What Can Leadership-as-Practice Contribute to OD?

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to find complementarities and make contributions to the field of organization development (OD) from the new field of leadership-as-practice (L-A-P), and in so doing, enhance the development of OD in practice. Rather than looking for leadership in people, especially in their traits and behaviours, leadership-as-practice looks for it in everyday practice, in the spaces between people, and in emergent dynamic social interactions. To find leadership, we look to the practice within which it is occurring. The paper explores these premises by first discussing some of the principal classifications of OD throughout its history. It then offers ways in which L-A-P can potentially enhance OD in both theory and application.

MAD statement

While the merits of the dialogue and diagnostic models of OD have been submitted to debate, another process approach has been percolating, that of leadership-as-practice. This paper advances a number of principles and practices that can potentially enhance OD in both theory and application.

KEYWORDS:

• Organization development
• leadership-as-practice
• diagnostic OD
• dialogic OD
• phenomenological inquiry
• sociality

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joe Raelin

Joe Raelin is an internationally recognized scholar in the fields of collective leadership, learning, and practice. He is the Gordon Visiting Professor of Leadership at the University of Cape Town, SA; and the Knowles Chair Emeritus at Northeastern University, USA. His most recent book is Leadership-as-Practice: Theory and Application.