A collaborative autoethnography of embodied leadership struggles: The case of leaderful practices in a university context

The L-A-P perspective within collective leadership theories

In this study, as noted above, we adopted an L-A-P perspective to explore the struggles of two authors who were recently appointed to leadership positions in a university context. The L-A-P perspective attaches itself to a broader discussion of collective leadership. In contrast, the “heroic” or individual approach, which dominates much of the mainstream leadership literature, focuses on the traits, styles, identities, and practices of individual (often cited as effective) leaders (Collinson and Tourish, 2015).

Previous studies have highlighted that one of the reasons why collective leadership is difficult to study or implement in organizations is the persistence of leader-centric views about leadership (Schweiger et al., 2020). These views are ingrained through business practices, business schools, and the leadership literature (Alvesson and Jonsson, 2018; Collinson and Tourish, 2015; Cunliffe, 2009). Denyer and James (2016) suggest that these assumptions about leadership are not merely the product of individual beliefs. Instead, they are embedded in organizational cultures and practices. Consequently, the concept of leadership is shaped and reinforced at both individual and institutional levels, further complicating the adoption of collective leadership perspectives.

The meaning of collective leadership is also ambiguous, even among leadership researchers, and is subject to multiple interpretations (Ospina et al., 2020). For example, some researchers conceptualize “collective” as the sum of individual colleagues’ perceptions of named leaders. Chrobot-Mason et al. (2016) illustrate this perspective by demonstrating how leadership perceptions are passed from one individual to another. Their study highlighted how a reciprocal identification with joint achievement supported the dual process of both seeing others as individual leaders and being seen as an individual leader by others. Consequently, due to particular sociocultural and historical conventions (Hosking, 2011), heroic leadership can often be perceived as an additive form of collective leadership manifested merely by acknowledging that individuals see one another as leaders rather than seeing everyone as leading together and all at the same time (Lortie et al., 2022; Raelin, 2018).

In contrast to these conceptualizations, the L-A-P approach decenters individuals and emphasizes collective, often emergent activity that can lead to social accomplishments through discursive and embodied practices that are often accompanied by a range of material and posthumanist entanglements (Carroll et al., 2008; Crevani et al., 2010; Raelin, 2016b; Sergi et al., 2021). From this perspective, leadership occurs “in the space between” people (Dale and Burrell, 2008) and often emerges through interactions via sayings, doings, and relatings (Kemmis and Grootenboer, 2008; Raelin, 2021). The L-A-P approach thus subscribes to a processual view of leadership, defined in terms of the production of direction that is continuously constructed in real time (Crevani, 2018). To explore leadership from an L-A-P perspective, researchers must analyze the flow of practices to identify interactions that prompt turning points leading to changes in the trajectory of the flow of practice (Raelin and Robinson, 2022). Consistent with this research, this study conceptualizes leadership as a processual, contextual, and material-discursive interactive activity. The interaction is between humans but also between actants and their accompanying artifacts (Ford et al., 2017).

The L-A-P has faced criticism for its lack of definitional clarity regarding the specific practices that constitute leadership (Chung and Norvell, 2025) and for its insufficient attention to power, asymmetry, and control (Collinson, 2018). In addition, L-A-P research has had to face the risk of being reduced to detached intellectual reflexivity unless it can demonstrate practical applicability in real organizational contexts (Chung and Norvell, 2025). In this study, L-A-P serves as a theoretical lens for understanding leadership and a framework for studying it rather than for prescribing a particular way of practicing leadership. We acknowledge the criticisms mentioned above. However, as strong advocates of more inclusive and collective leadership, we have actively sought to draw on the L-A-P perspective in our new organizational roles by fostering collective, or “leaderful,” leadership. In leaderful practices, any organization or unit is not dependent on any one person to mobilize direction on the part of anyone else. Everyone participates in leadership both collectively and concurrently (Raelin, 2011).

Distinctions between “leaderful practice” and “L-A-P”

Following from the above, we use the separate but aligned perspectives of “leaderful practice” and “L-A-P” in this study. In the former case, we endorse the ideological commitment of leaderful practice to embrace a stance of democratic participation by all involved actors (Raelin, 2011). Since all those involved in a collective activity—be they in managerial or employee roles—are capable of leadership, they directly participate through their own exploratory, creative, and communal discourses (Raelin, 2012). Their engagement often takes the form of a contested interaction among multiple and contradictory voices that comes to terms with adversarial differences (Lyotard, 1984) through critical dialogue based upon active advocacy, nonjudgmental inquiry, mutual perspective-taking, and a zeal for learning (Billett, 2020; Mead, 1934).

In addition, throughout this study, we also entertain the more descriptive posthumanistic approach of L-A-P because, in concert with Raelin’s exhortation, failing to understand the constitution of practice can limit our willingness to move beyond the entitative foundations of leadership and understand the sociomaterial nature of leadership in the making and in situ (Raelin, 2016b). In other words, if we are to change social dynamics, we first must observe and understand them. Further, L-A-P allows us to incorporate bodies and nonhuman contributors—rituals, technologies, and space—to mutually constitute and reconstitute what Barad (2003) refers to as an “intra-action.” It is not a relation between separate entities but rather a dynamic process among all contributors whose participation may supersede their own embeddedness and create unanticipated developments. It needs to be kept in mind, however, that in L-A-P, leadership is inexorably social and normative. Practices are ontologically social accomplishments, that is, they are “doings” and “sayings” that are, in turn, affected and at times limited by practical understandings and structures that together suggest what is acceptable and what is not (Gherardi and Laasch, 2022).

Embodiment and vulnerability in the L-A-P perspective

The L-A-P perspective views leadership as inherently embodied as it occurs through everyday interactions. More specifically and graphically, Gherardi et al. (2013) clarify the body’s three aspects in organizational life as the “body that works through the senses,” the “body that experiences through the senses,” and the “body that knows through the senses.” Inspired especially by the “body that knows through the senses,” we add to the previously mentioned sayings, doings, and relating of L-A-P what Gherardi (2018) calls “seeing,” which covers the body’s activity in all its sensible knowing and learning. While L-A-P recognizes knowledgeable doing (see, e.g. Kempster et al., 2016), learning has thus far been discussed mainly through the forms of collective reflection and reflexivity (Raelin, 2016b).

