethical leaders multiplied, some returned to leadership to suggest that it too was the solution. Far from calling leadership into question, many scholars and practitioners counteracted the mounting examples of ethical failures with ever more glorified characterizations of leadership as quintessentially moral and good. Under this prevailing logic, the antidote to bad leadership is always good leadership, where exceptional individuals are believed to be able to deliver their organizations from crises while conveying confidence, hope and optimism, and maintaining trust.

The glorified nature of leadership constrains the theorizing, development and practice of leadership. If leadership is believed to be intrinsically ethical, critical dialogues around the ways leadership perpetuates violence are silenced. Abiding fantasies about leadership can inflict harm on followers as well as leaders themselves. Particularly during times of crises or uncertainty, followers can experience a sense of alienation and helplessness. These feelings can also be exploited by leaders who may construct organizational or societal crises in order to foster followers’ reliance on heroic figures. Heroic ideals also promote leader narcissism and intensified identity work. Professionals from all levels of an organization can feel pressured to strive towards ‘leadership’ by anxiously pursuing a self-image more in line with contemporary corporate values. However, leadership fantasies continue to be perpetuated by corporations, the media, business schools and consultancy firms that trade in the valuable commodity of ‘leadership’.

This chapter introduces the range of theories that have sought to articulate the moral and ethical dimensions of leadership. It will focus primarily on ethical leadership, both philosophical and social scientific strands of this theory, and critique its promotion of individual heroism. It will illustrate the limitations of an individualist approach through the examples of benevolent sexism and racism, which reveal the structural and ideological machinations of white patriarchal power. In particular, the figure of the white saviour is explored in more depth, tracing its origins back to colonial discourses and showing how it has shaped contemporary ideas of ethical leadership.

Addresses the role of government in Australia through the life cycle of its automotive industry, from its success in attracting manufacturers, promoting the development of the industry, protecting and supporting, encouraging rationalization – and then being conflicted between that purpose and opening the market to imports, losing its grip on the industry, and finally succumbing to the temptation simply to subsidize it.

Results are the most tangible and readily measurable of the horizontal dimensions of performance. Hence, we shall begin our discussion at the end, by examining those approaches to performance management that are results-focused. This includes individual results as well as those associated with group and organisation-wide results. The chapter begins with an overview of those facets of work performance that are commonly characterised as ‘results’. Next we consider some of the key concepts associated with defining and measuring results, the promise and perils of results measurement, and the requirements for measurement reliability. The remainder of the chapter is then devoted to a discussion of two of the most widely applied results-based performance measurement and management methods, namely goal-setting and the balanced scorecard.

Relates the history of the production of automobiles: spectacular growth, the drive for scale accompanied by great waves of concentration among the vehicle builders, the emergence of new players, the globalization of the industry. A surprising result emerges: the unbroken dominance of an oligarchy of vehicle manufacturers, with no Chinese-owned firms in their ranks, despite China’s huge production volumes. Explains how the manufacturers control access to their end markets through their unique system of proprietary distribution channels.

Tracks the life cycle of powered land transport in Australia, and the dominant role taken by the automobile. It follows the growth of cars in service to saturation, the similar growth and saturation of the market for new cars. It describes the huge change in the structure of the market, with the replacement of the traditional large Australian car by more modern small cars and SUVs, driven by the immense changes in Australian society. It tracks the surge of imports, as government policy switched from protecting the national market to opening it to outside competition, and reviews pricing and the controlling effect of the tied distribution channels.