“Dialogue – possible between leader and follower?” - Ashridge

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In 2006 I began working as a faculty member at Ashridge Business School. I became specifically engaged with ‘leadership’ as an interest area, designing and delivering leadership development programmes. I began a PhD with Cranfield University in 2009 knowing I wanted to explore these two areas; leadership and empathic resonance. It was when I began to look into the academic literature for concepts similar to my understanding of empathic resonance that I discovered the field of dialogue and became particularly inspired by the work of Martin Buber. 4
3. Literature Review a. Dialogue The array of definitions given in relation to the word ‘dialogue’ can be quite overwhelming. It apparently means “simply a conversation between two or more persons” (Gergen et al., 2001:681), and yet the lack of it is “not only the most acute symptom of the pathology of our time, it is also that which most urgently makes a demand of us” (Buber, cited in Kramer, 2003:viii). It refers to “a joint activity between at least two speech partners in which a turn taking sequence of verbal messages is exchanged between them, aiming to fulfil a collective goal” (Tsoukas, 2009:943), and yet it awakens the hope of reaching a situation “where people might soften or drop the barriers between them, perhaps even transcend them and so find non-objectified, genuine meeting” (Isaacs, 2001:713). Amidst all of this Deetz and Simpson (2004) warn that as “dialogue foregrounds specific normative hopes” (p141), “the coupling of high expectations with an ill-defined and murky concept increases likelihood of disappointment” (p152). To make sense of this ‘murky concept’, and to explicate where Buber’s work is positioned, it helps to firstly see the range of contexts in which dialogue is employed and then the historical lineage of the term which illuminates some of the key elements of definitional difference that exist between authors. With regards to context, to illustrate the breadth of application the list below shows just some examples of circumstances where dialogue scholarship is of importance and some authors in those areas (see Anderson et al., 2004a for a more comprehensive overview of these and other contexts). Buber’s original work, (1958), is classified within the philosophical arena, however his work has then subsequently been used extensively by others within the therapeutic and educational fields. 5
Page 1 and 2: “Dialogue - possible between lead
Page 3: 2. Background It is difficult for m
Page 7 and 8: Figure 1: the historical developmen
Page 9 and 10: Both sets of authors have in common
Page 11 and 12: academic work linking the two areas
Page 13 and 14: accessible to a pragmatic individua
Page 15 and 16: and Uhl-Bien, 1995) and charismatic
Page 17 and 18: many of their propositions are cert
Page 19 and 20: to leadership theory” (2008:253).
Page 21 and 22: i. Inhibitions to leader-follower d
Page 23 and 24: can easily grow into a feeling that
Page 25 and 26: Research questions, methodology and
Page 27 and 28: A methodology which has grown in us
Page 29 and 30: My experiences of co-operative inqu
Page 31 and 32: • The very ambiguous and uncertai
Page 33 and 34: • As the above points indicate, i
Page 35 and 36: Where next? The process of co-opera
Page 37 and 38: References Anderson, R., Baxter, L.
Page 39 and 40: Habermas, J. (1984), The theory of
Page 41: Stewart, J. and Zediker, K. (2000),

“Dialogue – possible between leader and follower?” - Ashridge

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