21

leadership and Religion

Sverre Spoe/stra

Introduction
The link between leadership studies and religion is both obvious and puzzling. It is obvious
in the sense that one needs little more than a glance at the field's most popubr concepts to
know that leadership has a great deal to do with religion. After all, much of what happens in
the field today £•lis under umbrella concepts with explicitly religious roots, such as charismatic
leadership, spiritual leadership, and servant leadership. Other popular concepts have somewhat
less obvious religious roots, such as transformational leadership and authentic leadership. but the
religious connotations are not difficult to reveal here also. The popular business literature on
leadership, meanwhile, is flooded with books of the 'leadership lessons from Jesus' type (e.g.
Adair, 2011; Blanchard and Hodges, 2005; Manz, l998).
But the relation between religion and leadership studies is also puzzling because the connec-
tion is rarely addressed within the academic community ofleadership scholars (a few exceptions
notwithstanding, e.g. Grint, 2010; Sliwa et al., 2013; Spoelstra, 2013b; Thomas et al., 2015;
Tourish, 2014). In the rare instances when religion is addressed, leadership scholars have often
been content to discms it at the level of metaphor (e.g. Alvesson, 2010; Hatch er al., 2005),
thereby sidestepping the question of whether or not leadership itself may be seen as a reli11ious
phenomenon. The absence of an explicit interest in the relation between leadership and religion
goes so far that one might be tempted to speak of a repression of the religious dimension of
leadership amongst leadership scholars.
This chapter is structured as follows. In the first section, starting with an etytnological account
of religion, I make the case that leadership can be understood as a religious phenomenon. In the
two sections that follow, I show how this religious dimension of leadership plays out in some of
the most popular concepts ofleadership, first in relation to the concept of charismatic leadership
and then, more briefly, in relation to the concepts of transformational leadership, spiritual leader-
ship, setvant leadership, authentic leadership, and distributed leadership. These examples serve
as illustrations of the overall argument (that leadership is a religious phenomenon) but they also
show how and where these leadership concepts overlap and where they are rnodelled on difl:er-
enc religious themes. In the final section I ask what the recognition of leadership as a religious
phenomenon may mean for the study ofleadership.

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Sverre Spoelstra

leadership as a Religious Phenomenon

It is a commonplace to say that leadership is hard to define (e.g. Stogdill, 1974). The same has
been said about religion (King, 1954). This may suggest that a discussion of the links between
these two terms could be a tricky exercise. In an attempt to nan·ow the focus, I will use a philo-
logical starting point, in particular the question of whether the term 'religion' stems from the
Latin religare, 'to bind', or from the Latin relegere, 'to go through', 're-read' (Hoyt, 1912). The
first, religare, points in the direction of a bond: the religious person is the person who maintains a
bond with the divine. The latter, relegere, emphasizes the continuou.s efforts of the religious per-
son to follow the norms of the deities; it points towards 'obligation', or 'strict observance oflaw'
(Hoyt, 1912: 128). The opposite of religion is, in this reading, neglegere (negligence): 'An irreligious
Jew neglects the Law' (Hoyt, 1912: 128).
We shall refrain from following one etymological explanation over the other. Instead, I
shall use these two possible etymological roots to form a general conception of religion that
guides the discussion to come. 1 This basic understanding will allow us to draw parallels with
contemporary understandings ofleaders and leadership. First, the religious person may be said
to be someone who maintains a relation (to establish a bond, religare) with a realm outside of
the ordinary. This realm is sacred in the sense that it is separated (sacred: 'to set apart') from the
ordinary. We may therefore say that religion minimally assumes a separation of two spheres,
a natural and a supernatural sphere. We may further say that religious inhabitants of the mun-
dane sphere have established a connection with this higher sphere and that, depending on the
religious system, inhabitants of the divine sphere may or may not appear or take action in the
natural sphere. In other words, the two spheres are two worlds apatt, yet there are many bor-
der crossings in both directions, upwards and downwards, by a number of religious figures and
through a number of religious practices.
The etymology of relegere, in turn, highlights the difficulties in forming this bond, as well
as the sustained work that this involves: one must 'go through' again and again (e.g. to follow
the liturgy rigorously or to withstand one's earthly desires). According to Smith (1998: 270)
the English 'religiously', 'designating a conscientious repetition such as "She reads the morning
paper religiously" ' captures this meaning. While etymologically distinct, this latter meaning of
the term religion does not need to go against the interpretation of religion as religare. AsJean-Luc
Nancy observes, the difficulty ofbeing religious (to form a bond with the divine) comes with
the sacred status of the divine, which, in a sense, appears to foreclose the possibility of forming a
bond: 'The sacred is what, of itself, remains set apart, at a distance, and with which one forms no
bond (or only a very paradoxical one)' (Nancy, 2005: 1). One may further think of the notion
of self-sacrifice (popular in leadership discourse): to give up parts of oneself (or one's entire self)
in order to gain a divine (sacred) status.
In some religious systems the border between the natural and the supernatural can be
crossed by means of certain practices. For instance, in Buddhism, human beings live in a
realm where rebirth in a higher realm is possible by means of meditation and other practices.
'Nirvana' means literally 'blown out' (as a flame may blow out) and refers to a state where
one no longer suffers from the earthly 'flames' of greed, aversion and delusion, a state that can
be reached by means of sustained practice. In other systems, deities assume themselves earthly
forms. Within Christianity, Christ is said to be simultaneously the Son of Man and the Son
of God. Jesus Christ (as the second person in the Trinity) shows that 'God has truly assumed
manhood and thus is at the same time true man and true God in Jesus' (Ratzinger, 2004:
29). Moses, even though he is seen as a prophet rather than God, occupies a similar position

