LESSONS FROM THE FIELD:

AN ESSAY ON THE CRISIS OF LEADERSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY ORGANIZATIONS

James.Krantz

February 8,1990

Introduction

This paper is about leadership and the crisis of leadership in our contemporary institutions. The point of
departure for my thinking is the emerging literature in the field of applied behavioral and organizational research
itself. In other words, this essay asks what can be learned about contemporary issues of leadership from
reflecting on the themes and patterns that underlie the work of the field.

At the center of my focus is the relation between observer and observed. This essay tries to understand
something about the crisis in leadership by analyzing the way the observers of organization and leadership
make sense of their topics. Gleaning the lessons that reside in this intermediate zone requires turning to
interpretative methods. In contrast to methods which aim for prediction or explanation, interpretation is
concerned with understanding. It refers to the connections between previously disconnected data in order to
illuminate the meanings that imbue some field of inquiry.

My intent here is to look across the field of organizational scholarship as it relates to issues of leadership and
consider common themes and patterns. I take two "cuts" at the field. First I take a broad look at emerging ideas
of leadership and authority which grow out of the phase-change in our economic order to post industrial society.
Secondly, I examine more deeply major works recently published about the crisis in leadership: works by
Warren Bennis, Peter Vaill, and Tom Gilmore. Finally, I explore several underlying themes which link the
concerns identified in the literature to larger social and cultural issues.

Since one's own theory or framework defines the questions asked and has an impact on the empirical "slice of
life" one focuses upon, a final note of introduction may be useful to orient the reader to the author's interpretative
stance. Issues in leadership are viewed here through the dual lenses of systems thinking and psychodynamic
theory. How the unconscious meanings, conflicts, fears, and beliefs are projected into organizations and how
people collectively manage these forces is of central concern from this vantage point.

Leadership in a New Key

Leadership is in fashion now. Our society's preoccupation with leadership has spawned a large industry
devoted to "leadership training" and "leadership development."  The popular literature abounds with books
extolling the heroic qualities of maverick business leaders who are taking on mythic proportions in our cultural
landscape. No less telling is the massive volume of academic publication emerging in the area. While
leadership has been widely and variously studied throughout the last century (Van Fleet and Yukl, 1989; Bass,
1981), the current explosion of interest in leadership and particularly the massive effort to find, create, foster,
train, and develop more of it speaks to important features of the historical moment.

At the same time, an understanding of leadership remains elusive enough for Warren Bennis to comment that
leadership is the most studied and least understood topic in all of social science. While the studies agree on
little, a consensus is emerging around the central requirements of effective leadership at this time in history --
namely to provide a vision around which members of an organization can coalesce and direct their productive
energies (e.g. Bennis, 1989; Vaill, 1989; Sashkin, 1988; Leavitt, 1986; Burns, 1978;).

The almost exclusive emphasis on this particular feature of leadership is relatively recent. Earlier, leadership
and what is now distinguished as management were conflated, and classic managerial functions were
considered essential to leadership (Krantz and Gilmore, 1990; Selznick, 1957; Barnard, 1938).  Now they have
been split apart. Managers and leaders are seen as different breeds (Zaleznik, 1978; Bennis and Nanus,1985;
Burns, 1978). Increasingly, the "managerial mentality" is viewed as a source of our leadership crisis; the
"manager," in contrast to the leader, does damage through an emphasis on order and efficiency rather than the
sort of focus on mission and substance that can promote commitment and creativity (Vaill, 1989; Zaleznik,
1989).

A belief is commonly expressed that what is lacking is leadership in the new visionary sense (Zaleznik, 1989;
Sashkin, 1988). The solution generally proposed for this lack of leadership is straightforward: find real leaders.
The search for leaders with vision, leaders who can motivate by articulating a purposeful direction, suffuses the
academic literature and popular press. The massive leadership training and development industry is based on
the same prescription - provide leadership by developing leaders.

My central thesis is that this diagnosis of our crisis of leadership is simplistic and is used defensively in order to
avoid a confrontation with the more complex, and more intractable, problems which underlie this leadership
crisis. This is not to suggest that the person of the leader is unimportant. There can be little doubt that the leader
plays an important part in the leadership of an enterprise. What I am suggesting, however, is that the leader's
personality has been vastly overrated in attempts to understand leadership. And that in clinging to the hope that
leaders themselves will solve our leadership crisis, we prevent ourselves from addressing the underlying
problems that disable even enormously capable leaders.

The idea that leadership emanates from leaders was easier to maintain in an era which favored centralized
bureaucratic hierarchies. Control was imposed from top to bottom; Taylorism enacted a view in which
managers thought and workers labored; authority relations were based on obedience and contractual
obligation; command and control systems were based on information held by few; and careers tended to imply
a unitary trajectory through a single organization in which one was entirely dependent on one's higher authorities
for progress. The era of more placid operating environments and economic expansion driven by mass
production lent itself to organizational forms which reinforced the notion that leadership was provided by the top
official(s) and that leadership is what "comes out" of leaders.

