Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Organizational Story As Leadership
Organizational Story As Leadership
Abstract Leaders are often noted for providing a compelling vision that inspires
followers to act to fulfill the vision, often by telling stories. Here, we begin a separ-
ation of the notion of ‘leader as person’ from the notion of leadership as the
discourse that represents such a vision. We transcend the notion that leaders tell
stories, to the proposition that stories themselves operate like leaders. We suggest
that people follow the story as much as they follow the storyteller or author, hence
the story becomes the leader. In discussing the characteristics that stories share with
leadership, we generate two propositions. First, within the context of organizational
development, leadership development can move from ‘people’ development to the
development of the narratives that resonate within organizations. Second, we
decouple leader as person or position, from leadership as process in order to illus-
trate stories as leaders. We conclude with specific messages that individuals can take
away.
Keywords discourse; leadership; organizational stories
Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore)
Vol 3(3): 281–300 DOI: 10.1177/1742715007079309 http://lea.sagepub.com
Leadership 3(3) Articles
organizational stories with the aim of illustrating the similarities between the nature
of leadership and the properties of organizational stories. Without wishing to usurp
many years of great research, our general conclusion is that people follow, and are
influenced by, organizational stories and we suggest that organizational stories
demonstrate leadership as much as any person demonstrates leadership. We then
consider story making as a leadership activity and discuss insights for leadership
when seen as stories. We propose that organizational development can benefit from
our way of thinking and suggest that scholars might benefit from a further decoupling
of ‘leader as a person’ from ‘leadership as a process’. We conclude with a few
practical implications for those in leadership roles.
In this article, we are not proposing that story telling is synonymous with leader-
ship. There is a considerable literature to that effect, and we are not contradicting it.
Nor are we proposing that the author of the story is the leader. There is also a litera-
ture to that effect and we are not denying it either. However, what we are proposing
is that when a story displays leadership, we can view a story as a leader. Our
discussion concentrates more specifically on organizational stories. As such we are
implicitly drawing upon functionalist or unitarist understandings of organizational
leadership. Much of our literature has an organizational underpinning. In effect, an
organizational story may ‘do’ things that we often recommend leaders do, such as
inspire followers. A story can do this without any active intervention by a person,
whether author or storyteller.
The questions that we ask of leadership will help to develop our understanding of
the links between organizational stories and leadership. In a criticism of the state of
leadership studies, Alvesson and Deetz (2000: 52) wonder if Yukl’s (1989) agenda to
define ‘What is Leadership’ could have mislead leadership research. They suggest
that more might be learned from questions regarding ‘what can we see, think, or talk
about if we think of leadership as this or that?’ Our aim in this article is to ask just
such a question, asking what we can see, think and talk about if we think of organiz-
ational stories as leadership. We also propose some insights we think are revealed by
taking the perspective that stories are leaders. Specifically, we are assessing the
organizational context for this examination. The potential value of engaging these
questions is that in taking alternative views of leadership, we might reveal new
aspects of leadership.
History has already provided us with insights. Pragmatic thought over the last
century has established that the meanings of things and how we treat, react, and
interact with them are determined by how those things function. Just as objects are
defined by their use or purpose, when stories serve the same functions we associate
with leadership, they begin to operate, do things, like leaders. So we contend that
people follow the story more so than they follow the person who composes or tells
the story. Therefore, the story can enact leadership as much as any person can act as
a leader.
The following examination of the literatures surrounding the nature of leadership
and the characteristics and effects of organizational stories highlights the conceptual
similarities between the two constructs.
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be represented coherently and acted upon. A close link between story and action
provides insight into the behavior because, and as Boje (1995) and Czarniawska
(1997) assert, people use stories to make sense of and share experience as well as
construct lines of action. We also express feeling and provide rationale for decisions
or actions by building stories to represent why we do the things we do or want to
do (Weick, 1995). In fact, Mumby and Clair (1997) contend that organizations only
exist in so far as we create them through discourse, with organizations existing as a
collection of all the stories, often competing, that are their make up (Boje, 1995). The
idea that an organization is just ‘a collection of stories’ is not dissimilar from an
organization making the popular claim that ‘we are nothing more than our people’.
