MBA Lecturers’ Curriculum Interests in Leadership

MBA Lecturers’ Curriculum Interests in Leadership – E.J. Garcia – © ML 2009 – of 21

M B A Lecturers’ Curriculum Interests in Leadership

Eric Jean GARCIA

Key words: Leadership, MBA, Critical Management Education

Abstract:

This paper aims to provide insight into MBA lecturers' curriculum interests in relation to the topic of leadership. Central to this inquiry is the exploration of MBA lecturers' beliefs and expectations of leadership learning. An attempt is made to categorise the purpose of leadership study in five English and French MBAs by investigating lecturers’ assumptions about what counts as a leadership success in the corporate world. Guided by the work of Habermas on human knowledge interests, the main value of this inquiry is to provide research-based evidence of the prevailing interests in the teaching of leadership in MBA curricula. The analysis reveals that, although driven by different pedagogical motives, the majority of MBA lecturers are not committed to providing participants with a full understanding of leadership that might serve people and society beyond mere business ends.

Published online before print November 13, 2009,

doi: 10.1177/1350507609347588

Management Learning February 2010 vol. 41 no. 1 21-36


Introduction

n recent years there has been a growing interest in leadership development in MBAs as well as a growing dissatisfaction about the content of MBA curricula. On the one hand, leadership has become a pervasive subject of executive

education throughout the world and the majority of MBA schools are now equipped to undertake the mission of providing training and education in leadership (Bickerstaffe, 2005, 2007). On the other hand, MBA course directors face the challenge of reconsidering their educational model to free their curriculum from the domination of narrow instrumental forms of rationality (Alvesson and Willmott, 2001, Dehler, et al., 2001, Roberts, 1996) so as to serve the interests of the wider society rather than almost exclusively, although not entirely, those of the corporate world through teaching and those of the academic community through research (Mintzberg, 2004, Pfeffer and Fong, 2002, Starkey and Tempest, 2005). The relationship between these two trends is unclear and may be more coincidental than causal. Nevertheless, it is troubling to see that, when MBA curricula integrate more courses and activities aimed at developing participants’ leadership skills, criticism about the lack of educational and professional relevance of these curricula does not weaken. As a result, it seems that the recent emphasis on leadership studies in MBA curricula has not produced significant change. A number of reasons might account for this including:

The structure, ideology, and ethos of MBA curricula might be fundamentally opposed to an education of leaders (Gabriel, 2005).

The level of integration with other subjects and/or the teaching strategies used might fall short of providing participants with a significant improvement of their leadership skills (Mintzberg, 2004).

The time and resources allocated to leadership development initiatives might be inappropriate to seriously address the curriculum challenges facing MBA schools (Elmuti, et al., 2005).

Participants might be insufficiently experienced and/or ill-prepared to really benefit from a leadership development programme (Mintzberg, 2004).

There might be a dominant perception among participants that studying ‘leadership’ in a classroom is a waste of time, especially when they are required to remove their ‘comfort blanket’ and produce a high level of commitment and effort (Grey and French, 1996).

I


Partly because MBA education is typically a ‘cash cow’ at many universities (Pfeffer and Fong, 2002), there might be reluctance within the teaching staff to engage seriously with leadership issues beyond participants’ short-term expectations.

There might be a skill deficit among teaching staff notably due to the shortage of continuing professional development in MBA schools (Williams, 2000).

Even when MBA lecturers seriously attempt to challenge participants’ taken-for-granted assumption about leadership from a more critical perspective, the outcome can be deceptive (Sinclair, 2005).

At the heart of these issues lies the tricky and problematic nature of leadership, which makes leadership development activities particularly challenging for lecturers. The trickiness of leadership can be explained as follows. Leadership is an essentially contested concept (Gill, 2006), which has been subject to an etymological history of change (Grace, 2003). From a research standpoint, ‘the intellectual integrity of leadership as a legitimate and important field of study has remained open to question’ (Collinson and Grint, 2005) and remains thorny because it involves personal skills such as reflexivity (Schön, 1984) and emotional intelligences (Goleman, et al., 2003). For instance, the variety of learning strategies that can be used to promote leadership development (Bush and Glover, 2004) can be frustrating for MBA lecturers. The practice of leadership is also a complex activity depending on both social and cultural contexts (Hofstede, 2001, Mellahi, 2000, Rosen, 1984). As shown by Rost (1993) on leadership research in the US, a variety of perceptions of what leadership is can be found within a given culture over a relatively short period of time. Therefore, the real impact of leadership on organisational performance remains uncertain and hard to measure (Pfeffer, 1993). The problematic nature of leadership lies in the radically different projects for people and society that can be pursued through its study. As highlighted by Foster (1989), the topic of leadership can be used to either sustain the project of a ‘bureaucratic-managerial’ society or develop an ‘emancipatory’ project for people. In the former project, social relations in the workplace are largely determined by hierarchical structures of power and the dominant objective is goal achievement. To this end, the purpose of leadership is irremediably tied to meeting organisation needs and accomplishing performance objectives in such a way that the current social order is maintained by the leader. In the case of an emancipatory project, the main purpose of leadership is to make organisations more democratic and more accountable to wider constituencies than just the primary stakeholders (e.g. customers and shareholders). Here, leadership is somewhat distributed across the workforce and aims to attend to the moral needs of followers (Burns, 2003, Gini,


1998, Greenleaf, 1977) as well as to seriously empower people to bring about effective economic, social, and environmental changes in both the workplace and society at large.