The embodied framework is consistent with L-A-P because these embodied aspects can be observed in the fine-grained practices of people working together in leaderful ways (Fisher and Robbins, 2015). In this study, our focus is on how individuals physically and emotionally navigate tensions, conflicts, and role expectations in their managerial practice (Hay, 2014; Nicholson and Carroll, 2013). We focus on the struggling aspects of leadership learning, understanding it as an embodied, vulnerable process (Corlett et al., 2019). More importantly, this study examines how these struggles act as catalysts for leadership learning.

The concept of embodiment in relation to learning has been previously studied in the social sciences (Stolz, 2015). From a leadership perspective, embodiment has also been studied from such perspectives as collaborative creativity (Satama et al., 2022) and silence as an inscribed part of the learning process (De Vaujany and Aroles, 2018). Embodied learning is related to practice-based learning, which occurs through holistic embodied perceptions of the surrounding space (Gherardi, 2017; Willems, 2017). Research has demonstrated that embodied experiences are integral to both workplace learning (Satama et al., 2022) and can trigger deep learning even though such forms of knowing often remain undervalued in management education (Corlett et al., 2019; Finn and Cutcher, 2026). Throughout our study, we emphasize the embodied nature of leadership learning (Mandalaki et al., 2021; Satama et al., 2022), referring to lived experiences and subtle, sensory-based skills, emotions, and the intuitions that shape them (Beyes et al., 2022; Strati, 1999).

The epistemological perspective we adopt in this study foregrounds the subjective and experiential ways of being-in-the-world. We extend this view by aligning with Gherardi’s practice-based and sociomaterial theorization of bodies and knowing. Drawing on Gherardi’s (2018) work and her recent posthumanist contributions (Gherardi and Laasch, 2022), we understand leadership as a relational and materially embedded practice that emerges in entanglement with intra-action human bodies, artifacts, and affective spaces. Leadership from this perspective is continually enacted within sociomaterial arrangements in which bodies are active participants in the production of meanings and responsibility. By combining an aesthetic approach (Strati, 1999) with a sociomaterial understanding of practice (Gherardi et al., 2013), we conceptualize leadership struggles as embodied, relational, and materially situated experiences, opening up new ways of understanding how leadership is sensed, negotiated, and learned in everyday organizational contexts.

The leadership struggles explored in this study are also connected to the notion of vulnerability. Our work builds on feminist scholarship, which views vulnerability as a relational, embodied, and politically distributed phenomenon (Cole, 2016; Cutcher et al., 2022; Johansson and Wickström, 2023; Meriläinen et al., 2022). Throughout this article, we understand vulnerability as a socially negotiated and contextually shaped condition of being exposed to others and to organizational norms, which is experienced through the body and structured by power relations. It can thus be understood as a socially negotiated experience that can simultaneously enable learning. Furthermore, the embodied leadership struggles explored in this study occur within various “in-between” spaces (Dale and Burrell, 2008) or as “spatial, unstable achievements” (Kuismin, 2022: 718) in which leadership becomes negotiated throughout the body. In other words, leadership is actively negotiated in spaces that are deeply embodied and thus experientially felt (Satama et al., 2022; Strati, 1999). Further, we adopt a perspective that recognizes the inextricable relationship between embodiment and multiple materialities by which individuals engage with their physical “presences” in navigating their day-to-day work (Dale and Latham, 2015; Gherardi and Laasch, 2022). In sum, by positioning embodied experiences as essential sources of leadership learning (Finn and Cutcher, 2026), we shed light on how leadership struggles unfold through embodied, intercorporeal, affective, and vulnerable interactions (Katila et al., 2019); spatial positioning; and sensory awareness, highlighting that leadership is continuously practiced and shaped within social, affective, and physical spaces.

Study context

This study was conducted in two Finnish universities as a collaborative autoethnography. The first university is a medium-sized, multidisciplinary public university of applied sciences. The second university selected here is a public university in Finland and one of the country’s largest multidisciplinary institutions. Both of the universities emphasize academic autonomy, and their administrative and organizational structures are shaped by democratic principles and collective engagement.

Higher education has been a compelling context for examining management, particularly since the late 20th century when managerialism began to intensify (Deem and Brehony, 2005). This shift created a significant divide between the competing demands of economic efficiency and the values of academic freedom, resulting in many quarters in increased managerial control (Kallio et al., 2015) and, in some cases, role-distancing by middle management (Gjerde and Alvesson, 2025). At the same time and contrarily, a number of higher education institutions have been promoting collective practices to foster a collaborative culture. These practices have, in some institutions, encouraged faculty to participate in school-based decision-making, take initiative (Katzenmeyer and Moller, 2009), and, in so doing, engage in collective leadership.

In Finland, the concept of collective leadership has been gaining wide acceptance in various work sectors, supported by a long tradition of collaboration in government (Robinson and Riddell, 2022) and a growing interest in leadership studies from a collective lens (e.g. Lehtonen et al., 2025; Ryömä and Satama, 2019). However, since the early 2000s, higher education in Finland has also experienced a rise in managerialism and a decline in democratic decision-making and academic autonomy (Poutanen et al., 2022). A new performance-oriented approach was adopted in 1995, gradually shifting Finnish universities toward a market-oriented model. Radical reforms in 2010, moreover, put pressure on universities to produce measurable results and make Finland’s system of innovation more competitive worldwide (Kallio et al., 2015). These structural arrangements have heightened tensions between executive expectations and managerial responsibilities as middle managers have had to navigate both bureaucratic constraints and increasing performance demands.

