Advancing Relational Leadership Research

Leaders and followers live in a relational world-a world in which leadership occurs in complex webs ofrelationships and dynamically changing contexts. Despite this, our theories of leadership are grounded inassumptions of individuality and linear causality. If we are to advance understandings of leadership thathave more relevance to the world of practice, we need to embed issues of relationality into leadership studies.This volume addresses this issue by bringing together, for the first time, a set of prominent scholars fromdifferent paradigmatic and disciplinary perspectives to engage in dialogue regarding how to meet the challengesof relationality in leadership research and practice. Included are cutting edge thinking, heated debate, and passionate perspectives on the issuesat hand. The chapters reveal the varied and nuanced treatments of relationality that come from authors' alternative paradigmatic (entity, constructionist,critical) views. Dialogue scholars-reacting to the chapters-engage in spirited debate regarding the commensurability (or incommensurability) ofthe paradigmatic approaches. The editors bring the dialogue together with introductory and concluding chapters that offer a framework for comparingand situating the competing assumptions and perspectives spanning the relational leadership landscape. Using paradigm interplay they unpack assumptions,and lay out a roadmap for relational leadership research. A key takeaway is that advancing relational leadership research requires multiple paradigmaticperspectives, and scholars who are conversant in the assumptions brought by these perspectives.The book is aimed at those who feel that much of current leadership thinking is missing the boat in today's complex, relational world. It provides anessential resource for all leadership scholars and practitioners curious about the nature of research on leadership, both those with much research exposureand those new to the field.