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Is Organizational Leadership Structural or Processual?

Leadership theory, research, and practice have taken a structuralist turn whereby the leader role is viewed as a component of structural design within and for the organization. Not surprisingly, a considerable amount of theory and research exists which adumbrates the leader role as a structure and investigates its effects on outcomes such as leadership perceptions, follower reactions, and organizational productivity. This line of leadership inquiry follows the positivist approach of substantivizing organizational concepts via nouns and studying them as quasi-substances with fixed, stable, and enduring structures. Process studies insists on conceptualizing and studying the leader role as a process, i.e., as the process of leadership, with its attendant novelty and emergence. This paper investigates the implications of a shift from a substance- to process-based conception of leadership. The result is a movement from a fixed structure of leadership within an established and routinized organizational hierarchy to a liberated leadership that functions outside the parameters and constraints of organization design. Implications for organization process studies are discussed.