Narrative Leadership Part 5

Narrative Leadership

Organizational narratives, like those of the individual, are the telling of our experiences, the plotting of our lives, and a source of our identity. Such is the pervasiveness of narrative to construct persons (Denzin, 2000) and the need within human sociality to “achieve personal identity and self concept through the use of narrative configuration” (Polkinghorne, 1988, p. 150) that narrative can be experienced as a form of power.

When organizations exercise the power of narrative, the identity and agency of human actors can be gained or lost. Leadership is required that, aware of these implications and recognizing the primacy of narrative in human sociality, appreciates fully its defining ability. Rather than restructuring, outsourcing, globalizing or other expressions currently in vogue, this form of leadership will hold that lasting change within our organizations, as opposed to episodic reorganization, can occur only as leadership gains knowledge of organizational narratives and “meaning formations” (Mumby, 1987, p. 125) which create ideology, privilege particular views, and form power that articulates social reality.

Narrative Leadership and Power

Organizational narrative becomes power when members fearful of their identity refuse to confront an organization’s “pervasive controls over participants” or to acknowledge that narrative can create engineered or designer selves” (Brown et al., 2005, p. 322). However, power is intrinsic to persons, not organizations, and only occurs in the latter as those persons acquiesce (Faber, 2002) or relinquish fundamental rights.

Yet for organizations to accomplish the tasks for which they are formed, power must be granted and power must be exercised. A form of power granted is in allowing a hierarchy of persons with ability to limit “agency” that is, “the initiation of relatively autonomous acts governed by our intentional states – our wishes, desires, beliefs, and expectancies” (Bruner, 1994, p. 42). Following Foucault, Faber (2002) pointed out that power granted leads to accepting the “categorization and definition” organizations impose upon our lives; itself a loss of “power” and “autonomy” (pp. 78-79).

Management, as those that are “hierarchically privileged,” will impose their own “monological and unitary perceptions of truth” (Brown et al., 2005, p. 314) and privilege their “beliefs” as “official views” (Addleson, 2000, p. 238). Members, as those who “point to shared worldviews, i.e. to the meanings that the members of a given community have come to take for granted,” (Patriotta, 2003, p. 354) will “define the boundaries within which they construct their networks and careers” (Hopkins & Hopkins, 2005, p. 137). Each is invested in the organization they have created (Mumby, 1987) and will be resistant to change. Addressing this point, Todd (2005) stated:

Where identity has been entwined with power… changes are experienced not simply as a change of regime, but – for the dominant group – as an overturning of the moral order, an insult to their own integrity and identity, a placing of the undeserving above the deserving. It is a particularly sharp form of dissonance, where the world is not ordered as they had come to expect, and where these expectations were constitutive of their sense of themselves. (p. 440)

Leader and member who attempt change in an organization will encounter power. The tension in the encounter itself is not a sign that the effort should be abandoned but the result of a system disturbed. It is this disturbance and the chaos which follows that provides the narrative leader his or her best opportunity for change (Wheatley, 1999, p. 119).

Narrative Leadership: Changing the Narrative

The narrative leader is aware of narrative’s connective and relational power and seeks “to facilitate the transformation of one way of narrating the corporation to another” (Bojea & Rhodesb, 2005, p. 101). He or she must be concerned not only with the corporate narrative but its role in the identity formation of people.

The “connections” (Brown, Humphries, & Gurney, 2005, p. 425) that narrative provides between people and their organizations are tangible, producing meaningful “rituals” that alternately serve to strengthen their collective identity while “revitalizing shared sentiments and beliefs” (Hermanowicz & Morgan, 1999, p. 199). The change process then will engender new meanings and new cultures as well as the need to overcome resistance in order to formulate new ideology (Atkinson, 2006).

In addition to locating power structures, the narrative leader will encounter the organizational myth. In his analysis of the Romanian political system, Tanasoiu, (2005) demonstrated how myths facilitated the transition between political theories as “ways of explaining the fate of a community and accounting for failure and negative outcomes of particular strategies” (pp. 115-116). In doing so he showed that the factualness and symbolism of myth could be used to construct as well as deconstruct existing power structures (p. 114).

Parallel to this are the observations of Abma (2000) who used the expressions “destabilizing the organizational myth” and “rotation” in his discussion of narrative change. He found that by introducing to the discourse stories that are “like life and…critical in their approach,” the dominant organizational myth was destabilized sufficient for change to occur (p. 223). He explained the concept of rotation as the participants in a role-play exercise changing roles “in order to reposition themselves temporarily [and] see things from another point of view” (p. 223). By juxtaposing those who establish or maintain the myth/narrative with those who live within its boundaries and vice versa, each was able to see the narrative from the other’s point of view. The effect was to enable them to “absorb some aspect of the other and to carry this within them as possible ways of interpreting events and taking action” (pp. 222-223).

Quinn (2004) saw that “organizations are slow to see the need for change in their narrative as well as resistant to changing it” (p. 79). Resistance to change efforts among those of the dominant narrative may present as a loss of identity or a sense of “bewilderment and frustration” and give rise to feelings that their view is the correct view (a matter of morality) and that compromise is being demanded of them. Additionally, members will evaluate change efforts to determine whether or not their values are “supported or threatened” (Bruhn, 2004, p. 133). Successful narrative change involves, among others, the leader “touching people’s values” while providing the “concepts and language they need to discuss the meaning of the change” (Quinn, 2004, p. 67).

Although changing organizational narrative is possible, member’s acceptance of any such changes varies with the degree to which they are institutionalized. Armenakis et al., (1999) citing Kelman stated that institutionalization is “resistance against deviating from the current state” (p. 99). However, what the narrative leader may perceive as resistance to change, the member could see as commitment.

Institutionalization speaks of three dimensions of resistance/commitment. In the first, people conform their behavior to the change effort to receive “rewards” or to “avoid punishment.” The “rightness or wrongness” of the change itself is not in view (p. 99). In the second, people are motivated by a “desired relationship” to another “person or group.” Here compliance to change efforts result from being “associated with the desired relationship, but the content of the responses may be irrelevant” (p. 99). In the third, “the behavior is adopted because it is congruent with the individual’s values” (pp. 99-100).

Conclusion

The praxis of narrative is individual and corporate, communal and cultural. As the stories and plots of our living, narrative is present in all social movements whether causes, groups, organizations, or corporations. It animates social actors and is determinative for people’s identity, their movements, and contributes to a sense of purpose. Narrative becomes “individual” in the stories and identities of our lives and “corporate” in the stories and identities of our organizations. The narrative leader will be embedded in the lives of people and their organizations, transforming in leadership, and leading from within.

Narrative leadership seeks to change human organizations by leading their members to write a new story of their organization. This entails an appreciation of the essential nature of narrative within human sociality, its power over social actors, and a commitment to determine the individual and corporate narratives within the scope of its influence. Further, narrative leadership takes as primary the human as social actor refusing to delegate that place to any other entity. This focuses the leader’s effort in a people centric fashion and places human concerns, if not above, at least on par with those of the corporation.

In the space between transactional and transformational leadership is intention. Whereas the former concerns itself with the propriety of position and derived authority, the latter will focus on the person in the belief that authority, unless conferred is useless. The intention of the narrative leader is rooted in a moral concern for those who ask him or her to direct their cause. Neither dictatorial or pastoral in approach but grounded in fairness; in the belief that if change is to occur its effects must be shared among members who, fully informed, invest the stake of their identity in its process.

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