Self-leadership and global diversity management

The power disparity between leaders and members can lay the foundation for a hierarchy of rank across organizations. This power disparity can contribute to creating or reinforcing a dominant group within the organization, risking the oppression of other groups. Even where leadership theory has acknowledged the role of followers in choosing their leaders, such leadership styles have only shifted some power from leaders to followers. By largely retaining the leader-follower divide, they fall short of achieving power equity. In contrast, dispersed leadership, such as self-leadership, theoretically and foundationally promises to overcome the chasm between leaders and members. This makes such styles of leadership worthy of investigation for their alignment with diversity agendas. However, research into self-leadership reveals continued challenges in delivering power balance. This chapter shares self-leadership’s promise of power dispersion (Stewart et al., 2011), the challenges in achieving it (Gordon, 2002), and the ‘self-leadership high road’ to overcome these challenges (Manz, 2015). Additionally, the author critically evaluates the potential for achieving power equity by traveling the ‘self-leadership high road’ for diversity management and recommends some selected enablers from across the leadership literature and other disciplines that could allow self-leadership to be more conducive to global diversity management.