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 Leadership and Religi on

in Judaism: he is understood as the 'primordial cult founder who mediated the details of the
inside while standing irrevocably outside' (Hutton, 1994: 36). Next to methods by which
humans ascend or deities descend, in virtually all religions we find mediators: figures that
allow some form of communication or transfer between the higher and lower spheres. For
instance, prophets have been in contact with the divine and can therefore speak on behalf of
the deities, apostles are literally 'messengers' who spread the teachings of a particular religion,
priests mediate the relation between believers and their deities by administering religious ritu-
als, saints are seen as holy or have been made holy, fallen angels have been cast down to earth,
and so on. Each of these figures offers a partial 'solution' to a problem that may seem logically
impossible: to legitimately touch what may not be touched, or to partake in a divine world
while remaining in this world.
Against this background, let us now turn to the question of to what extent leadership may
be understood as a religious phenomenon. First of all, leadership is arguably not a religious
phenomenon if it simply refers to a (high or highest) function in a formal organization. This
is because such a position may be thought about without a separated sphere that transcends
the organizational realm. In other words, there is - in principle - nothing religious about
the creation of different roles and responsibilities in a functional chart. Having said that,
we should not lose sight of the fact that the very concept of hierarchy is itself a secularized
theological concept (Parker, 2009). Indeed, it can be difficult to conceive of those at the top
of the organizational chart as being in no way connected to the sacred. This tendency is also
captured in Weber's concept of the charisma of office, with the figure of the priest, who
derives his charisma from his function, as the paradigmatic example.
In the context of this chapter I will not elaborate on the religious dimension of formal-
ized positions. The reason for this is that few people today, whether in leadership studies or
in popular culture, understand leadership primarily as a function. Even if leadership authors
often turn to the study of top managers when they claim to study leadership (e.g. W aidman et
al., 2006) and continue to speak of 'positionalleaders' (in contrast to informal or distributed
leaders, e.g. Spillane et al., 2001), they tend to en<phasize that leadership is not principally
function-based. In other words, if authors speak of 'positionalleadership' (or similar notions
such as 'formal leadership', 'functional leadership', and also 'transactional leadership') they tend
to also speak of a non-positional form ofleadership, which is the one that is considered supe-
rior. Leadership studies is today fundamentally based on a split between two spheres, the sphere
of ordinaty organization (business) and a higher sphere. The most familiar form that this split
takes is the distinction between the manager, who occupies a function within the organiza-
tion, and the leader, a person who transcends the organization and is therefore capable of doing
something fundamental to it (e.g. 'transfotming' it, infusing it with meaning). Leadership is
seen as a force that transcends, redeems, or complements 'ordinary' management and business.
At times this results in the depiction of two different kinds of people: low ones (managers) and
high ones (leaders) (e.g. Zaleznik, 1977). More commonly it results in the distinction between
(high) leadership and (low) management, leaving open the possibility that organizational mem-
bers partake in both spheres (e.g. a manager/knowledge worker/production line worker, etc.,
who is also a leader, or who also takes part in some form of collective leadership). Leadership,
in short, is the name given to that which mediates between the sphere of mundane organiza-
tion and the extraordinaty.
Some have attributed these religious roots of leadership thinking to so-called 'Great Man'
theories of leadership, of which Thomas Carlyle is the most famous exponent. Carlyle (1993
[1840]) understood the course of hist01y largely as driven by exceptional men. In line with