Even so, researchers have noticed features of organizational life which are inconsistent with the idea that
control and leadership is such a top-down process in reality (e.g. Mechanic, 1962). An intriguing example is a
study by Nancy Roberts (1985) which explored the contextual determinants of charisma. Her study showed how
an executive who helped an organization respond successfully to a crisis came to be considered "charismatic,"
even though she hadn't been thought of in those terms before or in her subsequent positions. In a similiar vein,
contingency theorists approach a systems paradigm by recognizing that leadership is effective under certain
conditions and not others (Vroom and Jago, 1988; House and Baetz, 1979).

Similarly, psychoanalytically inclined researchers have explored the impact of unconscious processes on the
capacity of leaders to function (Hirschhorn, 1988; Kernberg, 1983). To "group-as-a-whole" theorists, leaders
are as much a creature of the group's collective emotions as any other member (Wells, 1985).  Because they
are active targets for other members' parental projections of love, hate, responsibility, and blame, leaders are
profoundly affected by their group memberships (Turquet, 1974).

The major "fault lines" in this heroic image of leadership, however, are appearing in connection with the shift to
the post-industrial order, creating pressures to re-examine the attribution of leadership exclusively to formal
leaders. The new post-industrial economic order is leading to dramatic changes in the relatedness of
individuals to their organizations and in the character of authority relations.

At the center of this evolving drama is the critical need for organizations to adapt to continually fluctuating
environments in order to compete globally. This change renders large centralized bureaucratic hierarchies
obsolete and selects for systems in which response capability resides in the outer boundaries as well as in the
center. To do this, organizations have had to relax their hierarchical control systems (Kotter, 1985; Cohen and
Bradford, 1989) and decentralize aggressively. They have had to introduce work designs enabling workers at
all levels to exercise informed judgement. They have had to appreciate that participation and group collaboration
are central determinants of quality and effectiveness. As a result of these changes, managers face the erosion
of their traditional sources of power - the hierarchical organization (Kanter, 1989) and a monopoly on
information (Zuboff, 1988).

The new, highly decentralized organizations make it much more difficult to maintain the notion that top officials
are "in control" than did its predecessor, the pyramidal, centralized structures that are receding. The illustory
dimensions of this image of leadership have been exposed by changing conditions. With increasingly
participative systems in which workers at all levels are expected to take up their roles more authoritatively, it
becomes harder to sustain the myth of the lonely hero on top or the more recent myth of the brave maverick that
saves the bureaucratically moribund organization (Reich, 1985).

New forms of organization, adapted to the turbulent conditions of contemporary operating environments, seek
to replace obedience and obligation with commitment and personal involvement in work (Walton, 1985). The
keys to success in these settings are collaboration and participation rather than deployment and command
(Hirschhorn, 1988 & 1984; Weisbord, 1987). Asking members at all levels to bring these parts of themselves
into their work roles amounts to a renegotiation of authority relations, and requires a recognition of the
fundamental interdependence between leaders and followers to create effective enterprise leadership.

Understanding the changing social, political and economic terrain and searching for ways to go about coping
with the new conditions that will enable organizations to thrive and enable people to find meaningful work within
them calls for a reconceptualization of traditional approaches to leadership. One implication of the basic
premise explored in this article is that a more pertinent and useful conceptualization of leadership will move
away from focusing on the leader toward a more complex appreciation of the variety of factors which affect
leadership within a system.

In systems terms, leadership is a property of the overall system and stems from the on-going process of
interaction between the important elements of the system. From this perspective, leaders and followers mutually
co-produce overall system leadership. What leaders do cannot be considered independent from, but
interdependent with what followers do. To understand leadership within a system, we must appreciate the
impact of systemic relationships between various subsystems, dynamically and hierarchically related (including
the personalities of the leaders) on the overall leadership capacity of an enterprise.

These subsystems include inter-group processes, task systems, and administrative structures of the
organization. For example, without an effective relationship between the administrative structure and the task,
leaders are doomed to fail. This "fit" is thus a property of a system's leadership capacity. It is also a view of
leadership which highlights the dependency of the formal leader on his or her followers (Krantz, 1989) and puts
into sharp focus the way inter-group relations within an organization shape leaders' capacity to exercise
authority. In other words, it places followership and leader-follower relationships squarely in the center of
systemic leadership capacity.

Each of the three authors discussed in depth here are grappling with the contemporary dilemmas of leadership.
They each articulate a complex understanding of leadership which encompasses both what we need from our
leaders as persons as well as the contextual requirements for effective systemic leadership. Warren Bennis
(1989) has written an updated companion book to his earlier classic, The Unconscious Conspiracy (1976), that
sets out the parameters of the current crisis in leadership. In Making a Leadership Transition (1989) and
Managing as a Performing Art (1989), Tom Gilmore and Peter Vaill, respectively, offer their own viewpoints for
ways out of this current dilemma.

