Leadership Practice In Isolated, Confined, And Extreme (Ice) Context: The Year Of A Leader In The French Southern And Antarctic Lands

Drawing on the leadership-as-practice (L-A-P) approach, this article responds to calls for more context-focused leadership research and addresses the gap in understanding extreme leadership processes. It investigates how leadership practice unfolds in extreme contexts, specifically exploring leadership within Isolated, Confined and Extreme (ICE) contexts and their unique demands. Employing qualitative, co-constructed autoethnography, the research describes the Alfred-Faure base (French Southern and Antarctic Lands) district chief's experience during Mission 61. Our findings show the uniqueness of ICE local attributes, which must be considered to capture leaders' behaviours and emotions fully, as well as leadership practice in context. They also reveal that leadership practice in ICE unfolds through four main practices—maintaining vigilant proximity, cultivating liminality, fostering a collective mindset, and ritualizing—which are both influenced by local attributes and shaped by the leader to mitigate the constraints of the ICE context. This article advances context-sensitive leadership, showing that leadership practice in such extreme settings not only adapts to but actively co-produces extreme context, challenging traditional views of leadership as merely reactive. It also highlights the value of co-constructed autoethnography for capturing situated, lived leadership experiences.