The empirical setting in this work focuses on the personal experiences of the two main authors of this study during their career transition to managerial positions in their respective higher education institutions. In the ensuing stories, we use the anonymized names, Elaine and Anna. At the beginning of the study, one of the authors was promoted to the position of head of teaching just as the organization was going through restructuring, during which new managerial positions were created. The case of the other author revolves around a period when the author began a tenure track, a role that, in this setting, includes managerial and administrative responsibilities such as supervising two subordinates and contributing to institutional decision-making. Role transitions are known to trigger leadership struggles due to new tasks, role expectations, and relationships (Hay, 2014). These managerial roles also occupy a middle ground within the recognized divide between academic and administrative staff in universities, further intensifying conflicting expectations.

Collaborative autoethnography as our research approach

This study represents a collective effort to share, reflect on, and respond to the autoethnographic experiences of the authors. Drawing on the work of critical scholars who emphasize embodied reflections in qualitative research (Boncori et al., 2025; Thanem and Knights, 2019), we sought to articulate the subtle nuances of our embodied experiences.

Autoethnography generates specific, complex, and nuanced insights into particular experiences or relationships (Adams et al., 2015: 22). As a methodological approach, it has often been criticized for its highly personal and seemingly vague character, lacking the depth of traditional qualitative analysis (Delamont, 2007). We take a different view, suggesting instead that, particularly in its collaborative form, autoethnography can be a profoundly reflective and analytical approach. The specific goal of applying collaborative autoethnography in this study, then, is to describe personal experiences in this case so as to capture the flow of thoughts, feelings, and meanings that the principals encountered in transitional or intermediate situations.

The L-A-P research approach has relied on qualitative methods, with single-case designs being particularly common. Autoethnographic inquiry is also prevalent in L-A-P research (e.g. Case and Śliwa, 2020; Kempster and Gregory, 2017). Our study continues the autoethnographic trajectory within L-A-P by offering collaborative autoethnography situated in a Finnish higher educational context. Collaborative autoethnography is a multivocal approach in which two (or more) writers share their personal stories and analyze the autoethnographic data collaboratively (Chang et al., 2013). For this study, we used two correspondents’ personal stories, which were integrated and analyzed through candid conversations. Recent collaborative autoethnographies have demonstrated that the method is especially well suited for revealing embodied experiences and vulnerabilities (e.g. Huopalainen and Satama, 2019). It is also regarded as a valuable approach for examining leadership through a collective lens (Kempster et al., 2016), given that traditional methodologies have often struggled to capture the “collectiveness” inherent in leadership (Ospina et al., 2020). This approach aligns closely with Gherardi’s concept of affective ethnography, which views research as an engagement with evolving data, in which texts, bodies, materialities, language, and agencies are intertwined in continuous interactions (Gherardi, 2019). Interpreted in this way, collaborative autoethnography becomes a practice that illustrates how leadership is constantly formed through embodied, sociomaterial interactions.

We are inspired by a recent study by Dahal and Luitel (2023) on collaborative autoethnography, who posit that collaborative autoethnography should strive for relational reflexivity and multilayered points of view. In this spirit, our study design comprises four authors, whose roles were intentionally differentiated from the start. The two junior authors generated the diary material, drafted the initial narratives, and formulated the first interpretations of their embodied leadership experiences and struggles. The two senior authors acted as “critical companions,” whose roles were to acutely engage with their junior partners through oral commentary and recursive rounds of feedback.

The research material and analysis

Our journey with this study began at the end of 2021, when one of the first authors (Anna) began in her new role and started to keep a diary of her everyday experiences. Anna continued to keep the diary for 2 years, but the writing of the article was left without much notice until the end of 2023, when she and the other first author (Elaine) decided to cowrite an autoethnography of her story. At that time, Anna started to share with Elaine those diary notes that contained the most puzzling incidents related to L-A-P.

From that point on, the authors began to meet both online and face-to-face to discuss crafting a research project, whereupon they began an initial inquiry into producing a joint document. During the summer of 2024, Elaine also assumed a new managerial role, and the idea of working on a collaborative autoethnography was born. Elaine immediately started to keep a diary of her everyday experiences in a new position, leading to a collaborative analysis of their mutual experiences. The analysis and writing were done through iterative turns on a shared document that incorporated summaries of their ongoing critical dialogue. In addition, the authors had one in-person meeting in the fall of 2024 and three in 2025 to sustain their collaboration. By the spring of 2025, Elaine also had approximately 20 pages of diary notes. At that time, each author critically commented on the other’s notes to help in distinguishing embodied experiences and started to categorize their findings and work on them through iterative writing turns. The critical companions helped with this process by offering an outsider’s view on the text when the main authors felt that they had become too immersed in their personal experiences. In addition, the third author, who has a profound knowledge of leaderful practices, was available to encourage the main authors to dive even more deeply into their experiences.

All together, in addition to numerous iterative writing rounds, the two first authors had five in-depth dialogical meetings (both online and in-person) during the analysis period, and the initial number of pages of autoethnography grew to around 40. However, as they developed the findings, the selected empirical episodes were broadened and sharpened. Their collaborative working style also played a crucial role in shaping the empirical material; in particular, when one read a reflection, it would spark inspiration in the other, prompting her to write about similar experiences that she might not have earlier articulated. In this way, the autoethnographic diaries evolved organically, both as personal records and as interconnected, dialogical texts. Analyzing the empirical episodes collaboratively opened space for reflection on their leadership, which in turn informed their everyday actions and the dynamics of those social practices in which they were involved (Marques Nascimento Macêdo and de Souza Bispo, 2023). Furthermore, as they shared and discussed their episodes with each other, they realized how much their own bodies as researchers informed their knowledge, enabling new forms of embodied learning to emerge between and around them (McConn-Palfreyman et al., 2022). Finally, by exchanging their reflections, they were able to challenge and expand each other’s interpretations, ensuring that the analysis was enriched by multiple perspectives and, ultimately, self-reflexive learning.