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this, some strands of leadership studies, including charisnutic leadership, have been described as
'heroic', in the sense that leaders are portrayed Js mythical, larger than life. W hat is again cap-
tured in the labelling of leadership studies as 'heroic' is the movement between a higher and a
lower sphere. As Joseph Camp bell (1969 : 30) notes, in the archetypical hero-narrative:

a hero ventures forth from the world of comnwn day into a region of supernatural <vonder:
fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive vic to ry is won: the hero comes back
from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

In other words, the hero is capable of bringing something extraordinaty to the ordinaty,
due to their virtues obtained in a different sphere. Another obvious reference here is Plato's
philosopher-king, who is fit to rule because he got his hands on a return ticket to the realm of
ideas. According to Barker (2001), this is still the model that informs most of leadership studies
at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
However, the hero is just one religious archetype that can be read into contemporaty lead-
ership studies. As 1 will show further in this chapter, leadership studies is best read as offering
ditTerent solutions to the problem of how to bridge the ordinary world of management with
the extraordinaty world ofleadership. In other words, it is in the business of producing images
of leadership tha t would allow business organizatio ns to establish a bond with a realm that is
fundamentally outside ofbusiness (Spoelstra, 2013a). It frequently draws, implicitly in academic
articles and ofte n explicitly in popular leadership b ooks , on theological concepts and religious
figures to shape these images. So next to Camp bell's description of the hero, we also fin d con-
cepts of leadership that draw on other forms of religious mediation, such as the prophet or the
apostle. It is worth noting (and will become clear in what follows) that the prime inspiration for
the construction of leadership concepts is the Judeo-Christian tradition. Tlus is not a surprise,
given that contemporary leadership discourse has predonunantly Western roots.

Leadership and Charisma

In understanding the relation between leadership and religio n, the concept of charisma has
become of central importance. Indeed, leadership studies as an academic field has taken an
explicit interest in religion since it developed an interest in charismatic leadership in the 1970s
and 1980s (e.g. Ho use, 1977; Conger and Kanungo, 1987). The concept of charismatic leader-
ship merits attention in its own right because it may be regarded as the paradigmatic concept of
leaderslup studies in its contemporary form: all other leadership concepts may be seen as vari-
atio ns of the exemplaty cas e of charismatic leaderslup - an argument w hich is illustrated in the
next section.
The religious, more specifically Christian, roots of the concept of charismatic leadership
(literally 'gift of grace') are well known through M ax Weber's popularization of the term in
the early twentieth century. For Weber (1978: 241), charisma refers to 'a certain quality of an
indivi dual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed
with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional power qualities'. Charismatic
authority, following Weber's definition, refers to the situation in which a person is considered
to be special due to a mysterious gift and for that reason worth following. Crucially, for Weber,
charisma, in its ideal form, amounts to an outright 'rejection of economic conduct' (1968: 2'1).
Charisma 'is the opposite of all ordered economy' , and even 'the very force that disregards econ-
omy' (1968: 21). The prop het exemplifies the non-economic nature of charisma: prophecy is
professed for its own sake, not fo r any material reward (Weber, 1968: 255). This non-economic

