The Psyche and Leadership

In Chapter 5 we drew on a study of leadership development to show that ‘Great Man’ and charismatic theories of leadership still inform organisational practices. We concluded that leadership therefore presents a norm which is so difficult to achieve that it can only have negative consequences for leaders, while it simultaneously creates categories of people who are ‘abnormal’ and who are thus second class, inferior and denigrated. In Chapter 6 we demonstrated that the people we call ‘leaders’ or ‘managers’ must simultaneously be both leaders and managers. As this calls on them to behave both in masculine and feminine ways, they do not know which way to turn and the result is anxiety. The theoretical perspectives we used in those chapters, queer theory and post-structuralist gender theories, draw on psychoanalytical theory to assist the development of understanding of what it is to be a person living in the West in the twenty-first century. In this chapter we turn explicitly to psychoanalytical theory itself and apply some of its insights to leadership.