Book Review: The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership: A Critical Perspective

Reading this book as the coffin of Margaret Thatcher was paraded through the streets of London before her funeral was an instructive experience. As paeans competed with vilification about ‘the irreversible changes that she brought to the UK’, the book’s immediate impact on me was to make me pause and ponder whether all the changes that affected British society between 1979 and 1990 can be attributable to the actions of a single woman, no matter how brilliant or how evil. To be sure, this is a period that marked the beginning of a trend of increasing social inequality. To take an extreme example, chief executive salaries which were 15 times the national average in 1979 have now reached the shocking level of 185 times the national average, according to think tank the High Pay Centre. Can Margaret Thatcher be seen as the lynchpin of such escalating economic and social inequality?

Let us approach these figures from a different angle. What does the skyrocketing of executive pay (and let us not forget that the average vice-chancellor pay in the UK is currently just under £250,000) suggest? What economic or social factors propel the pay of top executives upwards, irrespective of anything else that is going on in the economy? The market, I can hear you say, and, of course, this is the discourse that has come to dominate our outlook. The markets then demand that enormous salaries and benefits must be offered to attract ‘top talent’ to ‘top positions’. Let us persevere with this line of thinking. Why do the markets reward people in top positions in business and increasingly in other organizations so much more extravagantly than they used to? I suspect that sooner or later this line of questioning will end up with ‘leadership’. Leaders, it will be said, have the power to transform an organization or even a nation beyond all recognition. They can perform real miracles – they can revitalize virtually moribund outfits, turn defeat into victory, loss into profit and moral decay into moral purpose. This is the place where Dennis Tourish, in his challenging book, The dark side of transformational leadership, steps in. He puts many spanners into this type of reasoning. His main arguments are:

The book is sensibly organized in two separate parts, the first of which lays out the author’s fundamental critique of transformational leadership, while the second offers four powerful case studies that illustrate some of the darkest adventures of leadership. Part 1 opens with a critical review of the literature on transforming leadership, demonstrating very clearly how it relies on an exaggeration of leadership agency and how it has been blind to the link between charisma and cultism. Cultism is not a dysfunction of charisma, argues Tourish, but its inevitable consequence. Relying extensively on the seminal work of psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton (1961/1989) on ‘totalism’, or closed, self-inoculating belief systems that deploy a wide variety of means (including ‘thought terminating clichés’), Tourish demonstrates that charismatic leadership is virtually coextensive with cultism, eliminating dissent and inducing a form of ‘nympholepsy’, ‘a [collective] state of ecstasy or frenzy caused by a desire for the unattainable’ (p. 37). Nobody, in my experience, has offered as powerful a critique of this type of leadership as has Tourish. This critique extends to many leadership scholars who, in extolling transformational leadership, wilfully blind themselves to the realities of organizational conflict and to the need for constructive dissent (Grint, 2005). With a rich range of examples from different organizations, Tourish demonstrates both the subtlety and brutality of techniques of coercive persuasion deployed by commercial firms to silence opposition, while, at the same time, pointing out some of the limits of these techniques.

Other chapters in Part 1 of the book address discourses of spirituality in the workplace and their pliable submission to the performative intents of leaders, the dark side of silence in the workplace and the responsibility of business schools in disseminating heroic views of leadership that obliterate the role of followers and are ‘tailormade to encourage hubris and narcissism’ (p. 105). This part concludes with some reflections on how to improve the teaching of leadership in business schools. These include a recognition of the attributional aspects of leadership, a more nuanced discussion of ostensibly successful leaders (such as Jack Welch), an increased recognition of the importance of followership and a wide-ranging re-evaluation of the importance of dissent, dialogue and resistance in organizational and political life.

The case studies in Part 2 demonstrate some of the darkest areas into which transformational leadership can descend. These include Enron, the Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate cult suicides, the 2008 banking meltdown and the Militant Tendency’s rise and fall in its attempt to take over the leadership of the British Labour Party. I found this last one totally fascinating, not only as a textbook illustration of Lifton’s theory of totalism but as a persuasive account of leftist groups as entirely indistinguishable from religious cults. This is a view that the vast majority of the left has been unable or unwilling to entertain, not least the Labour Party itself, which for decades harboured its comrades in the Militant Tendency, unwilling to recognize the threat they posed to any democratic or pluralistic principle, let alone their near-lunatic beliefs and corrupt practices. This, I suspect, is a lesson that continues to be resisted for a variety of reasons, not least the left’s aversion to anything that might prompt charges of McCarthyism.

The book’s final chapter is one that seeks to chart a new agenda for re-imagining leadership and followership from a ‘processual, communication perspective’. The chapter opens with what seems like an appropriate summation of the earlier ones: ‘Leadership, as traditionally envisaged, is a key part of the problems we now face, rather than the solution. This is particularly true of transformational leadership in its various guises. Such theories legitimise the concentration of power in elite hands, whatever the intentions of their advocates’ (p. 200). Thereafter, the chapter seeks to build a ‘more emancipatory perspective for both theory and practice’ (p. 201) by, as I see it,

Notice how, in this last move, leaders and followers do not enter a relation but define each other through a relation that involves both dissent and consent. This is the most ambitious part of the book and, in my view, the less successful. Until this point, Tourish has maintained a judicious balance between two potentially contradictory ideas – that leadership as popularly and theoretically constructed is an illusion and that leadership has a dark side capable of causing great social and organizational harm. If leadership does not exist in the way it is popularly conceptualized but is an illusion, how, the sceptic may ask, can it be held responsible for the harm done on innumerable occasions? Is it that as an illusion it causes harm (the same way that various other illusions have caused harm to humanity throughout history) or is it as an actuality of political practices?

It seems to me that, in the last chapter, Tourish opts excessively for a discursive conceptualization that threatens to dissolve leadership into the ‘normal’ practices of power within social systems. If this is the case, then the appropriate theoretical response would be that, in studying leadership, we should restrict ourselves to studying it as an effect of power and not as a subject in its own right – just as religious people may debate the nature and properties of God, while sociologists restrict themselves to studying beliefs about God and not God him/herself.

I am also uncomfortable with Tourish’s ambivalent attitude to the idea of asymmetry in the relation between leaders and followers. Having dismissed the concept on page 201, he seems to bring it back through a favourable citing of Collinson’s (2005, p. 1435) view of the ‘deep-seated asymmetrical power relations of leadership dynamics’. It seems to me that the concept of ‘asymmetry’ is both necessary (and therefore Tourish is too rash to dismiss it in the first instance) and somewhat too ‘comfortable’, a shorthand for something that we, as critical leadership scholars, have not been willing to open up. If leadership dynamics are no mere echoes or power asymmetries, if in other words in constructing each other as ‘leader’ and ‘follower’ different people enter into different power relations from those that characterize ‘superior’ and ‘subordinate’, we must search for the nature of these asymmetries somewhere beyond other forms of political domination, subordination and resistance.

My own view is that the importance of leadership is both exaggerated along the lines that this book eloquently shows, and that it represents an actual social phenomenon capable of both considerable achievements and precipitous collapses. Leaders are not mere power holders; nor are they mere constructions of their followers’ imagination or discursive effects. Leaders are people in whom others place their faith, to whom they turn for direction and protection, especially in times of stress, and who enter in relations that are capable of generating a wide range of outcomes, from positive to ambiguous to disastrous. This book makes it perfectly plain that leaders should not take all the credit for success; my corollary is that they should not take the blame for all failure either. Darkness and shadows are neither the exclusive offspring of leaders nor entirely avoidable effects; the desire to disqualify them from social life may itself be a wish-fulfilling illusion.