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 Leadership and Kerrgron

nature of charisma, i.e. the sacred, is what separates it ti:orn the economic concerns of ordinaty
life, from which it is important for the leader to remain separate.
Within leadership studies, the source of the 'gift' of charismatic leadership is understood in
different ways, and not always in line with Weber. Some consider charisma as a mysterious qual-
ity coming from above, in line with Weber's definition (<wd also reminiscent ofCarlyle's Great
Man descriptions). For others cha1isma is rather a natural gift, given to certain individuals in
the form of a trait by birth. Yet others see charisma as something that can be acquired through
learning, which would make it a social gift rather than a natural or supernatural gift. In any of
these readings, however, charismatic leaders hover above 'ordinaty' people, with the figure
of the manager tending to stand for the ordina1y. Interestingly, the point of virtually all stud-
ies of charismatic leadership in organizations is to show that charismatic leadership is good for
organizational performance. In other words, charismatic leadership ought to be welcomed and
perhaps even developed in organizations because it is good for the economy of the organization.
In some definitions of chatisma, the religious sense and econonuc benefits come together. For
instance, charisma has been understood as 'a fire that ignites followers' energy and comnutment,
producing results above and beyond the call of duty' (Klein and House, 1995: 183).
Despite the one-sided emphasis on the economic and organizational benefits of charisma, it
would be a mistake to understand the analysis of charisma in economic terms as going against
Weber's ideal type of charismatic leadership as a non-economic phenomenon. The claim of
leadership scholars is not that ch;1rismatic leaders think in terms of economic benefits for the
organization. The claim is rather that charismatic leadership, in Weber's non-econonlic form,
happens to be good for organizations. This model can, for instance, be recognized in Chtysler's
former CEO Lee Iacocca's reduction of salaty, so often celebrated in texts on charismatic
leadership (e.g. Conger and Kanungo, 1987): for true business charismatics, as with Weber's
prophet, money does not matter. The 'discovery' of charismatic leadership scholars therefore is
that not thinking in terms of business is good for business (Spoelstra, 2013a). Furthermore, what
is separated from business (the sacred) not only makes business prosper but also redeems it from
its moral failures (Spoelstra, 2013a). With the business scandals, environmental crisis, and the
2008 financial crisis, business is no longer considered a redeeming power in its own right - at
least not by a majority. The religion of business (the market as the hand of God, the capital-
ist entrepreneur, etc.) has lost its support (Sorensen and Spoelstra, 2013). For non-believers in
business, something different is needed: something that does not hamper business as we know it
(as that would be 'unrealistic') but a force from the outside that not only makes business prosper
but also redeems it.
As Weber writes (1968: 21), 'In order to do justice to their mission, the holders of charisma
must stand outside the ties of the world, outside of routine occupations'. It is in this sense that
we may understand charismatic leadership as the paradigmatic case for virtually all leadership
concepts that have been produced since: servant leadership, authentic leadership, distributed
leadership, responsible leadership, and so on. All of these concepts refer to something that
stands outside of the economic sphere, which is why that particular form of leadership is
deemed capable of intervening from above in business. Leadership as a religion tells the story
of the breakdown of the paradigm of management (or systems thinking, control, functions,
rules, standards, etc.). Management can only bring the organization so £1r. What is needed
is something higher, and the leader inhabits this higher sphere while also being a part of the
organization. Weber's emphasis on the anti-institutional nature of charisma (seen by Weber as
a downside) is celebrated in leadership discourse. One could even argue that the leadership/
management distinction is a rearticulation of Weber's distinction between charismatic and
formal authority.

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Sverre Spoelstra

If the concept of charismatic leadership may be seen as a paradigm for all popular contemporary
leadership concepts, this is not to say that the figure of the charismatic leader still dominates lead-
ership studies. Indeed, research on charismatic leadership has decreased significantly since its hey-
day in the 1980s and 1990s, and much of what is left explores its 'dark side' (e.g. Tourish, 2014).
This dark side, as Rieff (2008) has argued, has everything to do with the fact that the char-
ismatic is understood as someone who breaks with the rules of this world, but not by following
the laws of a higher world (as charisma was understood by Paul in the New Testament). In this
sense, charismatic leadership is in opposition to religion as relegere (i.e. obeying the laws of a
higher order). Or, rather, the leader is not seen as an intennediary but as a lawgiver: he is mod-
elled after God the Creator rather than God the Redeemer. For Rieff this is a grave distortion of
Paul's notion of charisma, as 'the act of God in the present, a transforming power that is experi-
enced by the believer' (Potts, 2009: 34). What Rieff takes issue with is that Weber's concept of
charisma is no longer based on a creed. What makes Jesus charismatic, according to Rieff, is not
his miracle making, as Weber suggests, but the fact that 'he accepts without question the author-
ity of the law' (Potts, 2009: 69). This also explains why, in Rieffs view, it would be a mistake to
call Hitler charismatic: '[Hitler] is the leader of an anti-credal organization' (Potts, 2009: 118). 2
In light of the dangers of charismatics (understood as leaders who break earthly laws without
following higher laws), most leadership scholars today look for a more modest figure: a mediator
rather than a creator-commander. It is against this background that other leadership concepts
have been suggested that minimally offer a different emphasis, and often offer a different solu-
tion to the problem of how to bridge profane business with the sacred. I will suggest such a
reading in the next section for the concepts of transformational leadership, servant leadership,
spiritual leadership, authentic leadership, and distributed leadership.