All three authors span both worlds of academic practice and organizational consultation. Both Bennis, who is in
his 60's, and Vaill, in his 50's, have held senior administrative positions. Gilmore, a consultant and researcher
in his 40's, is a senior member of a private consulting firm. In trying to link theory with experience, each author
begins with the commonly held understanding of the context within which this leadership crisis has arisen - the
rapid and profound turbulence in the social, economic, and technological environments. Organizations must
now contend with vastly different conditions in which former approaches no longer apply and which require
developing the capacity to change, learn and adapt quickly and decisively.

Against the background of this "permanent white water," in Vaill's (1989) term, former approaches to
management and leadership, well suited to earlier times in which operating environments were more placid and
predictable (Trist and Emery, 1973), are rendered dysfunctional. Each of the three books is aimed at
understanding conditions which foster the development and effective exercise of leadership.

Before turning to these books in some detail, I want to discuss some of the human consequences of change of
this magnitude. As Rosabeth Moss Kanter (1989) points out, the shadow side of the autonomy, freedom,
discretion, and authorization is the sense of loss of control and greatly increased uncertainty. Facing the
enormous uncertainties involved in operating in today's business environment is painful and disturbing,
especially for managers who have been trained to "avoid surprises" or instilled with the belief that management
is supposed to "control uncertainty." The uncertainty and ambiguity at the heart of any change can lead to
psychological defensiveness and interpersonal rigidity.

Studies have illustrated how resistance to change was, in part, rooted in the fear of the uncertain (Menzies,
1961; Jaques; 1960). Now that change is constant, robust psychological defenses against this painful reality
appear quite frequently (e.g. Krantz and Gilmore, 1990). The kind of anxiety-laden, frightening changes that
organizations are being called upon to accomplish lead to a wide range of responses, from the most primitive
and fragmented efforts to establish omnipotent relations with others to the mature achievement of collaboration
and mutually respectful dialogue. (The repressive response to the changes in China may stand as an emblem
of the more destructive types of response to change.)

Shifting the focus for understanding leadership capacity from the person of the leader alone to the context of
leadership is likely to stir up massive anxiety. In practice, this sort of reorientation calls established modes of
thinking and relating into question. When responsibility for leadership is distributed around the system, people
will have to relinquish some of the shared notions that have developed in relation to more hierarchical authority
systems. These notions serve, in part, as socially maintained defenses against painful anxieties (Menzies,
1988; Hirschhorn, 1988; Jaques, 1955), and their dismantling may threaten members with emotional disarray.

Belief that the people on top are "in control" and responsible for everything can be gratifying, partly because it is
reassuring to know that at least somebody is in control is this world. It is also enables us to relinquish the burden
of responsibility for the groups and social systems in which we work and live (Rioch, 1971; Milgrim, 1965). The
equation of leadership with leaders reflects this kind of dependency since it locates excessive responsibility at
the top. The tendency in groups to believe in the unrealistic power and knowing of its leaders is what Bion
(1961) termed Basic Assumption Dependency, one of the main unconscious strategies employed to bind the
troubling anxieties that arise in work situations. For centralized, bureaucratic hierarchies, in which authority and
command are centralized, this may have been an adaptive defense because it aligned people unconsciously
with the task system.

The changes being discussed here render these defenses maladaptive and require people to relinquish them
in order to participate meaningfully in the new kinds of settings being created. An increase in anxiety can be
predicted whenever established defenses are threatened, leading to efforts to shore them up. One hypothesis I
propose is that the current search for heroic leaders represents just such an effort. The dramatic contrast
between institutional changes occurring which are undercutting comfortable dependencies on one hand and
what seem like nearly desperate efforts to locate organizational saviors and heroic leaders on the other
requires interpretation. Trying to solve our institutional malaise and leadership vacuum by looking for leaders
constitutes, following the argument in this paper, a flight from confronting the deeper issues of institutional
transformation, and from what is involved in creating a context in which leaders can lead. Specifically, I would
hypothesize that efforts to find and create leaders to solve our leadership crisis is a defense against recognition
of what type of context for leadership is needed.

Efforts persist to shore up the heroic leader myth, even in the face of nearly overwhelming evidence that it is ill
suited to emerging post-industrial conditions. The creation of cultural icons, such as Iacocca, and the explosion
in chief executive compensation serve to maintain the deified aura around our leaders and to deny their
essential dependency on subordinates. Other defensive postures in response to these issues are boosterism
and inspirational direction (e.g. Peters and Waterman, 1982). The three authors reviewed here are struggling
with tendencies toward immature, defensive approaches to leadership and are striving toward a
conceptualization of what mature, effective leadership will comprise under these conditions.

