IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ecl/harjfk/rwp02-043.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Through Their Own Words: Towards a New Understanding of Leadership through Metaphors

Author

Listed:
  • Mayer-Schoenberger, Viktor

    (Harvard U)

  • Oberlechner, Thomas

    (Harvard U)

Abstract

This article suggests that metaphors are essential to understanding leadership. Metaphors can serve as underlying organizing structures of leadership thinking and experience, and they can be mobilized in order to accomplish interpersonal goals. The literature on leadership abounds with metaphors such as leadership as game, sports, art or machine. While the multitude of leadership metaphors used by authors and leaders alike appears determined by a complex interplay of personal, situational, and cultural factors, the analysis of a leadership interview indicates that these metaphors center around experientially significant nuclei of meaning. By examining the entailments of leadership metaphors on such dimensions as highlighted and hidden leadership aspects or the suggested relationship between leader and followers, metaphor analysis allows the exploration of leadership conceptualizations on an experiential level. An exploratory grid presents possible entailments of selected metaphors on important dimensions of leadership. We propose that the study of leadership metaphors can provide valuable lessons to leaders. For example, effective leadership may require a rich and situationally attuned metaphorical vocabulary. Because leadership metaphors carry implicit suggestions about values (e.g., what is good, what should be done, and how), they may also allow for new insights into the ethics of leadership.

Suggested Citation

  • Mayer-Schoenberger, Viktor & Oberlechner, Thomas, 2002. "Through Their Own Words: Towards a New Understanding of Leadership through Metaphors," Working Paper Series rwp02-043, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
    • Handle: RePEc:ecl:harjfk:rwp02-043
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://research.hks.harvard.edu/publications/getFile.aspx?Id=57
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Yonit Nissim, 2020. "Draw Me a Shepherd: Student-teachers' Perceptions and Metaphors on the Image of the "Leader-teacher"," Higher Education Studies, Canadian Center of Science and Education, vol. 10(2), pages 1-24, June.
    2. Zullina H. Shaari & Amzairi Amar & M. Radzi Zainol & Azamudin Badri Harun, 2015. "Linking Leadership Studies to Corporate Brand Management: A Review," International Journal of Business Administration, International Journal of Business Administration, Sciedu Press, vol. 6(1), pages 26-37, January.
    3. Katerina Gkalitsiou & Dimosthenis Kotsopoulos, 2023. "When the Going Gets Tough, Leaders Use Metaphors and Storytelling: A Qualitative and Quantitative Study on Communication in the Context of COVID-19 and Ukraine Crises," Administrative Sciences, MDPI, vol. 13(4), pages 1-42, April.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ecl:harjfk:rwp02-043. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ksharus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.