Moving between heroic and collective leadership expectations through bodily spaces

To begin with, in the first part of our analysis, we explore how Anna and Elaine navigated between heroic and collective leadership expectations, focusing on their embodied experiences in different organizational spaces. We consider space both as a physical place, where Anna and Elaine negotiate their position in the workplace, and as a mental space that allows them to shift between heroic and collective leadership expectations. First, we focus on how Anna and Elaine used bodily spaces to negotiate their views on leadership as newly appointed managers.

The first empirical episode demonstrates how discussions about physical arrangements can subtly reveal differences in the expectations of leadership positions and roles:

The first time I was faced with different assumptions of what the new positions would entail was when I first went to school after the promotion and saw another promoted manager. Before I had even taken off my coat or found a way to my desk, they just greeted me and immediately suggested that we (the newly promoted managers) move from the large open workspace, where most of the lecturers sit, to a smaller open office space near the dean’s office. This notion had never crossed my mind but I instantly had a gut feeling that it would not be a good idea to move away from the team. So I explained that I would continue to sit within the team. Later that day, when the dean made the same suggestion, I felt even a bit defensive as I expressed my determination and emphasised the importance of remaining with my team. (Anna)

In the episode described above, Anna had a visceral, embodied “gut feeling” that the seating arrangements should not be changed due to a promotion. The feeling was immediate, demonstrating a prereflective knowing (Gherardi et al., 2013) that made her believe that there would be disruptions to collaboration if she were to emphasize her new role by physically distancing herself from the team. However, even if initially confident in her place selection, Anna appeared to struggle upon realizing that her assumptions and expectations about leadership likely differed from those of her managerial colleagues. The conversation about spatial arrangements brings out these differences in individuals’ expectations about leadership, which are deeply embedded in organizational dynamics. Earlier sociomaterial studies adopting a posthumanist view on leadership have demonstrated that organizational spaces can coproduce leadership (Hawkins, 2015) and play a key role in constructing leadership that reflects the collective structure of the organization (Pöyhönen, 2018). It can be argued that having a separate room for managers supports a more hierarchical form of leadership, whereas managers remaining in the same shared place as before their promotion could facilitate the emergence of collective leadership aside from one’s designation as being part of the formal management team.

In the next empirical episode, Elaine reflects on bodily space during the first days of her new position when assembling this time with her new management colleagues. By carefully sensing her colleagues’ moods and gestures in the meeting room and considering where to sit, she was actively shaping her sense of belonging and engagement within the managerial team. Her reflection below highlights how bodily space again became a site for navigating the tensions between heroic and collective leadership expectations, a kind of “space between” these expectations (Dale and Burrell, 2008; Gherardi, 2017). The act of choosing a seat can be seen as an attempt to integrate into the collective leadership dynamic—seeking connection, warmth, and a shared sense of belonging within the management team. By positioning herself at the center of the room, she signaled inclusion and mutual engagement rather than, in her case, a dependency response apropos of her low rank within the hierarchy. She describes the situation as follows:

I had similar bodily sensations at my first board meeting with the other managers. I entered the small, cozy meeting room, which had a large, empty table in the middle of it. I wondered if they had already taken their seats and where I should sit. I felt nervous, hoping no one would notice, and trying to hide it with my friendly smile. I wondered if I had made the right decision about where to sit when I decided to sit in the middle of the room so that I would be surrounded by people and feel a sense of belonging and the warmth of the management team right from the start. (Elaine)

This empirical episode illustrates how space is integral to embodied experience and the use of the senses (Kuismin, 2022). Elaine’s decision to sit in the middle reflects a desire to feel part of the community and to cultivate a spirit of belonging through her own sense of spatial positioning in relation to other board members. This act created a feeling of connectedness and inclusion while mitigating feelings of marginalization. Sitting in the middle also represented an effort to be visible, active, and at the center of discussions as a newcomer. This choice may have been driven by an awareness that board meetings are important rituals that have the potential to shape collective leadership. At the same time, her choice reflects an awareness of the more individual, heroic expectations of leadership and of how leadership is actually negotiated through embodied presence, gestures, and fine-grained interaction (Satama et al., 2022) even before any talk is transacted between the members of the meeting. By intentionally positioning her presence and influence within the team, even seemingly through a small bodily act, Elaine sought to shape her interpretation of leaderful practices and her leadership expectations.

Elaine’s next experience highlights a constriction of her embodied sense of space within the context of managerial work. The tension and lack of resolution in the discussion created a bodily sensed space in which, at times, people’s agency becomes restricted, particularly for those in less established positions, such as Elaine’s case as a new member of the management team. Elaine reflected as follows:

In this frustrating online meeting, I stared at the familiar yet distant faces on my laptop screen and I realised that we were spending valuable time arguing about how to proceed with reporting: who would do it and how. The members of the management team had different views, and the arguments became more intense and direct perhaps because we were online. I noticed that the head of the unit was trying to push her own view on how she wanted things to be done. At the same time, some others subtly, without words, clearly disagreed, and no progress was made. The standstill revealed a struggle beyond the issue of reporting itself, and I had a lot of questions in my head: Who is to decide how things are to be reported? Where is the leadership? Where, indeed, is the collective leadership? As a new team member, I chose to remain quiet; it felt easier to do so in order to please everybody. (Elaine)

The empirical episode illustrates two important aspects of L-A-P. First, it demonstrates how technology becomes entangled in the “interruption” of direction-setting by shaping the styles of argumentation in an online meeting. The sociomaterial production of affect (Gherardi, 2019) created a pedagogical moment, which can be fleeting while also enabling a leadership lesson. In this case, the interruption triggered Elaine’s reflective response. The second interesting aspect, and equally significant, was Elaine’s decision to remain silent. Silence can be both restrictive and expansive and a kind of powerful “makerspace” (De Vaujany and Aroles, 2018), as managers often find themselves navigating situations where they must balance assertiveness with subtle, body-sensed diplomacy (Bathurst and Cain, 2013), especially when established norms, in particular hierarchical expectations of leadership, are challenged. The empirical episode above highlights how leadership is enacted through restraint, withholding, and embodied judgment in situ. At the same time, Elaine appears to question her reserved stance, suggesting an internal struggle about how to assert her leadership ideals without alienating others who may hold different assumptions.

