Experimenting with iberating leadership. Further insights from the field - the Peacory case.
(2019) 31th SASE Annual Meeting — Location: The New School for Social Research, New York City, USA. (27.June.2019)
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- In the recent years, a rising number of firms in French-speaking Europe experiment according to the philosophical tenets of “liberating leadership” (Getz, 2011; Getz & Carney, 2012). The growing popularity of this fashion, and of the practices of self-management that it promotes, in the academia and the HRM professional community (Gilbert, Raulet-Croset, & Teglborg, 2017; Lee & Edmondson, 2017) sparked a trend of research to grasp the phenomena (Antoine, Donis, Rousseau, & Taskin, 2017; Fox & Pichault, 2017; Gilbert, Teglborg, & Raulet-Croset, 2017; Jacquinot & Pellissier-Tanon, 2015). “Liberating leadership” defenders adopt a strong anti-hierarchical and anti-Taylorian discourse (Getz & Carney, 2012). Firms inspired by this philosophy experiment different practices ranging from raising the involvement of frontline workers in decision-making (collective intelligence), changing the management structure (from pyramids to multi-level circles) to promoting an egalitarian culture (less symbolic privileges for higher ranking company officer). By giving back some power to workers, self-management and task-based employee participation (Marchington, 2007) are often understood as means to achieve a more democratic workplace (Ajzen, Donis, & Taskin, 2015; Argyris, 1958; Taskin & Dietrich, 2016). French sociological literature (Boltanski & Chiapelo, 1999; Borzeix, Charles, & Zimmermann, 2015; Borzeix & Linhart, 1988; Spurk, 1998) more than often, describe these participative arrangements as a ploy for workers. It would grant the illusion of autonomy in the working experience, while being the counterpart of stronger emotional and personal investment, newer forms of control (Barker, 1993; Gilbert, Teglborg, et al., 2017) or distracting workers from important strategic decisions (Ferreras, 2017). Assessing whether “liberation leadership” helps to foster democracy at work is the problematic this doctoral project will be discussing with empirical fieldwork. This problematic is supported by three arguments. (A) Few studies are concerned with these participative schemes in the context where firms also support these practices with a clear and public - radical, for some - commitment to improve work by giving power back to the lower level of the chain of command. (B) Too many studies of participative management focus on well-being indicators whereas fewer are interested in (might be) shifting power relations (Batt, 2004). (C) More than being understood or explained, these experiments in management need to be carefully assessed as to how much they contribute to fostering democracy in the workplace (Casterman, Charles, Delhaye, & Ferreras, 2015). It follows that management following a “liberation leadership” agenda offer interesting critical cases to study since they ally the public display of convictions to practices of participation. Part of a PhD research project, this paper builds on prior evidence discussed at last year SASE conference. This paper brings further understanding of the experimentations inspired by “liberation leadership” in French-speaking Europe by presenting a second ethnographic case study. It describes the daily work life in an industrial food processing family-owned firm in Belgium. I explain how work is organized and by whom, key institutional practices of workers’ participation and the rationale behind them. I will also address how unions are involved or not in the making of these new arrangements and how they are challenged by this philosophy.
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Jégou, O. (2019). Experimenting with iberating leadership. Further insights from the field - the Peacory case. 31th SASE Annual Meeting, The New School for Social Research, New York City, USA. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/239927