Three Studies of Leadership

In Why Leaders Can't Lead Warren Bennis has written a sequelae to The Unconscious Conspiracy that filters
the same basic argument through the last ten years of history with characteristic insightfulness and incisive
observation. But the outcome is strikingly different - darker, more despairing and angrier.

What a dramatic difference from his early work which described how the behavioral scientist was developing
tools to humanize work organizations (c.f. Bennis, 1963)! If the course of his writing is any gauge, the OD that
was rooted in the 1960's and grew in a climate of social hope and optimism has been tempered by experience.
Bennis' dismay, anger and sense of betrayal reflect a bitter recognition of how limited the social technologies
were in the face of broader cultural forces.

In this book he addresses these cultural forces and the way they affect the unconscious conspiracy that he first
described in the earlier book. The "unconscious conspiracy" is a way of talking about the context of leadership
and the conditions presented to leaders which disable them. This set of tacit arrangements establish the cultural
and operational parameters of organizational life and, in Bennis' view, prevent leaders from "taking charge and
making change."

The situation he describes is critical. The crisis of leadership Bennis is trying to understand is rooted in a more
general social disarray. "The business world is turbulent....The political world is in upheaval...The very fabric of
our society is being unravelled ....and unprecedented cynicism toward possible solutions [prevails]" (xii).
The book begins with the story of a 48 year old University president who killed himself in 1969, the day after
leaving his post. This story exemplifies the impossibly complex conditions facing today's leaders and the way
these competing pressures can express themselves in the personal travails of those trying to manage them. In
attempting to account for this tragic death, Bennis weaves a complex explanation which includes multiple levels
of analysis - personality, leadership style, the historic moment, institutional history, and organizational factors -
illustrating how the coalescence of these factors contributed to human destruction.

The relationship between the leader and the institution that Bennis sculpts is complex and sensitive: we need
leaders who care deeply about their institutions, yet that implies they are also vulnerable to what happens within
them. Identifying with the institution puts one at risk of psychic damage when there is no shared caring for or
identification with the institution by others as well. When the leader makes a personal investment in the
institution and others simply use it to further personal or political ends, he or she is at risk. From an
organizational standpoint, Bennis' diagnosis is that the university failed to provide the mechanisms of protection
and cushioning for the president.

Quality leaders, he feels, are withdrawing from leadership positions because they are exposed and vulnerable
to these destructive processes. The unconscious conspiracy produces "simply ridiculous" situations in which
leaders are involved in and subjected to impossible situations, double binding politics, and paralyzing conflicts.
As a result, those better suited to these conditions are placed in leadership roles, further compounding the
problem.

Bennis then shifts focus from the context of leadership to leaders. Using his experience as president of the
University of Cincinnati, Bennis identifies what he feels are the essential traits of leaders themselves: leading,
not managing; conceptualizing; creating goals; doing the right things not things right. These competencies, in
which he attempts to articulate true leadership as distinguished from management, are formulated into four
essential types: management of attention, meaning, trust and self. Leaders need to be passionately committed
to quality and to people in Bennis' view, and they must be allowed to express these aspects of themselves.

So to the question of whether leadership is in the person or the context Bennis' answer is: both. The first section
of the book puts this creative conceptual tension forward as a polarity which must be retained, else
understanding leadership will be impossible. To this Bennis adds a third component - the environment within
which this dialectical accommodation between person and organization must be achieved.

Here he paints a disturbing picture of a world in serious decline, adapting to the compelling logic of mass
markets by becoming shallow conformists and alienated consumers. Bennis depicts the current conditions
within which institutions operate with a grim and acerbic brush. The central themes revolve around the pervasive
narcissism in society which leads people to put their own ambitions above loyalty to institutions and above
commitment to purposes beyond the self. In stark contrast to the 60's, which Bennis recalls as a time of purpose
and vision, now there is no social hope to rally around nor any sense of shared values to serve as beacons.

Bennis sees the organizational consequences of these societal developments -- the idolatry of celebrity
executives, the short-term bottom line obsessions which blind managers to the true importance of human
resources, the wilful distortion of reality in order to promote interests, and the unbridled greed of the 1980' -- as
contributing profoundly to the unconscious conspiracy against leadership.

The primary hopeful note Bennis strikes is that the contemporary era is one of constant change. This holds out
the possibility that changes will occur which reverse some of these trends that are draining the meaning out of
life and sterilizing people's relatedness to their organizations. Staying with the person-context tension to the
very end, Bennis calls for special people of virtue to lead us out of this wilderness of materialism and isolated
self-interest, people who can be trusted and convince us to trust them. At the same time he recognizes the
deep-seated countervailing forces against innovation and creativity that reside in any established system of
norms and interests, forces which will work to neutralize their potential contributions.

In the end, he seems to feel that as far as the person goes, leadership can be exercised only by the
self-actualized in today's world where the sheer complexity and turbulence will serve to derail any but the most
directed, purposeful leaders. In keeping with the dialectical tension throughout his book, he also recognizes that
the leaders alone cannot save us from the crisis he describes. We must create institutions that let them lead as
well.