Her aforementioned experience highlights the tension that can arise when new managers seek to position themselves within an established social structure while maintaining their leadership principles. Even when participation is possible, some colleagues may choose not to assert themselves. This is still a presumed exercise in democracy, provided that the option to engage remains available. Many people are happy to defer decisions to those they trust. Of course, the trust between Elaine and the other members of the management team was still developing, as they had not met many times before this situation arose. However, there is always the presumptive expectation of leadership and trust between all members of the management team, which can enable collective leadership to emerge.

Upon further analysis, after Anna had seen Elaine’s reflection, she realized that she had had a similar experience and reported on her own implicit choice to withdraw and remain silent:

I can relate to your coping mechanism of silencing one’s own aspirations. Relating to my experiences about this matter, in a workshop meeting I felt even slightly shocked as I witnessed a situation where our group’s discussion (at least per my understanding) was about collective leadership but somehow changed to an extremely heroic view of leadership. This occurred when the group decided how to present our findings to senior management, even as the presenter seemed unaware of any challenges to the consensual view. At the time, I felt uncomfortable but chose to remain silent to avoid any tension within the group setting. (Anna)

Anna’s sense of shock reflects the embodied nature of struggles, which are experienced viscerally during everyday leadership practices. In this situation, Anna ended up silencing her own aspirations for collective leadership and accommodated a conventional leadership mindset temporarily to maintain a sense of harmony within the group. Furthermore, this empirical episode highlights the ambivalence of maintaining collective leadership ideals in the presence of higher-ranking officials. Individuals appear to moderate their leadership assumptions depending on whom they share their expectations. Even when those in power do not actively challenge or question consensual decisions, the mere presence of hierarchy and asymmetry can subtly pressure individuals to conform to more traditional, top-down leadership expectations. The earlier episodes also subtly illustrate that Anna and Elaine may have experienced enhanced struggles with their leadership assumptions when they felt that their perspectives diverged from those of their supervisors.

Navigating vulnerability in relation to our leadership expectations about the quest to find leaderful practices

Moving next to our second theme regarding vulnerability in relation to our leadership expectations, in this section, we describe how we observed that some of our embodied leadership struggles stemmed from fragmentation in our own leadership expectations and aspirations, as well as uncertainty about how to create collective endeavors that support the emergence of leaderful practices (Raelin, 2011). This reveals the complexity of vulnerability behind leadership expectations and leaderful practices. More specifically, vulnerability reveals our interdependencies and the ways in which organizational structures and the fine-grained assumptions about others’ expectations shape our leadership expectations. The vulnerability discussed in the empirical episodes arises from the tensions between embodied experiences, relational expectations, and the dominant organizational worldviews about leadership. This makes it a socially negotiated concept, as illustrated by the following empirical extract. Here, Anna illustrates an attempt to establish collective practices in her team, having assumed her new managerial position:

In a team meeting we had a lively discussion on how we could complete the process of dividing theses for supervisors collaboratively rather than circulating the decision through me, as we had earlier interpreted the university’s operating guidelines to imply. Team members expressed their opinions in a relaxed yet enthusiastic manner, allowing others to contribute as well. Ideas flowed freely, with one person’s comments prompting thoughts and responses from others. When faced with some questions on the new process, I was moved to giving a lengthy explanation how effective it was for the team to collaborate on the task without circulating the decisions through me potentially creating a “bottleneck” in the process. In hindsight, there was probably no real requirement for this explanation and it seemed that everyone was fine with the process. However, I felt an urge to explain it for fear that some team members could have thought that I was just trying to get an easy way out by refraining from making decisions. (Anna)

As the episode above illustrates, leadership practices are shaped by the interplay of rhythms and embodied sensations while influenced by materiality. At times, this creates a shared sense of energetic engagement (Katila et al., 2019) and collaborative creativity (Satama et al., 2022) among those present. However, Anna’s need to justify the approach reveals an underlying discomfort and insecurity that accompany efforts to shift from traditional hierarchical work structures to more collaborative practices. Her urge to explain seems to stem from a fear of vulnerability in challenging the interpretation of organizational standards, which led her to adopt a more traditional managerial approach in the meeting. The vulnerability was negotiated socially within the organizational context, in which expectations of appropriate leadership conduct can determine what can be expressed and how. There was no explicit request for an explanation, and furthermore, the situation seemed to typify a cocreation (Crevani, 2018) and, thus, a leaderful practice.

Anna’s concern that others might perceive her as “trying to get an easy way out” exposes her own insecurities about required leadership and her struggle to abandon a heroic mindset. Discrepancies in leadership assumptions are thus found within individual managers’ consciousness. Changing one’s mindset generally requires unlearning (Corlett et al., 2019; Mandalaki et al., 2021) that often, in turn, leads to anxiety (Denyer and James, 2016). Even though Anna had an “uneasy” feeling taking such a demonstrative stance explaining her role in the new process, as a collaboration, it nevertheless enhanced her understanding of herself and the situation. This underlines the oft-mentioned requirement of reflexivity in L-A-P-based learning (Case and Śliwa, 2020; Lehtonen and Seeck, 2023; Raelin and Robinson, 2022) and also highlights the merits of collaborative autoethnography in management learning.

Elaine experienced a similar shade of vulnerability in her own leadership expectations arising from her new position:

In my new role, I often found myself wondering about how much I should allow others to decide vs. how much I should “dominate” them. On the one hand, I wanted to decide on certain aspects of the faculty role, but I didn’t want to force my subordinates to do anything. I wanted them to flourish and participate. I found that the more I flexed my authority, the more things fell on me. I felt fragile and that I was not as “strong” as I should have been. This was not the kind of leadership I wanted to develop. (Elaine)

Elaine’s reflections reveal the complexity of vulnerability in her leadership practice. Although she placed a strong emphasis on care and supporting her colleagues, she simultaneously struggled with an internal pressure to appear confident and competent in her leadership role. She sensed that her subordinates expected her to embody strength and certainty rather than insecurity or doubt, which limited how she could have expressed vulnerability in her leadership. In this, what we might refer to as a public instance, vulnerability is experienced as a potentially undermining aspect of formal leadership. Following Elaine’s diary notes, the vulnerability arose from the tension between her lived, embodied experience of uncertainty and the socially constructed expectations of leadership, which privilege confidence, control, and decisiveness.