Religious Connotations of Some Central Leadership Concepts

In this section I briefly discuss some of the most popular leadership concepts within leadership
studies today. Two of these concepts, transformational leadership and servant leadership, have
entered leadership studies in the late 1970s/ early 1980s; the three others, spiritual leadership,
authentic leadership, and distributed leadership, have become fashionable more recently. This
is by no means a complete overview; there are other leadership concepts with (more) obvious
religious connotations, such as self-sacrificial leadership (Choi and Mai-Dalton, 1999), tran-
scendental leadership (Cardona, 2000), or visionaty leadership (Nanus, 1992). However, the
concepts below have - I believe - some of the largest followings within leadership studies today.
Together they give a good impression of the way religion plays out, to a greater or lesser extent,
in contemporary approaches to leadership.

Transformational Leadership
As already mentioned, transformational leadership is closely affiliated with charismatic leader-
ship . Both concepts came to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s and are often mentioned in
the same breath (e.g. Bryman, 1992; Van Knippenberg and Sitkin, 2013). Initially charisma
was one of the four dimensions of transformational leadership in the work of Bernard M. Bass
(1985). It is therefore not surprising that much of what been said in the previous section about
charismatic leadership also holds for transformational leadership. For instance, transformational
leaders are, much like charismatic leaders in Weber's ideal type, understood as non-economic
(their counter-figure is the transactional leader, who thinks in terms of economic exchange).
Furthermore, as Tourish (2014) argues, transfonnationalleadership often assumes the cult-like

324
character that one also finds in Weber's ideal type of the charismatic. If there is a reason to dis-
cuss transformational leadership separately from charismatic leadership, then this must stem from
the concept of 'transformation' itself, which - perhaps surprisingly - is rarely discussed in the
literature on transfom1ationalleadership (Delaney and Spoelsrra, 2015).
At first sight, transformational leadership is less obviously a religious concept than charismatic
leadership. The word 'transformation', in contrast to charisma, is not of religious origin. Indeed,
in an anthology of religious concepts, Lawrence (1998) feels he needs to justifY the inclusion
of the tenn 'transfomution' alongside terms such as 'God', 'sacrifice', and also 'religion' itself.
However, as Lawrence continues to show, there is a substantial religious discourse on transfor-
mation, including transfiguration, transubstantiation, and conversion. According to Lawrence
(1998: 338), this discourse is 'largely individual', 'markedly voluntary', and 'avowedly positive'.
This is to say that transformations in religious discourses tend to refer to individuals who out of
their own will embrace a higher order. From this perspective, it could be argued that transfor-
mational leadership, in comparison to the concept of charismatic leadership, puts (slightly) more
emphasis on the follower: it suggests that individual workers voluntarily undergo a transforma-
tion where they come to embody higher values for the good of the company. Connotations of
the religious concept of conversion are particularly strong (Delaney and Spoelstra, 2015). The
transformational leader is the figure that has the capacity of realizing these conversions in oth-
ers. He or she is perhaps best understood as a secularized version of the prophet: the prophets
depicted in the Old Testament's Book of Kings have a 'transformational power' in that they
'change the way people think, their words are effective, almost creative [like God the creator]'
(Towey, 2013: 55).

Spiritual Leadership
The concept of spiritual leadership has gained traction since the 1990s (Conger, 1994; Fairholm,
1996; Fry, 2003; Reave, 2005). The term 'spirit' is originally 'a metaphor for the "wind" or
"breath" whereby God creates and empower living beings' (Pye, 1994: 253). To be inspired or
to be spiritual is to be under the influence of a deity. When leaders are referred to as 'inspira-
tional' or 'inspiring' (one of the most conm1on associations with the term 'leadership', alongside
charisma and vision), they appear as secularized deities, i.e. as God-like people who breathe
life into others. The concepts of charismatic and transformational leadership often build on this
imageq. For instance, Bass (1985) has identified 'inspiration' as one of the four dimensions of
transformational leadership. Likewise, Kanungo and Mendon~a (1994: 184) conclude that 'it is
only when leadership takes on a truly transformational form that the spiritual dimension comes
to the fore'. Like the transformational leader, the spiritual leader hovers above the organization
and infuses the organization with meaning through their 'vision' and even provides the organi-
zation with a 'soul' (Leavitt, 1986) .3 Some of the imagery, even more than transformational
leadership writings, reminds one of Carlyle's Great Men prose. For instance, Kanungo and
Mendon~a write that 'the spiritual dimension [ofleadership J ... is expressed in the sense of the
profound consciousness of the eternal values of truth, beauty and goodness represented by the
vision of the leader' (Kanungo and Mendon<;a, 1994: 185). We can further recognize a typi-
cal hero-narrative in some renderings of spiritual leadership. For instance, according to Palmer
(1994: 28), one can become a spiritual leader only by means of a 'downward journey [into the
selfj through violence and terror' , until one touches 'the deep place where we are in community
with each another', which forms the basis ofleading others to that happy place.
In some forms, then, spiritual leadership is best understood as an off-shoot of transforma-
tional leadership, one that puts more emphasis on the need of the leader's self-transformation.

