What if many of the ideas we cling to about leaders, are more zombie ideas – outdated concepts that refuse to die?
What if some of these ideas are holding back progress in moving forward with more calibrated and effective principles of leadership?
Today’s study is: Haslam, S. A., Alvesson, M., & Reicher, S. D. (2024). Zombie leadership: Dead ideas that still walk among us. The Leadership Quarterly, 35(3), 101770.
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Transcript:
We were all drawn to comforting ideas, especially around leadership. Heroic actions from leaders steer the organization from collapse. One of these highly valorized ideas of leadership are more myth—zombie ideas that won’t die—ultimately helping to reinforce outdated power structures.
Good day everyone, I’m Ben Hutchinson and this is Safe As, a podcast dedicated to the thrifty analysis of safety, risk, and performance research. Visit safetyinsights.org for more research.
Today’s paper, from Haslam et al. (2022), is titled “Zombie Leadership – Dead Ideas That Still Walk Among Us,” published in The Leadership Quarterly. They explore the concept of zombie leadership ideas, which are a residual commitment to an older set of ideas that have been repeatedly debunked but which nevertheless resolutely refuse to die. It’s a concept taken from “zombie economics.”
They say that zombie ideas are prevalent in the business world because the stakes are so high. If you can control the narrative of leadership, you control one of the principal engines through which power and privilege are understood and reproduced. Leadership ideas that are hard to kill are those that simplify really complicated social processes while legitimizing the privileges of social elites. So it’s like a complex, ego-boosting set of personal coaching, expensive development programs, and glossy business magazines.
Before moving on to zombie leadership axioms, which they cover in this paper, they discuss three mechanisms, what they call the Hollywood narrative of leadership. The narrative assumes that masses of people are incapable of looking after themselves without a leader at the top of the hierarchy. It implies that leaders deserve their exalted position because they are special individuals who have distinctive qualities that set them apart from the masses, and it attributes the success of a group to the actions of the leader, marginalizing other group members. In their words, zombie leadership constitutes a powerful cocktail of ideas that removes the masses from the running of society, legitimates the prevailing social hierarchies, and provides those in positions of power with a justification for their sense of superiority.
They cover some core foundational principles of leadership. At its most basic level, they say that leadership isn’t a solo process but in itself has to be grounded in relationships and connections. You must have followers in order to lead. Because leadership is a social process, it’s more about getting people to want to do things than about making them do them. They also discuss the role of power, noting that leadership is less about power over followers and more about power through them.
Now they present a number of axioms. I don’t have time to go through each of the actions in depth, but I’ll just tell you what they are:
- Leadership is all about leaders.
- There are specific qualities that all great leaders have.
- There are specific things that all great leaders do.
- We all know a great leader when we see one.
- All leadership is the same.
- Leadership is a special skill limited to special people.
- Leadership is always good and is always good for everyone.
- People can’t cope without leaders.
So let’s discuss some of the axioms right now. People are often more attuned to and affected by the leadership of their immediate supervisors than they are to the distant, more senior leaders, or as they say in the paper, “the leaders.” One study found that when sports athletes were asked who was doing the leadership in their own teams, they generally indicated leadership activities less by formal leaders and more by rank-and-file team members who had taken on informal leadership roles. They say that these findings contrast zombie leadership fads that, in a sense, routinely single out high-profile leaders.
Also from the paper, they argue that there’s a tendency to fetishize leaders, creating a hubris. Leaders can be caught up in this syndrome, what they call the “leadership trap,” where group success is overly credited to leaders rather than to the followers. This can feed the ego and narcissism of leaders and also just harden followers.
Another axiom relates to the principle that leaders are born, not made. Similarly, “leaders have qualities that non-leaders don’t.” On this myth, they observe there’s probably no positive ability or quality that has not been linked to effective leadership at some point or another. They also point out research on the social characteristics of leadership and how it can often lay more in the perceptions of followers than in specific qualities of the leader. They say that the fact that being assassinated or simply being dead is a powerful predictor of a leader’s charisma and perceived greatness. Because of this, it alerts us to the fact that what leaders are like will sometimes not matter at all.
Another axiom relates to charging into the large change programs yet leading the pack. Instead, they say leadership is as much about stable phenomena as it is about change. Stable stuff like resolving conflicts, bolstering morale, reproducing culture, ethics, and more. They say that the aura of a “champion of change” also frequently ignores the failures associated with leadership. In any case, they argue that it remains impossible to reduce leadership success to a simple “to-do list” because group context is critical. They also challenge the idea that even if leadership isn’t always grand, then surely it’s always good. But they disagree with this concept. Leadership—as in discreet, heroic, hierarchical leaders—isn’t always necessary and won’t always lead to better outcomes. It’s just the romanticized vision of what a leader is and should be, that “Hollywood idea of a leader.” Moreover, they say a large body of research highlights that different forms of collective and distributed leadership, where the leader role is shared, can also lead to high performance.
I’ve skipped a lot of the findings just due to time. How can we defeat zombie leadership ideas, these ideas that just won’t seem to die? They provide a number of ideas. Again, I can’t go through all of it, but one is recognizing the components of “zombie leadership meta-theory.” For instance, these myths that only leaders can lead or leaders have qualities that set them apart from ordinary people. We need to move on from those.
Two, they say return to the definition of leadership. It’s a process where one or more people motivate one or more other people to contribute to the achievement of collective goals. And this is by shaping beliefs, values, and understandings in context.
Four points here they say are:
- Leadership is grounded in relationships and connections. Without some formal followership, there can’t be any leadership.
- Leadership is more about getting people to do things rather than about making them do them.
- And leadership is a group process and ultimately about the activities and collectives, not just the individuals.
Recognizing the cost of zombie leadership, they say there are four key costs. One is a failure to recognize and reward the efforts and achievements of ordinary people. They say that zombie leadership ideas can alienate group members and reduce their willingness to contribute. It can also damage leaders by inducing narcissism, complacency, and unwillingness to learn. And four, championing theoretical and practical alternatives to zombie leadership. They say there are four key priorities. Champion approaches that broaden our understanding of leadership beyond the leaders. Champion approaches that see leadership as a process to which everyone can and needs to contribute. Champion approaches that recognize that success really depends upon connections between leaders and their group. And champion approaches to leadership development that prioritize these objectives.
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