Those people, and the organization, represent themselves by building stories that help
them make sense of and communicate ‘who we are’. They then also ‘live’ by those
stories, using them to guide their actions and behaviors. All in all, we consider stories
as metaphors representing organizational life, but recognize that metaphors have
powerful and concrete effects, such that stories can operate and function just as
leaders do.
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different manifestation, so too does a story alter and vary with each telling. Leaders
are made of stories, but not only of stories. Similarly, a story is a leader, inter alia.
Not surprisingly, the closest manifestation of leadership is that which takes the form
of stories that are espoused by people in leadership positions.
Story as prophet
Similarly, we can suggest other similarities between leaders and stories. For
instance, leaders are scapegoated within organizations when there is trouble, or
followers develop dependency on the leader to deliver them in moments of crisis.
Could we say the same things of stories? We contend that we can. Stories are scape-
goated, just as there is a dependency on stories to deliver people in crisis. For
example, a prayer could well be an appeal to the story about delivery from a crisis
situation. We contend that stories are illocutionary in as much as they are acts of
speech that presuppose some form of action or compliance. For example, a person
fails when they are told that they are a failure, or a person succeeds when they are
told that they are capable.
In some cases, leaders victimize, judge, punish and even kill people. To step
outside the organizational domain for a moment, we could attempt to posit, perhaps
as a mater of ontology, that stories do the same. For instance, a racist story may act
as the prompt for lynching, but is it the story that does the killing? Well, Weick (1995)
says that stories can be prophecies. For example, there is little difference between
prompting racist lynching and actually doing the killings. Besides, we are not saying
stories do these things; we are saying people are led to do them by stories as much
as by other people. For example, stories might say that white people are better than
black people, so white people might enact that story and ascribe to it by behaving
that way. In fact, in the case of racial violence, the story that conveys the message
that ‘they deserve it’ would be even more powerful than a person telling whites to be
violent. People are in these stories, but the stories are not about specific, identifiable
people. They are about anonymous people. In so doing, the story moves away from
the identifiable leader toward an emphasis on leadership.
Exemplars of leadership
The ultimate exemplars of organizational stories might be sayings, parables and
fables. People learn through following the morals inherent within the parable of the
boy who cried ‘wolf’ or the fable about the goose that laid the golden egg. These
messages are metaphors for behavior in organizations. After all, we all know of
someone who metaphorically cried ‘wolf’ and we all know of examples of how an
organization has killed the goose that laid the metaphorical golden egg. By learning
those moral maxims, people follow a course of action that is expected and rewarded
within the organization. Certainly, each storyteller is demonstrating leadership. Just
as certainly, Aesop demonstrated leadership by first recording those stories. However,
each telling of the story is slightly different from the last. With each unique telling
of the story, people probably do not consciously or unconsciously model themselves
upon the storyteller. Perhaps people model themselves upon the message inherent
within the story itself. I never knew Aesop. I cannot recall the people who have
recounted those stories to me, and even if I did, I am not following the storyteller
because the storyteller is merely a vehicle of the story itself. It is the story,
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Sense-making
The second area of overlap between the literatures on leadership and organizational
stories is in the area of sense-making. Stories are symbols that represent organiz-
ational understandings. Tacit understandings about organizational life are made
explicit and represented in stories (Boje, 1991, 1995; Feldman, 1990), and stories
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Leadership Stories
Leaders . . . Stories . . .
Are often transient Can be enduring
Need good stories Good stories need a story teller
Engage in discourse Are a form of discourse
Are hard to replace Are easy to generate
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Collective identity
The third area of overlap between the literatures on leadership and organizational
stories is in the area of collective identity. Organizational stories not only unify
groups (Martin, 1982) and their understandings regarding organizational goals, but
forge a collective identity among followers, suggested Gardner and Avolio (1998).
By the same token, Bass (1990) asserted that leadership generates teamwork.
Communication is more effective in organizations that rely on corporate stories as a
source of inspiration because they promote consistency (Van Riel, 2000), and provide
continuity (Mitroff & Kilmann, 1975). Perhaps stories are more flexible than leaders.
Leaders may come and go, but an enduring corporate story can last the life of the
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company, and just as everyone enacts their interpretation of a leader’s vision, they
enact the vision a story provides. Just as a leader’s vision changes, so do stories as
they take on more voices, and hold diverse ideas in a coherent whole. Some of the
other characteristics that stories share with leaders may include mobility and a poten-
tially long organizational lifespan. They might also allow for multiple interpretations
by followers balanced with the potential for sending a consistent message.
