Leadership Research Summary:
- This study is developed from qualitative data exploring the metaphors used to describe women’s leadership in differing cultural contexts. Metaphors are a useful communication tool, allowing us to understand an idea or concept through some other phenomenon. Understandably, studies of metaphor tend to focus on metaphors deriving from the English language and from Western cultures. Our everyday language literature abounds with metaphors that evoke images of the masculine – including of machines, war and fighting, competition, games and sport.
- Leadership is generally thought of as “a good thing,” as something important, carried out by people with desirable attributes, such as courage and insight, or with attractive personalities and good communication skills. Metaphors used in discussing women’s leadership in many countries may support this approach, but they do so by highlighting the obstacles women face, for example, the glass ceiling, glass cliff, sticky floors, and the labyrinth. This study attempts to break the mold, investigating the understanding of women’s leadership as expressed in metaphors that is contextualized differently across the continents. Taking an interpretive approach, this study seeks to present leadership through the understanding of female leaders involved in the field of education broadly defined, from Rwanda and Bangladesh, who gave accounts of their metaphorical conceptualization of leadership.
- Using narrative analysis, these accounts were analyzed to identify and interpret the metaphors emerging from descriptions of leadership experiences. The analysis shows that these leaders used metaphors determined by a dynamic interplay of personal, situational, and cultural factors. Somewhat surprisingly, the metaphors used to present leadership are not always based on a local cultural context, with some explicitly including references to European plants, which could be considered exotic. However, they are not metaphors that fit neatly into the taxonomies recognized in the literature. This study makes an important contribution to the literature on leadership, especially leadership in education. It is one of the few studies focusing on the stories of women from a non-Western background. The pool of case studies presented here is limited, but these metaphors represent thinking tools enabling a scholarly and imaginative understanding of women’s leadership in education.
Leadership Research Implications and Findings:
- This study set out to present metaphors that women leaders in non-Western contexts use to communicate their concepts of leadership and it has presented an analysis of metaphors presented by seven women from Rwanda and Bangladesh. The study has shown that the metaphors used by the women in this study are not influenced by the metaphors commonly found in the organizationally based literature on metaphors and leadership. The metaphors they have presented provide a stimulating way to understand leadership and what women really mean when discussing it. The analysis of these leadership stories shows that the metaphors they use are determined by a dynamic interplay of personal, situational, and cultural factors. It has also shown that there has to be a shared cultural understanding for a metaphor to provide insight into the concept of leadership.
- This need for shared cultural understanding in easily understanding what someone means when they use a metaphor in turn raises questions about the choices open to participants in cross-cultural research of the kind envisaged here. We had hoped to bring to light metaphors used by women acknowledged as leaders in their communities which are far removed geographically from Australia and the global north from which our scholarly traditions derive, and in so doing to give them a voice in this globalized scholarship. Yet the very process we used meant that they were likely to think about how to communicate their thoughts and practices across this cultural distance and thus to choose metaphors that we in the global north could relate to.
- The study has supported Alvesson and Spicer’s contention that leadership exists both as a concept and as a practice, and that imagination is important both for its expression and its understanding. The women clearly used a process of imaginative thinking to come up with the metaphors. These were not examples of the ordinary and invisible use of language found in other studies. Further, understanding some of these metaphors required imagination on the part of the researchers. In other words, these metaphors were deliberately developed to convey both the abstract and the practical, rather than being a part of the everyday discourse of leadership.
- Leadership is portrayed here, by at least some of the women, both as a series of attributes and as a range of practices to be understood within their context. This context may necessarily involve generating opposition because without that opposition there can be no significant change; however, the opposition is not cast in terms of winners and losers. The significance of context also means that the attributes cannot be separated from the women and the context in which they found themselves and turned into a checklist of desirable characteristics.
- Finally, this study cannot make claims about whether the use of the metaphors presented here is gendered. It can only state that these metaphors were presented by women in response to a request from a researcher. It may be that the language of management and leadership is already so gendered that it will be difficult to maintain everyday discussion of the concept and practice without using language with those invisible metaphors.
- This exploratory study, with its strengths and limitations, is a starting point for research on a topic of importance in a globalizing world. There is certainly scope for further research by women on women’s use of metaphors in expressing notions of leadership in a range of different contexts and cultural settings.