Studying Leadership from a Microgenetic Perspective

This book presents a new theoretical and methodological framework to study leadership from a cultural-psychological and developmental perspective. This framework includes a new theory – called Small Act Psychology – and a new methodology to analyze leader-follower interactions in irreversible time. This perspective is inspired by current microgenetic (aktualgenese) developmental research within the wider domain of Cultural Psychology. Drawing on Kurt Lewin's field-theory, E.E. Boesch's Symbolic Action Theory and L.S. Vygotsky's semiotic theory, the present work defines leadership socially, and hence from a qualitative perspective, contributing to the development of a cultural-psychological theory of leadership.

This new approach seeks to break with the current prevailing paradigm of the leadership research centered round the big-hero myth and interpreting leadership as a personal quality of a given person.  It also aims to feel a gap within the general literature about qualitative leadership by proposing an encompassing and wholistic theory and methodology to make sense of leader-follower interactions from a developmental perspective.

After presenting this new theory and methodology, the book also presents the results of empirical ethnographic and autoethnographic studies in which the new framework was applied. These studies provide not only empirical proof how leadership can be understood from a field-theoretical perspective but also show how leadership trajectories can change depending on specific interventions, providing evidence to the developmental nature of leadership as a social phenomenon.

Studying Leadership from a Microgenetic Perspective: Towards a Cultural-Psychological Theory of Leadership will be of interest to organizational and educational researchers, as well as qualitative psychologists in any domain of psychology striving for a theory that makes sense of leadership dynamically, and developmental psychologists interested in seeing how developmental approaches can be adopted in the study of a wide range of social phenomena.