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literature has defined the components and characteristics of stories and their role in
organizations. Denning (2004) offers a comprehensive categorization of story
patterns that are paired with various objectives, offering a story type for every circum-
stance and a projection of what feelings various stories might inspire. But with the
growth of the interpretive paradigm, stories emerged as great ‘factories’ of meaning
– creating it, transforming it, testing it, sustaining it, fashioning it, and refashioning
it (Gabriel, 2000), and perhaps the field needs to move from story telling to story
making. Certainly, we are suggesting that to maximize the manifestation and utility
of leadership in our organizations, we should move from story telling to story
making. Because leadership is central to our argument, a good starting point might
be the construction of a vision.
Constructing a vision
We begin with a very functionalist perspective on how leadership might be enhanced
through story making. Alvesson and Deetz (1996) suggest that corporate visions and
cultures are strategic local narrative constructions which provide integration and
motivation. For example, at 3M, stories are constructed to explain events and their
significance (Shaw et al., 1998). Strategic stories specify critical relationships and
demonstrate how goals can be achieved. Employees understand their role in the
organization’s story, enhancing their sense of commitment and involvement (Shaw
et al., 1998). Stories help organizational members leverage the experience of others,
which help them fill gaps in their own understandings and sense-making, providing
conclusions or suggesting actions (Boje, 1995). Stories help them make sense of
unfamiliar situations by linking them to familiar ones (Weick, 1995), just as Smircich
and Morgan (1982) contend that leadership is the management of meaning. Stories
also provide precedents for times of crisis or change (Boje, 1991). Stories symbol-
ize overarching purpose in a way that inspires and teaches, and provide suggestions
about how participants should act once inspired. All these characteristics of stories
are very much like the constructions of visions that leaders provide for their organiz-
ations.
Gardner and Avolio (1998) explored how leaders use stories to influence future
behavior and use stories to articulate an organizational vision, one that challenges
the status quo and aligns followers’ values and aspirations. In providing an idealized
vision, stories can make followers’ work more meaningful and provide them with a
deeper sense of purpose, even activating followers’ higher-order needs by appealing
to their desire to contribute to the collective good (Bass, 1985; Shamir, 1995). This
forging of a collective identity parallels the leadership function of building organiz-
ational culture, as claimed by Schein (1992). This development of a sense of purpose
or mission, this generation of an organizational vision, is also a characteristic of
leadership (Bass & Avolio, 1997).
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two fundamental outcomes: credibility (or believability), which Kouzes and Posner
(1987) argue is one key to effective leadership, and defamiliarization (or novelty).
This novelty is conceptually akin to Kouzes and Posner’s leadership factor ‘challeng-
ing the process’, Bass’s (1985) leadership factor called ‘intellectual stimulation’, or
Alimo-Metcalfe and Alban-Metcalfe’s (2001) transformational leadership factor of
‘critical and strategic thinking’.
Stories should be loose scripts, suggesting specific behaviors without imposing
inflexible rules. Similarly Conger (1991), in an assessment of the ‘language of leader-
ship’, concluded that leadership need not be prescriptive. Good stories should plot
events that make sense and be concrete enough to provide a vision for collective
decision and action (Wilkins, 1984) where people can see their roles, and know what
actions are called for, yet flexible enough to allow followers to construct their own
lines of actions that fit within the story as they enact the story in fulfilling the vision
it provides. Likewise, role modeling is an axiomatic component of leadership (Bass,
1985; Kouzes & Posner, 1987). Therefore, one can see further evidence that organiz-
ational stories are conceptually very similar to leadership.
Social contagion
By telling the story (and of course by specifying the moral to the story), the teller
releases the leadership within the organizational community so it can do its work.
The moral to the story is in effect the essence of the meaning that the listener might
take away. Just as Meindl (1990) conceptualized leadership as a social contagion, the
story multiplies and proliferates throughout the organization with each retelling. In
effect, the leader(ship) is unleashed and set free to spread among the organizational
community. The story achieves that effect, not the author of the story and not each
teller of the story.