In Making a Leadership Change (1989), Tom Gilmore takes a hopeful stance in relation to the crisis in
leadership. Gilmore stands for the idea of "working through."  His appeal is aimed at responding to emergent
post-industrial conditions adaptively through improved methods of leadership change, selection, and
empowerment which take into account the increasingly complex set of factors impinging on successful
leadership.

His argument serves as a counterpoint to calls for radical discontinuity or appeals for epistemological
transformation that characterize Vaill's book, discussed below.  From Gilmore's vantage point, the call for a
radically altered mindset or cultural paradigm can be understood as a form of magical thinking or a longing for a
messianic vision or construct. His proposal is more sober: we must improve our ways of changing, finding,
enabling, and replacing leaders if we are to develop the leadership that our organizations so desperately need.

Underlying his detailed and thoughtful presentation of a model for leadership transition is the enormously
important idea that times of change provide perhaps the richest of all learning opportunities. Transitions, in
Gilmore's view, are moments when crucial issues are grappled with, and when organizations enact their implicit
theories in ways which make them more accessible than usual. In other words, if handled with self-awareness,
leadership transitions are opportunities both for finding good leaders and for enhancing the organization's
ability to enable its leaders by articulating, refining, and clarifying its purposes and priorities. Doing so depends
on incorporating authentic self-review and careful thought into the process.

Gilmore begins with his own formulation of the crisis of leadership: "As our world becomes more complex,
pluralistic, and interdependent, and as the pace of change quickens, we become increasingly dependent on
authentic leaders" (p. 3). At the same time, unfortunately, these very same factors both reduce the tenure of top
executives and render them more vulnerable to competing and impairing demands. Leadership transitions
become more frequent and the "process costs" of leadership increase.

Yet transitions also afford the opportunity for important improvement of the organization and in its ability to bring
in the sort of leadership it needs. Gilmore takes the reader through each step of a leadership transition:
determining the organization's needs, developing a profile and expectations of the new leader, searching for
and hiring a candidate, and coping with acting leaders and lame ducks in the interim. He discusses, also in
illuminating detail, what new leaders must do to join with their organizations in meaningful and effective ways.
This involves addressing the lingering impact of the predecessor, building alliances with the existing staff and
building a new management team, incorporating an authentic new vision into the organization, managing the
"inevitable reorganization" effectively, and preparing the organization for future transitions.

For the purposes of this article on leadership, what stands out is Gilmore's complex appreciation of the
demands of leadership in post-industrial settings and an equally complex appreciation of the contemporary
challenge of transition. This comes across primarily in two ways.

First, he recognizes the role of irrational forces in the exercise of leadership and authority. Of course the
irrational has always been a major factor in the exercise of authority. Now, however, the irrational is impinging
upon and suffusing organizational dynamics to a far greater degree. Effective systemic leadership must find
ways of working to harness its creative potential to task.

By taking irrational forces into account, and by appreciating the impact of anxieties elicited in the course of
leadership succession, Gilmore offers a sophisticated treatment of this daunting moment in an organization's
life. At every step, he proposes the use of structures to bind the inevitable anxieties that arise and to preserve
the all important capacity for dialogue and reflection. As for the positive aspects of irrationality, Gilmore similarly
argues for structures and social technologies that enable new values, beliefs, and purposes to emerge and to
be linked with organizational needs. Commitment is a more mature expression of irrationality than obedience,
to be sure, but it depends on finding a way of linking personal values to organizational purposes. Again, the
conceptual movement is toward context and its enabling features.

Secondly, his image of leadership captures the evolving nature of authority. No longer can the leader command
and direct as in earlier times of highly centralized hierarchical bureaucracies. His emphasis on team building,
forming alliances and networks, and working through collaboration all speak to the ways in which the nature of
authority relations are changing. Paradoxically, this development de-emphasizes the person of the leader, as in
the image of the commander or heroic warrior, and emphasizes the importance of leaders who work with and
through people. His view of modern organizations is based is largely antithetic to charismatic leaders. For while
Gilmore argues that organizations are increasingly dependent on effective leaders, he is also saying that
leaders are increasingly dependent on their organizations to match them with their roles and enable them to
work. Charisma breeds the sort of dependency that undermines an organization's ability to manage transitions
effectively.

In Managing as a Performing Art (1989), Peter Vaill offers yet another perspective on the crisis in leadership, a
viewpoint which calls into question the underlying world views that guide thinking on leadership and
organizations. Instead of working through and refining our adaptive capacities, he is suggesting that nothing
less than a transformation of our ways of thinking and understanding is required in order to meet the current
challenges.