Organizational conditions, therefore, limit the possibility of relying on vulnerability as a resource for leadership practice, instead positioning it as something that must be carefully managed or concealed. However, these conditions also revealed the struggles she faced when different leadership expectations circulated around and within her. This approach required constant readjustment as she sought to balance her authority with the autonomy of others. Working in a university context, where professional autonomy can be a core value, heightens this challenge. In line with this struggle, the next empirical episode illustrates the challenge of balancing individual personalities at a workplace with the expectations of collective leadership practice. Elaine, in this instance, highlights a central managerial struggle in L-A-P: how to foster effective collaboration as working practices and environments evolve.

I am still getting to know my workplace and colleagues. This takes time, and I am finding it harder to sense the rhythms, moods, and unspoken dynamics of our work community because we don’t work in the same place. I am also confused about the role of leadership in this hybrid working environment. I do not know how to reconcile the differing leadership expectations. How can leadership ensure that everyone is satisfied and happy with their work? How do I know if everyone is on board with me and each other? I also have a wide network of colleagues beyond my immediate work community, and sometimes I struggle to identify who my team is and how leadership unfolds within this broader network (Elaine).

In collective leadership practice, leadership involves tapping into a group’s knowledge, skills, and creativity in subtle and aesthetic ways (Satama et al., 2022). The L-A-P perspective suggests that leadership emerges in practice through everyday interaction (Raelin, 2016b). Svensson and Von Knorring (2025) further suggest that one of the appointed managers’ tasks in L-A-P is to “lead the leadership of others.” Elaine’s reflections suggest that this process is not always smooth, as confusion and a sense of uncertainty in leadership persist as to how to facilitate and possibly coordinate such tasks within a diverse workgroup amid changing work practices in remote and hybrid environments. Similarly, Anna encountered a situation where she and her colleague adjusted their leadership approach within a discussion through in situ coping—a fundamental reference point in L-A-P (Raelin, 2016b)—as Anna sensed an uneasiness arising from her teammates’ subtle gestures and ways of speaking:

I also struggle sometimes to realize and facilitate differing needs of the team members in my attempt to support collective leadership. As an example, when our team collaboratively set our goals, we only set the deadlines for those goals that were the most urgent and for the others, the responsible persons were to decide the best time for them to complete their goals during the year. One of the projects without a deadline was assigned to two team members. A few months later, when I had a meeting with one of them, they suddenly looked a bit uneasy and acknowledged that they were struggling to focus on a project because other urgent issues were taking up their time. “It would be easier for us to complete the project with strict deadlines”, they said. “Oh, okay,” I replied slightly confused, “I can set deadlines for you, even strict ones if that helps.” (Anna)

In this empirical episode, a change in the approach of setting project deadlines happens aesthetically in the conversation flow “in-between” Anna and her colleague. This illustrates the concept of the “body that knows,” as described by Gherardi et al. (2013), where knowledge arises prereflectively through sensory and embodied attunement rather than through explicit reasoning. Anna sees, hears, and feels her colleague’s vulnerability and uneasiness about the situation, which suggests a need for a different approach.

The two empirical episodes above demonstrate that there is no “one size fits all” approach to collective leadership practices; each has to be created case by case. Since setting deadlines is traditionally seen as a managerial task, situations such as the one above may require managers sometimes to adopt a more conventional leadership role to meet the needs of the team or its individual members. In addition, these episodes reveal individual embodied leadership struggles that are linked to the uncertainty of how one can support collective leadership emergence within a group and how to incorporate leaderful practices when they veer from our colleagues’ expectations, resulting at times in some leadership accommodations accompanied by personal soul-searching and learning.

The last of the presented themes that emerged in our autoethnographic diary notes about embodied leadership struggles relates to fractured meaning-making concerning leadership. However, we also found that these unraveling moments helped us to reimagine how to achieve leaderful practices and appreciate the mundane aspects of leadership. The empirical episode below demonstrates that when looking at leadership through an L-A-P lens, the struggles related to an individual’s internal leadership aspirations can be intensified:

There were surprisingly many tasks that initially felt like leadership tasks to me, but when I used the L-A-P lens to examine the situation, I noticed that I was actually controlling, not participating in the change of practice. This was startling to realise and took some time for me to accept. However, gradually, while reflecting on this, I realised that while control is not fully irrelevant, it would feel more meaningful if we were able to create practices where this control was mutual within the team. After this realization, I got excited as I could look forward to just getting together with others and figuring out together what these practices could be. (Anna)

In this instance, when it comes to control, an L-A-P perspective would downplay a control-submission pattern as constituting a social accomplishment underlying a leadership event. Further, it has been argued that one of the benefits of the L-A-P approach is that it can provide practitioners with new and unexpected views about their leadership practices (Lehtonen et al., 2025). The above example further suggests that in looking for leadership through an L-A-P lens, our internal emotional and thus embodied struggles caused by these “surprises” can also act as a productive tension that might help to envision what a leaderful practice could look like or how it could be created, thus forming an important contribution to the learning process. In our example, Anna was excited about planning with others how a new collaborative practice might emerge. This suggests that she was comfortable fostering an atmosphere that embraces vulnerability. As a manager, she recognized that she did not always have the best solution and was open to different viewpoints. In less supportive surroundings, a manager might struggle to admit their unknowingness and have difficulties in recognizing the value of cocreating a practice.