The downside is that a story cannot champion itself. Furthermore, stories are just
as susceptible to ‘spin’ as any event. Organizations have rumor-mills, grapevines and
informal stories. There are comprehensive literatures that detail the nature of these
constructs. Stories cannot defend themselves against restorying, while people in
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leadership roles can make efforts to maintain a consistent message in story telling.
We contend that one management role can be to clarify the moral (or meaning or
purpose) of those unanticipated stories. This clarification represents leadership.
Moreover, anyone who clarifies the moral (or meaning or purpose) of those stories
is demonstrating leadership. Such people need not be formal leaders or senior
managers. They could be clerical or process workers at the lowest levels of the
organizational hierarchy.
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and allows them to make judgments about using the content. Followers can project
themselves into a story and still make autonomous decisions to enact an organiz-
ational story. This allows followers to judge for themselves, attuned to their own
context, how they might best contribute their individual knowledge, skills, and abili-
ties in moving a story forward to fruition, and in fulfillment of an organizational goal
or vision. In so doing, leadership becomes more of a process, and less of a person or
a position. This notion is supported by French and Simpson (2006). They noted that
many successful leaders of business organizations downplay their personal leader-
ship while telling the story of their organization. In effect, people are influenced more
by the story that is told and retold, and less by the leadership example that the person
in the leadership position has provided. This influence process frees up the individ-
ual from bearing the leadership burden.
Context may need to be closely coupled with story content when conveying a
specific message. Such a goal relies heavily on contextual knowledge. Stories told
out of context might lose much of their meaning, so a follower’s sensitivity is height-
ened to attempt to ‘place’ where certain leadership behaviors might be effective.
While stories can be evoked in any context to support a specific teller’s agenda, if
the story is widely shared among members, there might be less chance that the
specific messages and values the story represents can be ‘spun’ to meet competing
agendas.
Finally, stories can hold conflict. Leaders who hold two positions simultaneously
face serious legitimacy questions in their followers’ minds. For example, a person
might be a colleague or peer, and the manager. A story has no such problems with
legitimacy. Not only can stories hold conflict, they even rely on conflict to move
forward. For example, imagine a story where the protagonist never meets any resist-
ance? We contend that conflict moves a plot forward. Peter Senge (1999) has
described a metaphor for change where a vine must meet resistance (a wall) in order
to grow. This means that not only do stories allow multiple voices and ideas, these
multiple voices and ideas can be represented in story without the compulsion to
resolve differences in order to avoid impeding forward movement towards goals.
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story making and the unintentional formation of stories within social contexts. By
asking oneself, ‘what story will be told by followers as a result of my action?’, all
people have an impact on the stories that might be created within organizations. This
aspect of your leadership role is to ensure that the story to be told is a positive one,
or at least the story that you would wish to be told and retold. Thereafter, you hand
over to the story to continue the leadership role.
Fourth, individuals could build stories into their discourse – to generate what
Burke (1975) recognized as dramatic effect. We do not wish to revisit the burgeon-
ing literature on story scripting, but the better stories for leadership are those that
represent the collective organization, where everyone gets to participate in the
discourse that creates stories. Rather than building prescriptive stories into one’s
discourse, individuals could allow followers to be empowered when determining how
to write or enact the story. A mindset such as this allows people to decide how to
move the plot along, and in this way, stories can distribute and share the leadership
around.
The fifth message is a rather relieving and releasing message. That message is that
we should release ourselves from the excessive burden of expectation that goes with
leadership. Of course, if one is in a leadership role, one cannot be relieved of leader-
ship entirely. However, we are suggesting that one could follow the suggestion of
French and Simpson and ‘downplay’ one’s personal leadership role. By downplay-
ing one’s personal leadership role and by having faith in the story that has been
released into the organization, the same leadership effect can be achieved. Indeed,
the leadership effect might even be greater.
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Hans Hansen is an Assistant Professor at Texas Tech University. His research inter-
ests are broadly related to meaning making and the methods to inquire into those
meanings. Research topics include ethnonarrative methods, organizational culture,
storytelling, aesthetics and abductive inquiry. Hans teaches Organizational Theory,
Organizational Creativity and Change, and Organizational Behavior. He also
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conducts creativity workshops for various companies and executive programs. Hans
previously held a position at Victoria University in New Zealand and visiting posi-
tions at the Kellogg School of Management, Stanford University, and Copenhagen
Business School.
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