Vaill's understanding also centers on the state of dynamic fluctuation and turbulence that now characterizes the
world. His concern with the implications of this situation lead him to explore the new emergent meanings of
leadership, the sort of personal development required of people who lead, and the underlying philosophies of
knowledge and action that support this development. Like Bennis and Gilmore, he focuses throughout on the
dynamic interplay between person and context.

Vaill's metaphor for the new conditions within which leaders and managers must operate is "permanent white
water," a condition in which little can be taken for granted. He is speaking of a "revolution of the total situation,"
it is "not just new kinds of problems and opportunities that we are facing, but whole new contexts within which
these problems and opportunities resid" (p. 2). He is not saying that we must now learn how to live within a
newly configured context, as if in a Lewinian sense the situation will become "re-frozen" after a systemic
re-alignment. Rather, Vaill believes the contexts themselves have become de-stabilized. Since we orient
ourselves with respect to our contexts, the emergence of continuously shifting contexts presents major
problems, one of which is that you can never know what your problems are.

Given this, the challenge of personal adaptation is no longer finding one's way within a context, but learning how
to continuously learn emergent contexts. Thinking about this requires bumping our attention up a level to the
epistemological questions of how we know things rather than what we know. In other words, he steers us toward
what Bateson (1972) calls as deutero-learning, which refers to the capacity to learn how to learn (a new
context). Since managers, in Vaill's view, work in a world of constant chaos, our existing paradigms of
management and organization are inadequate. The new conditions call for competencies and attitudes which
cannot be accommodated within the categories engendered by conventional paradigms. Our paradigms are
losing their relevance, in this view, and we need to adopt new paradigms suited to the tumultuous,
unpredictable world.

Vaill's critique of existing attitudes is multifaceted and spans our attitudes from the "micro" theories we hold
about ourselves to the broader ideas we hold about the nature of organizations, authority, and the environments
in which they operate. One common theme throughout concerns the way our habits of thought tend to create
understandings of the world in which our selves and our consciousness is separated from our behavior, our
goals, and our immediate contexts. For example, his critique of the theories of management based on
competency notions is that it presumes managerial competencies can be meaningfully understood apart from
the whole person who exercises them. In the process of abstracting those bits of the person which are identified
as a "competency," other elements which inform and give these "competencies" their meaning and potence are
obliterated. The same sort of argument goes for thinking about managements as a set of functions, as if
functions have any real meaning apart from the consciousness that underlies the functioning.

Action-taking involves the whole person; efforts to divide action-taking into abstracted and reified segments
prevent us from recognizing some of the deepest and most profound sources of human creativity and
effectiveness. In the contemporary situation, according to Vaill, it is these elements of ourselves which we must
locate and call on in order to navigate the white water.

Vaill also disputes the cherished belief in techniques or methods as ways of reaching goals. Dependence on
techniques, what he terms "technoholism," presumes a stable context. The belief that following a specific
sequence of steps or plan of action will produce a predictable outcome assumes that contingencies will not
render the plan irrelevant. One way managers and leaders protect themselves from confronting the contingent
nature of their work is by rigidly adhering to techniques and plans.

On the cultural level Vaill sees parallel forces which lead to the denial of the deeper dimensions of human
relatedness and meaning. Superficial "models of man" predominate in social sciences and organizational
practice. The commonly held, tacit understandings which bind people in a common organizatinoal purpose and
meaning are under attack by what he calls the "dialexic" impulse to comment on and expose everything. A
perversion of self-reflection and introspection, "dialexic" mentality destroys cultural bonds and shared meaning.

As cultural bonds weaken, people are thrown back onto themselves and their own personal interests which
leads, inevitably, to alienation and the sense of purposelessness so characteristic of today's world.
Vaill's hope is for people to re-integrate themselves -- re-integrate thought with action, intention with
unconscious modes, logical and nonlogical, behavior with consciousness -- and to enable them to engage
holistically with the perplexing world they face. The kind of knowledge required to operate in the world Vaill
pictures cannot be abstracted from past practices or based on proven methods. To operate under "white
water" conditions of shifting contexts one must depend on knowledge synthesized through complex, often
non-rational, means. This requires bringing all aspects of the self to the role. Unlike Bennis, Vaill does not
examine the personal vulnerability that results.

Established paradigms attempt to understand by breaking phenomena into component parts. The synthetic or
systems views that Vaill advocates do the opposite. One consequence of the atomistic approach is the
creation of dualities and polarities which, when viewed from a broader perspective, appear as paradoxes. Vaill
argues that paradox ought to be sought out and embraced, as a kind of bridging mechanism from the
established framework into this more whole viewpoint. Along the way, numerous myths about authority,
hierarchy, and organization will be relinquished. Not the least of which is that control is exercised through a
pyramidal chain of command. For Vaill, organizational control arises from meaningful relatedness, from the
development of common purposes, and from the bonding of shared commitment. Achieving this sense of
collective purpose within the shifting contexts of white water depends on the articulation of and commitment to
values. Since goals cannot be specified, values provide the only effective form of guidance. He goes so far as
to say that "Leadership and management in the turbulent modern organization are values clarification"
(emphasis mine) (p. 55).