When viewed through the lens of vulnerability, this empirical episode illustrates how leadership learning can unfold through experiences that challenge one’s sense of leadership competence. Anna’s realization that what she initially perceived as “leadership tasks” were in fact acts of control highlights a moment of relational vulnerability. Her actions didn’t match her aspirations for collaborative leadership. Such moments are challenging as they show that some leadership practices can reproduce old hierarchies. But they also show that vulnerability leads to learning, as occurred in the aforementioned situation.

The following episode highlights how everyday, mundane conversations about shared experiences can influence one’s view of leadership and the emergence of a vulnerability-accepting work environment:

I also remember a situation in which aesthetic cues became relevant. I had a remote meeting with one of my subordinates. Despite being online, I could sense their different moods behind the screen. As a new manager, I felt they were somewhat reserved towards me and what they could say. I tried to create a relaxed atmosphere remotely and show my authentic self. I was relieved when it seemed to work. My genuinely friendly attitude tends to rub off on others. We talked at length about the changing nature of university work and how we all now have to do a lot of “secretarial” work, such as course registrations and credit checks. I was relieved that they were able to talk to me openly and develop a sense of collective leadership. (Elaine)

The remote dialogue described above illustrates the process of aesthetic meaning-making, in which the manager and her subordinate coconstructed a shared understanding of leadership and an appreciation of vulnerable copresence within the university context. As the description of the virtual meeting above shows, leadership is often mundane and not necessarily inspiring. Rather than arising from extraordinary moments, it is gradually built through sensory encounters and shared emotions between people (Satama et al., 2022), whether in face-to-face or remote settings, in which bodies also play a significant role (Mirchandani, 2014). Affect is circulated continuously between bodies in the interaction, shaping how leadership emerges and is negotiated in practice (Gherardi, 2019; Katila et al., 2019). Sharing difficulties, struggles, and irritation, and thus vulnerability, can also create a sense of leaderful practice.

Embodied leadership struggles as ongoing work in enacting leaderful practices

Our first contribution is to L-A-P research (Crevani, 2018; Kempster and Gregory, 2017; Raelin, 2011) in which we conceptualize the embodied and often invisible struggles that managers experience when attempting to enact and sustain leaderful practices in their everyday work. While the L-A-P scholarship has emphasized leadership as something that emerges through practices rather than positions, less attention has been paid to how managers bodily experience the tensions that arise when trying to move away from heroic leadership ideals toward more collective forms of it. Our findings showed that these struggles were deeply entangled with bodily sensations, spatial arrangements, and sociomaterial conditions. Leadership expectations were negotiated through the placement of bodies, how space was occupied or avoided, and how silence or movement was used. Sociomateriality played a role in these negotiations through bodies, technologies, spaces, rituals, and written documents. In this sense, leadership unfolded in social and material spaces (Kuismin, 2022).

By foregrounding these lived struggles, our study makes visible those dimensions of leadership that are often overlooked in outcome-oriented, rational, or formal accounts. In the findings, we report that as managers, we were not passive recipients of leadership expectations; rather, we actively negotiated and reshaped these expectations through embodied actions that sometimes preceded speech (Satama et al., 2022; Willems, 2017). For example, avoiding a central spatial position, remaining silent, or withdrawing bodily from a situation could function as subtle yet meaningful leadership acts aimed at resisting heroic leadership scripts and inviting collective participation. This extends existing L-A-P work by showing that leadership learning and enactment often occur through aesthetic, bodily, and spatial adjustments rather than through explicit deliberation alone.

Importantly, our findings also demonstrate that leadership expectations were fluid and situational, shifting not only across organizational contexts but also within the same individual across moments. Leadership learning, therefore, could not be separated from the organizational realities in which it occurred. These realities include physical arrangements, cultural norms, and human and institutional pressures that shape leadership practices, reinforcing previous claims about the ambivalence surrounding stand-alone classroom learning in favor of practice-based learning on the job (Carroll, 2016; Lehtonen and Seeck, 2023; Raelin, 2011). It also demonstrates how practice-based leadership learning in everyday work sometimes becomes ambivalent due to conflicting leadership expectations, while also demonstrating how this ambivalence is experienced, perceived, and managed within the managerial mindset (Satama et al., 2022). Learning occurs “in the spaces between” managerial bodies and materialities (Gherardi and Laasch, 2022; Katila et al., 2019), which are situated within the contexts in which learning takes place (Mandalaki et al., 2021).

Vulnerability as an ambivalent resource in embodied leadership learning

The second contribution of our study lies in deepening the understanding of how embodied leadership struggles can function as a source of leadership learning through the notion of vulnerability. Building on work that conceptualizes vulnerability as a productive dimension of leadership identity and learning (Corlett et al., 2019; Johansson and Wickström, 2023; Satama et al., 2022), our findings highlight how vulnerability emerged through managers’ internal negotiations, uncertainties, and bodily tensions when attempting to support more collective forms of leadership. However, rather than treating vulnerability as an inherently positive or universally empowering condition, our study offers a more critical and context-sensitive view. We show that vulnerability in its private form is deeply relational and organizationally situated: it can enable reflection, learning, and relational attunement, but when manifested publicly, it can also expose leaders to risk, marginalization, or emotional strain when organizational conditions are unsupportive. In this way, vulnerability appeared as an ambivalent learning resource, the effects of which depended on power relations, cultural expectations, and material conditions around leadership.

Overall, our study reveals the uncertainties managers face when attempting to support more collective practice, where leadership emerges from acts of saying, doing, and relating (Kemmis and Grootenboer, 2008; Raelin, 2021). For example, when attempting to introduce leaderful practices in work teams, not all team members may be willing to participate in leadership, nor may they agree with the collective leadership approach. In such situations, leadership becomes a fragile and uncertain practice, as efforts to redistribute responsibility can unsettle existing expectations, expose managers to doubt, and challenge taken-for-granted hierarchies. Rather than a stable accomplishment, leadership emerges as a vulnerable, negotiated process that depends on the willingness of others to engage and on the specific relational dynamics at play. Managers, therefore, need to continuously learn to adjust their actions (“doings”), sayings, and relatings through seeing (Gherardi, 2018); that is, sensing the situation and the feelings and discomfort of others. We have accordingly extended existing discussions of vulnerability in management and organization studies by demonstrating that vulnerability is not merely a relational stance or an ethical orientation but a bodily experience that can unfold in practice. Feelings of confusion, unease, relief, or excitement, often emerging prereflectively as gut feelings or bodily tension, can act as signals that prompt reflection and adjustment. These findings resonate with Bloomfield et al.’s (2024) notion of managerial unknowingness as productive, while adding an embodied dimension that shows how such unknowingness is first sensed in the body before it is articulated cognitively.

