Chapter 11: Models, Methods, and Triangulation: Researching the Social Processes in Our Societies

This chapter provides some commentary on each of the other chapters and attempts to synthesize some of the messages and implications contained therein. In doing so, it also presents some new material produced recently by the chapter authors. The chapters in this book give insights into the conceptualization of leadership and associated organizational processes. Some chapters outline the actual research that has been conducted into these processes. They also draw conclusions about methodologies best suited to providing insights into these processes. We attempt to draw together these conclusions and insights.

Micha Popper tells us that leadership is a type of relationship, and not just the interplay between leader, follower, and circumstance. Grounded theory is a research method that reflects and gains insight into that “leadership as relationship” paradigm, rather than the “leadership as cognition” paradigm. This chapter is interestingly connected to several other chapters in the book. In focusing on the relational aspects of leadership, there is a point of contact with Ropo and colleagues’ chapter that also emphasizes the relational aspect of leadership, though from a completely different perspective. Here, Ropo is interested in, as several other authors are, the possibilities of grounded theory to redress some of the limits of traditional leadership discourses and as an antidote to the biases that have been promulgated via the mainstream extant methodologies. While other chapters used grounded theory to discover nuances of leadership processes, as they are revealed in local context and circumstances, Popper sees the possibilities of grounded theory for moving us out of the biased nuances we have inherited from the more traditional research paradigms. It seems he is arguing that instead of zooming in for details using quantitative approaches, we should use grounded theory for zooming out—to begin with a new conceptual base, founded on a leadership-as-relationship paradigm.