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Sverre Spoelstra

The basic idea is that the spiritual leader has to engage in self-transformation before transforming
others (Fairholm, 10%; Reave, 2005). However, there are also versions of spiritu;1lleadership
that blend in with the work of spirituality literature (see Osvvick, 2000). The basic idea here is
that all workers (whether or not they are designated as 'leaders') ought to estrtblish a relation
with a deity or transcendental force so that both humanity and profitability may prosper. From
this perspective, the celebration of the vision of the transcendental leader is seen as a danger eo
spiritual leadership rather than as a defining characteristic (Reave, 2005). The main somce for
these more 'modest' versions of spiritual leadership is mysticism, i.e. 'personal religion' (James,
1985) rather than institutional religion.

Servant Leadership
Like spiritual leadership , the religious roots of servant leadership are Curly obvious and often the
explicit focus of books on the topic (e.g. Wilkes, 1998). However, unlike spiritual leadership,
these religious roots are rarely acknowledged in jourml publications (exceptions are Sencljaya
and Sarros, 2002; Wallace, 2007). The concept of servant leadership has been popular since the
late 1970s, following the publication of Greenleafs (1977) book with the same title. Greenleaf,
a Quaker, was obviously influenced by the portrayal of Jesus as servant in Matthew and Mark:
'The Son of Man cante not to be served but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many'
(Matt. xx. 28 and Mark x. 45). Jesus is for Greenleaf the archetypical leader (Banks and Led better,
2004), in the sense that he puts the interests of his followers first, as exemplified in the story of
Jesus washing his disciples' feet Qohn xiii. 1-17).
Less often mentioned than Jesus as a model for servant leadership is Paul. But there is a case
to be made that servant leadership is modelled on the figure of Paul as much as Jesus: Paul serves
God (as Jesus Christ), whereas Jesus, as the second person in the Trinity, is God. Indeed, the
£1mous first ten words ofPaul's Letter to the Romans read: 'Paul, a servant ofJesus Christ, called
to be an apostle, separated to the gospel of God'. This line may also suggest that servant leader-
ship is best understood as apostolic: the servant leader is an apostle in the sense that he or she is
a messenger of God. Also the notion of a calling is crucial in this sentence: one is called to be a
se1-vant and it is this calling that binds (religare) the religious person to God.
It is useful to compare this image of the servant leader to the concepts of charismatic leader-
ship and spiritual leadership. In contrast to the charismatic (and transformational) leader, the
set-vant leader is not seen as the authoritative source: he or she acts on behalf of God (but does
not take the place of God). This is essentially the notion of charisma that Rie.ff has sought to
restore in relation to Weber's (transgressive) charismatic (which has been the model for the
organizational versions of charismatic leadership). The charisma derives from God, and one
is charismatic only to the extent that one serves God. However, set-vant leadership resonates
closely with less heroic notions of spiritual leadership. As Greenleaf mentions, the 'Spirit is tbe
driving force behind the lTtotive to set-ve' (cited in Banks and Ledbetter, 2004: 11 0).
We may finally note that Christianity was not the only point of reference for Greenleaf; he
was also inspired by Herman Hesse's short novel]m1rney to the East, whose protagonist Leo was
a leader without being recognized as a leader. This is the key motive in the concept of servant
leadership: the (best) leader is not someone who stands in the limelight, but someone who is
hardly visible because he lets others shine. The servant leader is a mediator in the sense that he or
she transmits a spirit that lifts followers up to a higher plane. Out of all leadership concepts popu-
lar today, set-vant leadership is perhaps the most 'humble' in that it draws attention away from
the authority of single individuals. This modesty nicely shows in the reversal that 'what we need
today are not ... more sewant leaders but .. . leading servants' (Banks and Ledbetter, 2004: 111).