Our study also contributes to debates on democratic and dialogic leadership (Gergen and Hersted, 2016; Raelin, 2012, 2016a) by illustrating the difficulties of sustaining collective leadership in practice. Not all organizational members were willing or able to participate in leadership, and collective practices had to be continually negotiated rather than assumed. Here, vulnerability was not simply something to be embraced but something to be carefully navigated. The managers in this case learned to adjust their actions through sensing the atmosphere of the situation (Gherardi, 2018), attending to discomfort, and sometimes choosing silence as a leadership response.

We argue that to reduce confusion in facilitating collaborative leadership practices, a new approach to leadership learning is required. However, the intent for any initiative in leadership learning would not be to provide solutions on how to “lead” (Gergen and Hersted, 2016); on the contrary, our study suggests that managerial “unknowingness” (Bloomfield et al., 2024) can act as a productive tension. By conceptualizing leadership as something that is enacted between bodies, spaces, materialities, and affect (Gherardi and Laasch, 2022; Gherardi et al., 2013), our study reimagines leadership not as an individual achievement but as a vulnerable, relational, and ongoing accomplishment. If organizations genuinely seek to move toward more collective and leaderful practices, leadership learning must extend beyond appointed leaders and create spaces for shared reflection and dialogue. Our study suggests that staying with uncertainty, vulnerability, and unknowingness can open possibilities for reworking leadership practices in more inclusive and social ways. In this sense, embodied leadership struggles are vital sites through which new forms of leadership can be imagined, learned, and practiced.

On the methodological contribution of the study

Methodologically, this study contributes to the growing literature on collaborative autoethnography by indicating its dual role as a research approach and as a means of management learning. It can accordingly function as a reflexive and leaderful practice through which embodied struggles are collectively examined, shared, and reworked, thereby expanding its potential within management learning research. Collaborative discussion, analysis, and reanalysis of personal episodes required us to thoroughly attend to our embodied experience, gestures, silences, spatial arrangements, and emotional intensities, and to situate these within our wider organizational practices and realities. In addition, the collective analysis and reanalysis of these narratives, conducted with the support of our “critical companions” in dialogue throughout the process, created a shared reflexive space in which we have been able to explore and distinguish taken-for-granted assumptions about authority, collegiality, and leadership in all its forms. It further helped us in starting to recognize and distinguish leadership practices that are distributed, contested, and codeveloped.

Practical implications, limitations, and ideas for future research

The study has important implications for the field of L-A-P as well as leadership learning, often referred to in L-A-P terms as leadership-as-practice development (LaPD). Specifically, our study highlights the need for personal and collective leadership learning to account for the embodied aspects of leadership, including how individuals occupy and use space and how emotions, gestures, artifacts, and the like play an important role in the learning process. These insights have important implications for leadership learning interventions. Any intervention needs to prepare and support both appointed managers and other participants, such as team members, in navigating the embodied and cognitive territory that inheres in physical spaces as well as through bodily presence when negotiating leadership expectations at work. Moreover, our study highlighted how a collaborative autoethnography enabled the identification of leaderful practices through collective reflection, particularly among the researchers involved. This has valuable implications for management learning as it illustrates the value of collective reflection without time or topic constraints.

Although L-A-P scholars have long advocated for the inclusion of affective and embodied practices in the construction of leadership (Crevani and Lammi, 2023; Raelin, 2016b), they have not had access to the depth of qualitative data made available through this autoethnography, nor have they considered some of the conflicting dynamics faced by administrators, especially new middle managers, as they attempt to engage their workers, faculty in this case, in mutual leadership practices. On the learning front, up to now, the focus of LaPD efforts has been on situated learning occurring within everyday social contexts, often expressed in learning teams collectively focusing on their own problems (Denyer and James, 2016). In the current study, building on the elucidation of embodied learning practices depicted in this journal (see, e.g. Finn and Cutcher, 2026; Li et al., 2025; Satama et al., 2022), we add to an emerging understanding that such learning is often tied up with body actions and sensory cues among members in real-time organizational settings. In addition, these sites are entangled with material contributors that together can produce pedagogical moments that are fleeting but otherwise available for study and reflection.

We would be remiss not to point out the limitations of our study, in particular, our methodological choices. First, our autoethnographic approach is grounded in the deeply personal experiences of two researchers, which limits its generalizability. In addition, the specificity of the university context as a working environment poses another limitation. Given this specificity, the situations described in our findings may not be naturally recognizable or relatable outside the university setting. A final consideration is the sensitivity of our empirical material. The descriptions of working life included a detailed, context-specific account that may enable those familiar with our environment to identify the individuals involved. To address this ethical concern, we shared the descriptions with those referenced in our narratives to ensure that their privacy was secured.

Based on the results of this study, we identified several potential directions for future research beyond those already signaled above. First, our study indicates that hierarchical asymmetry plays a role in shaping leadership expectations. Although L-A-P does not view leadership as confined to formal structures or assigned to specific “leaders,” it acknowledges that leadership expectations influence leadership practices (Denyer and James, 2016). Therefore, it would be valuable to conduct more L-A-P-based studies on how asymmetry shapes emerging leadership. Second, future research could investigate the impact of special physical environments, such as open offices, virtual workspaces, and hazardous working environments, on leadership from an embodied perspective. Third, it would be valuable to explore the gendered dynamics of embodied leadership struggles, particularly in relation to how gender is intertwined with leadership expectations.