Viewing the Leadership Narrative Through Alternate Lenses: An Autoethnographic Investigation**

Zusammenfassung

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This conceptual-theoretical article revisits the work of Parry and Hansen on the nature of the organizational story as leadership. The present article is written in the autoethnographic style. The original narrative work is re-examined through the lenses of autoethnography, narrative theory, metaphor/discourse, critical realism and conventional quantitative research. The insights provided by this methodological triangulation are examined. The conclusion is that organizational stories will reflect leadership if they are plausible to the intended audience, give all organizational members an empowered part in the story, have a moral to the story, and have a happy ending. The overarching theme that is proposed is of leadership as the generation of individual hope for a better existence.

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Auszug

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Viewing the Leadership Narrative Through Alternate Lenses: An Autoethnographic Investigation**

This is an autoethnographic investigation of organizational phenomena. Boyle and Parry (2007) have stated the case for a greater use of the method of autoethnography in organizational research. Indeed, a chapter of the 2008 Sage Handbook of Organizational Research Methods dedicates itself to organizational autoethnography. From very humble beginnings, the use of autoethnography in organizational research is increasing. By its nature, autoethnography is a reflexive and emotive personal narrative. It is not conventional leadership research. The subject of this particular investigation is a reflection upon the generation of the theoretical argument put forward by Parry and Hansen (2007), which was based upon the notion of the organizational story as leadership. In particular, I look at this notion of the Organizational story as leadership' through four research lenses, each of which has gained a level of popularity in organizational research and is gaining greater popularity in leadership research. I hope that by using this rather non-conventional discursive approach, and by triangulating these various perspectives on how we developed theory, I can shed more light on the essential nature of leadership, at least insofar as it pertains to followers in organizations. The data used in this investigation is of course the self-narrative, which traditionally is seen in autoethnographic research. This narrative includes discourse about a quasifield experiment that I undertook recently. However, this certainly is not a piece of quantitative leadership research.

Part one - a realisation: narrative and leadership

It was a few years ago that Hans Hansen and I realized that our two literatures covered a very similar area of scholarship. Hans researched discourse and organizational stories. I researched leadership. Of course, Hans researched much more besides, but it was these two bodies of literature that seemed to be saying much the same thing. We had a few chats over coffee. Then we sat down and compared the two literatures. We tried out our ideas at the Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism in Nova Scotia. We ran our ideas past some colleagues. Ultimately, our collaboration resulted in the article in the Sage Leadership journal (Parry & Hansen 2007). The essence of the argument is that people follow organizational stories as much as they follow people, so organizational stories can be considered as leadership. The organizational story creates a narrative. The narrative generates an outcome that people can work toward. People join with the narrative, rather than follow the leader. Therefore, the leader need not be a person. The aim of this article is to revisit this narrative research, and to look at the phenomenon of Organizational story as leadership' through alternate perspectives on organizational research. Those perspectives are autoethnography, discursive method, critical realism, and finally a more traditional quantitative method. As I have explained, autoethnography is relatively new to organizational research, and to leadership research in particular. The discursive method is not new to leadership research. However, to the extent that discourse, narrative and leadership are axiomatic o...

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