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Authentic Leadership
The concept of authentic leadership has become £1shionable in the 2000s with the popular lead-
ership books ofBill George (2003, 2007) as well as scholarly work by Avolio and his colleagues
(e.g. Avolio and Gardner, 2005). These authors stress the importance of knowing yourself,
being true to yourself (sincerity), and being true to others (transparency).
As Guignon (2004) has shown, contemporaty ideas of authenticity can partly be traced
back to the Protestant critique of religious hierarchy. For Luther, 'what is all important ... is
the individual's one-to-one relation to God. Luther rejects the church hierarchy, the practice
of confessing one's sins to a priest, and evety form of worldly internl.ediaty standing between
oneself and God' (Guignon, 2004: 15). Lutheranism involves a turn towards inwardness: pure
intentions are more impmtant than actions. The task for the religious person is to become
true to oneself. Authentic leadership is arguably an expression of this Lutheran ideal of taking
part in the divine world by means of inwardness . This is also the main difference trom char-
ismatic leadership: if charismatic leadership, in the tradition of Weber, amounts to the loss of
inwardness, as Rieff (2008) argues, the concept of authentic leadership is an attempt to bring
inwardness back in.
This has the great advantage that leadership becomes in principle open to all: leadership, in line
with other fashionable leadership concepts such as self-leadership and distributed leadership, is not
limited to extraordinaty characters that are created in the image of the prophet or apostle. Evety
single person in the organization can work on establishing a deeper relation with him or herself.
For some this is as difficult as Luther thought it was (in line with relegere). For others, however,
it is a pretty straightforward matter: 'So what should we do? It is simple, just do what is the tight
thing in your judgement and be completely transparent about why you are doing it' (Avolio,
2005: 131). In fact, being an authentic leader is even said to be easier than pretending to be one:
'To manage the impression of transparency versus to simply do it is more complicated and the risk
offailure is way too high today with the broad availability of information' (Avolio, 2005: 132).

Distributed Leadership
The concept of distributed leadership has become particularly influential in school leadership
via the work of Gronn (2000) and Spillane (2006). Out of the concepts discussed so far, the
religious bearings of distributed leadership are no doubt the most speculative. Indeed, the word
'distribution' has no religious connotations, at least not to my knowledge. Neither do affili-
ated concepts such as shared leadership, collective leadership, or team leadership - all concepts
that try to move away from so-called 'leader-centred' approaches to leadership (though these
concepts often maintain an important role for 'vertical leaders'; see, for example, Pearce, 2004).
lt has also become the custom to refer to these concepts as 'postheroic', which again suggests
a move away fi·om the religious roots of contempora1y leadership thinking in the tradition of
Carlyle's Great Man hero-worship.
It seems to me that the concept of distributed leadership (and afiiliated concepts mentioned
above) offer no new contents to the meaning ofleadership. All distributed leadership proclaims
is that leadership ('as we know it') ought to be distributed. In other words, concepts such
as transformational leadership or servant leadership remain present in the idea of distributed
leadership, albeit in 'distributed' fon11 (i.e. no longer located in a single individual). This is at
times acknowledged by distributed leadership scholars. For instance Spillane, Halverson, and
Diamond (2001: 24; see also Harris, 2004; Pearce, 2004) note how their understanding oflead-
ership is in line with transformational leadership.

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Sverre Spoelstra

If this is correct, then the question remains what is left ofleadership when the leading char-
acters have left the scene. The obvious answer is that we would encounter a leaderless form of
spiritual leadership, where the spirit (or 'the wind of God') moves through different people and
different situations. Perhaps distributed leadership points in the direction of a pre-Abrahamic
concept of religion: 'In many languages, the words signifYing spirit, soul and God relate to
ancient words for wind, breadth and light: perceivable fluxes whose message-bearing circula-
tion transfom1s and reorganizes bodies and their environment' (Serres, 1995: 34). But in the
Abrahamic religions too one can find the idea that God's spirit ought to be distributed. One pas-
sage may be of particular interest: in the Old Testament (Number> xi. 16-30), God takes some
of the spirit of Moses and distributes it over seventy elders ofisrael, who then start prophesizing.
When Joshua protests to Moses that he should stop the prophesy of these elders, Moses answers
that he wishes that God's spirit would be distributed to all people.
In comparison to other leadership concepts, distributed leadership consists of messengers
only: distributed leadership is a mediated fom1 of leadership where the medium is no longer
understood as a patticular individual (i.e. 'the leader'). This may be connected to its partial roots
in activity theory, which sees social life as 'a continuous flow of mediated activity' (Woods,
2004: 5). Drawing on Serres (1995: 9), we may even characterize distributed leadership as
angelic: 'the job of angels is only to bring messages'.

