Towards a Three‐Component Model of Relational Social Constructionist Leadership: A Systematic Review and Critical Interpretive Synthesis

• Date: 01 April 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ijmr.12095
• Published date: 01 April 2017
• Author: Jürgen Weibler,Sigrid Endres

International Journal of Management Reviews, Vol. 19, 214–236 (2017)

DOI: 10.1111/ijmr.12095

Towards a Three-Component Model

of Relational Social Constructionist

Leadership: A Systematic Review

and Critical Interpretive Synthesis

Sigrid Endres and J¨

urgen Weibler

Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, Chair of Business Administration, Leadership and Organization,

University of Hagen (FernUniversit¨

at in Hagen), 58084, Hagen, Germany

Corresponding author e-mail: Sigrid.Endres@FernUni-Hagen.de

Given the increasingly acknowledged insight that people do not act as self-contained

individuals but in relation to others and embedded in context, relational social con-

structionist leadership (RSCL) has recently gained excitingmomentum. Unfortunately,

this development has not been accompanied by sufficient efforts at clarification. This

systematic concept-centric review, which consists of 47 empirical RSCL studies, con-

tributes to a better understanding of RSCL as part of the relationality movement in

leadership. The results help to clear up some misunderstandings on relational lead-

ership and suggest a more analytical and critical treatment of RSCL approaches to

advance the development of RSCL. As a major contribution for dealing appropri-

ately with RSCL, the authors propose a three-component RSCL model, composed of:

(1) social construction (i.e. processes of intersubjectivelycreating social realities through

ongoing interpretation and interaction), representing the leadership mechanism,

(2) high-quality relating and communicating (i.e. all the visible and invisible threads

that connect people) representing the leadership content; and (3) influence (emerging

at the interpersonal interaction level or the collectivelevel), representing the leadership

manifestation. This model permits: first, clearer boundaries to be drawnbetween RSCL

and other relational leadership forms and general relationship forms; second, power

and influence in RSCL to be addressed adequately; and third, potential ‘dark sides of

RSCL’ to be considered in full. The authors believe that this model mayhelp to reduce

the risk of diluting the distinctiveness of RSCL, and to balance potential tendencies to-

wards developing overly idealistic or implicit ideological leadership approaches within

the promising field of RSCL.

Introduction

Given the wide-reaching changes taking place in

society, the economy and technology, organizations

are facing increased complexity, with conditions

such as interrelatedness, ambiguity, uncertainty,

diversity and paradox (Gulati and Gargiulo 1999;

The authors would like to thank Dermot Breslin and the

anonymous reviewersfor their extensive comments and use-

ful advice in bringing this manuscript to fruition.

Marion and Uhl-Bien 2001). Related organizational

developments are the increase of decentralization

and team-based knowledge work with high task

interdependence (Pearce and Manz 2005; Phelps

et al. 2012) or growing network embeddedness

(Davis and Eisenhardt 2011; Miles et al. 2010; Raab

and Kenis 2009). These overlapping developments

are accompanied by the insight that people do not act

independently as self-contained individuals, but in

relation to others and embedded in context, and that

a great deal of what organizations and people wish to

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Relational Social Constructionist Leadership 215

accomplish cannot be achieved alone, either by single

organization members or by single leaders. Against

this background, the relational leadership perspective

has emerged as one of the most promising trends in

the field of leadership (e.g. Carmeli et al. 2012; Denis

et al. 2012; Hunt and Dodge 2000; Uhl-Bien et al.

2012). This development has been associated with

the relational turn in leadership research (Ospina and

Uhl-Bien 2012a) that emerged earlier in other fields,

such as sociology (Emirbayer 1997), psychology

(Berscheid 1999) or the general field of organizational

science (Astley 1985; Bradbury and Lichtenstein

2000; Hosking and Bouwen 2000; Phillips and

Oswick 2012; Vaara and Whittington 2012). This

tendency, as highlighted by Uhl-Bien et al. (2012,

pp. 319f.), actually culminates in ‘the relationality

movement in leadership’ that is now ‘the zeitgeist of

the times’.