It is in the embracing of public, shared values that the person of the leader and the context of leadership come
together for Vaill. To achieve the kind of atunement to the unpredictable, novel context as it unfolds in the
moment, Vail believes that the leader's values, spiritual and otherwise, must serve as the primary organizing
principle for action. Similarly, to achieve high performance and strategic clarity in the modern environment,
organizations must organize themselves around economic, technological, communal, sociopolitical, and
spiritual values. This brings the nonrational to the heart of management practice.

Vaill's image of the effective leader in today's organization is anything but the proficient technician or
commanding presence. He likens the effective exercise of leadership to artistic performance, a kind of
synthetic, harmonious immediacy. The leader is profoundly connected with his or her ensemble:
"expressiveness...is more important than mere technical competence with the tools, actions, and traditions of
the art and a mentality that is friendly to paradox will practice influence and control as an emanation of a
growing, dawning comprehension of what is going on and of what is needed." (p. 124)

Because the writers discussed arise in an historical moment, their ideas are woven from commonly shared
strands of experience. Several underlying themes, or subtexts, emerge. To compliment the two already
discussed - the need to consider the context of leadership (rather than leaders per se) in understanding the
leadership crisis and the changing character of authority relations - three prominent subtexts emerging in the
domain of organizational scholarship are addressed below.

The Increasing Prominence of Irrationality

Increasingly, leaders must contend with irrationality as the source of both destructiveness and creativity. Stable
organizational arrangements are used by members to contain and manage the anxieties that are evoked by
membership in groups and organizations (Menzies, 1970). The increasing pace of social, economic, and
organizational change leads to a continual destabilization of boundaries and loss of established ways of
containing anxiety (Hirschhorn, 1988). Heightened anxiety manifests itself as irrational group and individual
behavior. Additionally, the increased interdependence between subsystems eliminates buffers and prevents the
containment of irrationality with sub-systems, leading to more fluid parallel processes (Alderfer, 1984; Smith,
1989).

At the same time the non-rational or irrational, used interchangeably here, is also a source of hope. If the
emerging literature is any guide, then the issues of vision, purpose, and meaning are pivotal for developing
leadership capacity in modern enterprises. These too are rooted in the irrational sphere, grounded in the
realms of meaning, belief, value, and subjectivity. As the importance of things like commitment, involvement and
creativity increase, then leaders will increasingly be called upon to embrace the irrational in constructive ways.

The emergent notion of organizational effectiveness and personal competence is one in which people link
organizational purposes and missions with their personal value systems. It is a function of leadership is to help
members make these connections. Because creativity, inspiration, and imaginativeness all reside in the
irrational strata of the human mind, aligning the irrational dimension of peoples' functioning with their tasks and
roles has become a prerequisite of high performing systems.

Similarly, functioning as an effective leader in today's chaotic environment requires that leaders be able to draw
more readily on their non-rational capabilities. The loss of "road-maps" from past experience or proven
techniques requires leaders to draw on their intuitive abilities to synthesize the complex information confronting
them. A heightened receptivity to the unconscious and irrational spheres of organizational life depends on the
ability to tolerate being vulnerable to often uncomfortable or frightening experience. This amounts to a call for
leaders with a high degree of personal integration and maturity out of a recognition that the extraordinarily
powerful social and psychological forces with which they must contend can easily derail the more fragile or rigid
psyche. Without stable structures to rely on, leaders will have to draw on their inner resources to a far greater
degree.

The Weberian legacy in organizational theory and managerial practice is increasingly becoming a liability in
this regard. To be sure, organizations aim to relate means to ends rationally. But the normative orientation
which devalues the irrational and feeling-full aspects of organizational membership will pull for people ill suited
for modern settings (Kern, 1989) and reinforce constricting norms which inhibit the kind of spirited, creative
spontaneity required.

Narcissism in the Modern Age

Since the mid-century psychoanalysts have been discovering a shift in common patterns of psychological
functioning. Freud's and his immediate followers discovered a kind of incapacitating guilt, anxiety, phobia, and
obsessions which contemporary psychoanalysts see less and less. Today, they are finding people who are
grappling with a lack of feeling, an inner emptiness and a deep sense of frustration and unfulfillment.
The emergence of narcissism has a profound impact on the nature of organizational life and the exercise of
leadership. Narcissism refers to a constellation of character traits centering around a particular relation of the
self to the world. It refers both a psychological and cultural condition.

On the individual level it refers to aspects of personality characterized by exaggerated investment in one's own
image and interests. Narcissism is expressed by the untempered ambition and greed that is so common, and
by an attendant sense of isolation and detachment. It also refers to an unconscious exploitativeness and
manipulativeness toward others, which involves a diminished concern for the social, for the other, and for
community.