Implications for leadership Studies

A standard narrative in leadership studies claims that the field was in crisis in the late 1970s, a
'doom and gloom' period (Hunt, 1999) in which a number of commentators recommended
abandoning the study ofleadership altogether for a lack of clear results (e.g. Miner, 1975). The
happy ending came in the 1980s when 'the study of transformational and charismatic leadership
came in to save (sic) the day' (Hunt, 1999: 130). The arrival of these new concepts amounted to
nothing less than 'a transformation of the field' (Hunt, 1999). Since the 1980s, it has been said
that leadership studies live in times of 'New Leadership' (capitalized, as in 'New Testament')
(Bryman, 1992). This turn has also been described as the invention of a 'new genre ofleadership
theory', which focuses 'on exceptional leaders who have extraordinary effects on their followers
and eventually on social systems' (Shamir et al., 1993: 577). 4
According to Kuhn (1970), a paradigm shift in the sciences is akin to a religious conversion,
where the members of the scientific community come to see the world anew. Rarely, however,
do scholars use such an overtly religious idiom to describe a paradigm shift. Indeed, what is
interesting in this narrative is that leadership scholars themselves appear as God-like characters
who have saved leadership studies fi·om an earthly existence of unconfirmed hypotheses. With
the arrival of'New Leadership', all hypotheses are confirmed, which- within the narrative-
signals scientific progress.
But one may question to what extent leadership studies since what we may call the 'religious
turn' amounts to a study ofleadership. Much of what happens in the field is perhaps better under-
stood as apostolic: as messengers of a particular (leadership) religion. The silence on the religious
nature of leadership no doubt helps leadership researchers in maintaining their self-identity as
scientists (Atwater et al., 2014), but it has come at the expense of the study ofleadership.
Ifleadership is indeed best understood as a religious phenomenon, then there are two obvi-
ous possibilities for studying leadership. The first is the theological approach, i.e. to take the
religious bearings of leadership seriously and subject them to faith-based analysis. Similar to
Odo Casei's (1962: 5) thesis that, '[God's] revelation remains a mystery, because it is not open
to the profane world, but hides itself, shows itself only to the believers, the ones whom he has

328

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 Lead ership and Religion

chosen', true leadership may also be said only to show itself to £1ith-based scholarship. A great
example of this, outside of the community ofleadership scholars, is Philip Rietfs (2008) book
on charisma which I have occasionally drawn on in this chapter: in his book Rieff shows how
a theological concept, namely charisma, has come to be corrupted and he offers a powetful cri-
tique of conternporaty manifestations ofleadership on the basis of this critique. From within the
community of organizational leadership scholars, Banks and Ledbetter (2004) also come to mind
as an example of scholars who subject leadership to 6ith-based analysis. The second possibility is
to study leadership from a religious studies perspective. This would involve studying leadership
as a religion without being committed to that religion oneself. The work of Dennis Tourish
(2014) on the links between transformational leadership and cults may serve as an example. In
my view, both avenues hold great potential for leadership studies. 5

Notes
One may of course question if this etymological exercise is best suited to capture contemporary
meanings of 'religion'. Pye (1994: 224) goes as £1r as saying that 'the modern use of the term [religion]
is not dependent on its etymology', which is echoed by Smith who holds that many of the etymological
connotations are 'irr-elevant for contemporary usage' (1998: 269). In particular, 'religion' is often seen
as an institution, which is also captured in anthropological definitions (e.g. Spiro, 1966). However, it
seems to me that the most fundamental question underpinning religious institutions is precisely how the
border between the sacred and the profane is crossed, which direcdy pertains to the two etymological
roots discussed.
2 Following Rieff's critique ofWeber, one may also critique contemporary leadership disconrses for their
simplistic distinction between the routine nature of management and the anti-institutional nature of
leadership. Many religious concepts, including the concept of charisma, offer a much more nuanced
picture of the interplay between, and even the simultaneity of, the goals of organizational maintenance
and organizational revolution (next to Rieff, 2008, see Hutton, 1994).
3 Among business scholars, the idea that organizations have a soul is, without exception, seen as a positive
thing. However, not all celebrate the infusion of spirit in business. Gilles Deleuze (1995: 181), for instance,
declares: 'We're told businesses have souls, which is surely the most terrifying news in the world'.
4 One may question to what extent 'New Leadership' is, in fact, new. It may be more precise to speak of a
rediscovery of the religious dimension ofleadership, given that many leadership texts prior to World War
Two also draw on religious themes (see Humphreys and Einstein, 2003).
5 Many thanks to Christian Borch, Nick Butler, Helen Delaney, Josh Firth, Bent Meier S0rensen, and
Stefan Tramer for their helpful feedback on an earlier version of this chapter.

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