The understanding that the senior executives of an organization (the CEO and his/her selected team) are responsible for strategic formation and enactment. In viewing strategy, and in interpreting strategic possibilities, members of the organization’s upper echelons inevitably do so through the lens of their through their personal experiences, values, personalities, and other similar human factors.
Published in Chapter:
The Conundrums of Strategic Leadership: Leading of Organizations, in Organizations, or through Organizations?
David Starr-Glass (University of New York in Prague, Czech Republic)
Copyright: © 2017
|Pages: 11
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-1049-9.ch122
Abstract
Strategic leadership has emerged as the most significant and widely used leadership approach, and is seen as moving leadership away from a concern with the organization's internal dynamics to an involvement with its strategic alignment in the external environment – a leading “of” organizations, rather than a leading “in” them. Rhetorically, strategic leadership has a strong appeal; conceptually, however, it presents a number of conundrums. Strategic leadership seems to confound the process of strategic management with a process of leadership. It fails to recognize a relational understanding of leadership that might actively include people, develop inspiration, or sustain productive motivation. By focusing exclusively on hierarchical leaders and their externalized goals, strategic leadership also avoids a consideration of how leadership might actually work through the organization, rendering internal organizational dynamics invisible, if not irrelevant. This chapter explores these problems and calls for a reconsideration of what strategic leadership might mean.