Chapter 8: Dialogue: A Dialogue on Theorizing Relational Leadership

Dear Bill,

I wanted to start off our dialogue about “Theorizing Relational Leadership” with some brief personal reactions, observations, and questions that perhaps you could help clarify, illuminate, or just plain discuss. After reading through our set of papers, I think my general reaction was “pizzled.” I know it’s not a word, but I heard it used in a TED talk and thought it captured my reaction quite well: simultaneously pissed off and puzzled.

Now, that may seem a little harsh, so let me elaborate. The p.o.’d part of my reaction, I think, stems from the postmodern tone in several of the chapters. To me, much of postmodernism, including deconstruction, smacks of modern-day Sophistry—and I do mean that in a pejorative sense. The focus is on argument and not on trying to measure, predict, and understand empirically what is the essence of, in the present case, “relationality,” which is perhaps why I’m puzzled as well. How can I engage in a dialogue in which my values are so misaligned with the topic? My training is in industrial-organizational (IO) psychology, which is hardly the bastion of postmodernism in the academy! Nonetheless, it does highlight my unease (or I could be cute and say dis-ease) with some of the underlying assumptions and values reflected in the chapters. Specifically, that postpositive—or what I would call scientific—approaches to theorizing about relationship leadership (RLT) need to be chucked. I think the approaches also overly simplify things into and Entity versus a Constructivist approach. Is there not a continuum there?