The Ghost Leader: An Empirical Study on Narrative Leadership

2012

Studies on leadership too often focus on the leader rather than on leadership. The starting point for this study is the argument that leadership is not equal to the leader as a "real" person but is at least partly costructed in organizational storytelling. This empirical study dissects the construction of leadership in storytelling in terms of typical organisational events, such as the arrival of a new leader, confronting resistance and a leader leaving an organisation. The data consists of interviews with a leader and his followers in a large high-tech organisation. The findings show that the leader existed in organisational storytelling before his first formal encounter and he remained in…