Relational leadership, roughly speaking, involves

the study of interaction and relationship quality

among individuals engaged in leadership activities,

whereby some strands place particular emphasis on

the contextually embedded social influence processes

that emanate from interactions and relations among

individuals. However, the term ‘relational’ in the

context of leadership study is used for labelling

quite different phenomena. Depending on the adopted

paradigmatic lens, scholars gave prominence to the

emergent socially constructed nature and contextual

embeddedness of leadership (e.g. Crevani et al. 2010;

Cunliffe and Eriksen 2011; DeRue and Ashford 2010;

Hunt and Dodge 2000), the collective dimensions of

leadership (e.g. Bolden 2011; Carson et al. 2007;

Denis et al. 2010; Gronn 2002; Huxham and Van-

gen 2000), the positive impact of sharing leadership

among team members (e.g. Dust and Ziegert 2015;

Nicolaides et al. 2014; Pearce and Conger 2003;

Wan g et al. 2014), or the value of high-quality lead-

ership relationships (e.g. Carmeli et al. 2012; Dutton

2003; Graen and Uhl-Bien 1995; Kark 2011).

One main differentiation that can be found in the

literature on relational leadership (as we explain in

more detail below) is the differentiation between an

entity and a social constructionist perspective on re-

lational leadership (e.g. Uhl-Bien et al. 2012). Seen

through a social constructionist lens, reality is so-

cially and culturally influenced, and therefore the fo-

cus is on the interpreted intersubjective social real-

ity that emerges from interaction. Works from this

perspective also contribute to the surging wave of

more process-oriented, context-sensitive, inclusive

and post-heroic leadership approaches (e.g. Barker

2001; Bryman 2011, 2004; Crevani et al. 2007, 2010;

DeRue 2011; Fletcher 2004; Parry 2011; Raelin 2014;

Wood 2005). As our review shows, recently numer-

ous empirical works on leadership haveadopted a so-

cial constructionist approach for advancing the study

of leadership and for capturing the leadership phe-

nomenon, as it occurs in organizational practice more

comprehensively – and not restricted to formal lead-

ing positions or pre-defined roles, for example. This

increased research attention has produced a confusing

variety of research accounts and conceptualizations of

relational social constructionist leadership (RSCL).

Unfortunately, this development has not been accom-

panied by sufficient efforts at clarification and inte-

gration. While there have been recent overviews that

also embrace relational leadership approaches (Uhl-

Bien 2006; Uhl-Bien et al. 2012), or related forms,

such as plural leadership (Denis et al. 2012), dis-

tributed leadership (Bolden 2011; Cope et al. 2011)

or shared leadership (Fitzsimons et al. 2011), these

contributions neither intended to provide a systematic

concept-centric review and synthesis of the study of

leadership from the relational social constructionist

perspective, nor did they examine the current empir-

ical literature on RSCL in depth. All these reasons

underline that it is relevant, timely and necessary to

take stock of what we know of relational leadership

that is empirically studied from a social construction-

ist perspective and to explore the term ‘RSCL’ on the

basis of a systematic concept-centric review.

We approached this review openly. Instead of pre-

defining RSCL, we based our review on a clarifica-

tion of the theoretical and paradigmatic background

of the relational social constructionist lens. We also

related RSCL in the broader context of (different)

relational and plural forms of leadership – as pre-

sented in the section following the description of our

review approach. This framing of our review is de-

picted in our four-field matrix of relational leader-

ship (Figure 1). On the basis of our analysis and

synthesis of the reviewed empirical work, consist-

ing of 47 studies on RSCL, we both completed the

four-field matrix (Figure 1) and identified core mech-

anisms and components of RSCL – which we fi-

nally combined into our three-component model of

RSCL (Figure 2). Following the description of these

results and the presentation of our model, we provide

a deepened discussion of the key problem domains

of the RSCL study and suggestions for future re-

search. This involves a summary of the weaknesses

and strengths of the different relational perspectives

(Table 3).

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