The impact of contemporary narcissism on our cultural and social life has been explored by various writers (e.g.
Lasch, 1979; Lawrence, 1979). Some have written about excessive narcissism in leaders themselves
(Horowitz and Arthur, 1988; Kets de Vries and Miller, 1985; Kernberg, 1980), describing the corrosive impact
on subordinate staff of their striving for power and admiration.

There is equally good reason for concern with the way this development erodes the domain in which leadership
may be exercised. A central characteristic of narcissistic functioning is the difficulty in finding meaning and
purpose outside of the self and beyond instrumental self-interest. In particular it involves the use of work roles to
seek out power and prestige rather than meaningful activity through commitment to task or to the ideals
represented by the functions carried out by the institution. While Bennis is most articulate and alarmed by an
"everyone-for-him or herself climate" in which people "rank their fealty to their own ambitions above any loyalty
to the" organization (p. 63), Vaill and Gilmore are grappling as well with the attenuated connection to task and
purpose that pervades modern organizations. Each recognizes that effective leadership depends upon a
context of followership in which people are related meaningfully to their work. Otherwise a leader's "vision"
cannot motivate or coalesce activity.

The emergence of narcissism in society poses a severe problem for leaders and for the development of
leadership capacity in institutions. Recognizing its profound impact on organizational membership leads to an
additional hypothesis concerning the widespread call for leaders who can provide purpose and direction. Are
we tacitly asking our leaders to provide this very sense of meaning and purpose, to enable people to
experience commitment and involvement, and to help people overcome the sense of unconnected detachment
from higher purposes? If so, then we are surely asking too much of them, and the tacit request is part of the
unconscious conspiracy Bennis warns us about: by expecting the unexpectable of our leaders we render them
ineffective. Narcissism is a cultural problem; looking to our organizational leaders to compensate for it dooms
them to fail.

Managing Inter-group Relations in Chaotic Environments

The denser interdependencies and heightened adaptive challenges require increasingly sophisticated
collaboration. More and more work is vested in teams and groups to accommodate greater complexity and to
draw upon collective problem solving capacities (Weisbord, 1987). One function of organizational leadership is
to foster this collaboration. But is "vision" enough to provide a facilitating medium?

Paradoxically, just as the need for robust and creative collaboration is increasing throughout organizations, the
rising levels of diversity in the workforce pose major barriers to achieving it. Homogeneous work groups have
the advantage of sharing tacit codes of communication and understanding. While this can promote group
blindness it can also foster clear communication and understanding. With the introduction of women and
non-white males into many levels of organizations, there is inevitably a fragmentation of the "world views" and
cultural assumptions operating. Inter-group relations, as they are imported into workgroups through their racial,
ethnic, and gender-specific representatives pose an important challenge for leadership.

Similarly, the increased interdependence between functional, specialist, and regional work groups places a
premium on another type of inter-group relation. Leadership is faced with the need to oversee wide cultural,
epistemological, and instrumental differences amongst groups. Failed collaboration between groups, both
identity groups and work groups, leads to heightened destructive irrationality. Genuine dialogue across these
boundaries can produce creativity and enrichment.

It is unlikely that "vision" will be enough to forge these critical links across the perceptual and cultural gulfs these
inter-group relations represent. I expect that an increasingly essential component of leadership - whether
exercised by formal leaders or others - will be the ability to manage inter-group processes and promote
negotiated understandings of shared tasks. My final hypothesis is that the emphasis on "vision" and "direction"
is, at times, used in the hope that inspiration can be mobilized in order to avoid the complex and frightening
issues raised by the increased workforce diversity and sub-system interdependence in post-industrial settings.

Conclusion

The emerging consensus that effective leadership involves setting directions and providing vision is clearly
grounded in the need for organizations to adapt continuously to changing, unstable environments. This essay
has attempted to explore both the constructive aspects of this emerging consensus as well as the defensive
uses of the search for visionary leaders.

While the search for leaders who are passionately committed to a vision and who provide direction to their
organizations is essential in this environment, it also lends itself to new forms of debilitating dependency and to
a longing for saviors. Moving away from an excessive emphasis on formal leaders to a broader focus on the
context of leadership renders visible the impact of a wider range of features - such as followership, structure
and inter-group relations - on systemic leadership capacity. Hoping for transformational leaders (Burns, 1978),
or their "visions," to rescue us from the cultural malaise of narcissism, from the increasing need to exercise
authority and judgement at all levels of organization, or from the unsettling confrontation with inter-group
phenomena will undoubtedly serve to perpetuate the crisis in leadership in our modern society.

One thing appears to be certain. The confusion, the accelerating rate of change, the breakdown in familiar
boundaries, and the shifting contexts characteristic of organizational life will continue to put established patterns
and ways of experiencing into disarray. Though discomforting and frightening, in anxiety and disarray are the
seeds of change.