The research agenda MBA lecturers have, for better or worse, a crucial role in producing and reproducing the practices of leadership. However, given the tricky and problematic nature of leadership, what these lecturers are trying to do with the topic of leadership is neither neutral nor value-free nor culture-free. For instance, the recognition that organisational behaviour courses have been underpinned and legitimized by positivistic conceptions of social sciences, particularly through positivistic versions of economics and psychology (Steffy and Grimes, 1992) poses the problem of the extent to which MBA lecturers’ beliefs and assumptions fit this description and contribute to extending this process through leadership studies. In this debate, is Reed and Anthony’s claim that MBA lecturers should ‘recover their institutional and pedagogical nerves’ by providing more ‘critical’ perspectives within their programmes (1992 p.610) well-founded? Or is Hay and Hodgkinson’s (2008) contention that MBAs are already providing participants with a satisfactory level of critical understanding of managing tenable? Clearly, in the absence of empirical research, it is difficult to provide insightful interpretations of what MBA lecturers might attempt to do in respect of leadership in their curricular activities. This paper aims to provide insight into MBA lecturers’ curriculum interests in whatever they call ‘leadership’. The concept of ‘curriculum interests’ is rooted in the idea of curriculum developed by Barnett and Coate (2005) and raises a fundamental question: what is leadership study for? Or, more specifically, in which direction should MBA participants’ learning experience about leadership be pointed? It also raises questions about what counts as leadership success in the corporate world and whose interests do MBA lecturers aim to primarily serve in their teaching: those of MBA graduates, the top management, other company workers, company stakeholders, or society at large? These questions have in common the exploration of MBA lecturers’ expectations of leadership learning. Therefore, what is at stake here is MBA lecturers’ contentions about the influence leadership study should have on the way participants will practise leadership in the workplace. In that respect, the value of this inquiry is to provide research-based evidence of the prevailing interests in the teaching of leadership in MBA curricula. Methodology and research strategy The methodological approach of this inquiry recognizes that MBA lecturers are taking a deliberately active part in defining and using the various forms of knowledge available about leadership in their teaching activities. As such, they do


not act as passive transmitters of knowledge about leadership. On the contrary, they select, clarify, adapt, re-distribute, assess and therefore transform knowledge about leadership. In doing so, they can be assimilated as ‘social agents’ who operate by means of ‘selective screens’ (Storey, 1993) through which they study and interpret leadership for the purpose of helping MBA participantss to make sense of leadership practice in the workplace. More indiscernibly, their work and behaviour are also involved in shaping the hidden curriculum of MBAs. This expression is used as a shorthand for highlighting the importance of implicit norms and rules, which, beyond public documentation, official course handbooks, textbooks, and lecture notes, might reproduce social inequalities and create a managerial elite subservient to capitalist interests (Apple, 1990, Bowles and Gintis, 1976). Therefore, the decision was made to focus on MBA lecturers’ personal knowledge and interpretations, thereby applying Beck’s conception of social science (Beck, 1979): The purpose of social science is to understand social reality as different people see it and to demonstrate how their views shape the action which they take within that reality. Since the social sciences cannot penetrate to what lies behind social reality, they must work directly with man’s definitions of reality and with the rules he devises for coping with it. What social science offers is explanation, clarification and demystification of the social forms which man has created around himself. (Cited in Cohen, et al., 2003) In compliance with this conception of social reality, the underlying principle guiding this inquiry is that revealing insight into the societal purpose of leadership in MBAs requires empirical evidence and, thus, to meet individually those identified as the key disseminators of knowledge about leadership in these programmes. These disseminators are the lecturers who have a personal leverage to influence participants’ beliefs, assumptions, and behaviour related to leadership. In the context of this study, they typically teach Leadership, Organisational Behaviour, Human Resources, and Strategy courses. However, for simplification they will be called MBA lecturers. An empirical study of five MBA programmes was conducted across the two leading MBA providers in Europe in terms of the number of MBA schools and programmes, namely the UK and France. Twenty-five in-depth interviews were conducted which included almost all the lecturers specialising in ‘leadership’. The research design used is that of a ‘multisite case study’ (Creswell, 1998), which involves a single method (interviews) for gathering data, yet enabling a triangulation of data by means of different geographical sources also called ‘space triangulation’ (Denzin, 1970). However, this study is not intrinsically comparative in the sense that the strategy used here does not ‘seek to inspect educational entities or events to explain their similarities or differences’ (Thomas, 1998 p.1). In this regard, it is worth noting that, although conducted in two different countries the analysis of data from this study showed no significant differences between


lecturers relating to their base country of operation. Certainly, a larger sample would be needed to be more conclusive on this issue. Two major criteria were used to select the five MBA programmes. Firstly, all schools offer an executive MBA programme. This choice is justified by the growing attractiveness of part-time MBAs, which now represent two-thirds of the MBA degrees awarded worldwide (MBAinfo.com, 2006). It is also justified by the profile of participants, who are experienced professionals with, supposedly, more chances to take a leadership role in organisations as compared with regular full-time participants. Secondly, all MBA programmes selected for this inquiry satisfied at least two of the three leading quality assurance schemes, namely AACSB, AMBA, and EQUIS. The tactical approach adopted for conducting the interviews is that of the ‘interview guide’ developed by Patton (1980). With this approach, interviews were conducted in English or French by the author in an open-ended fashion so that research topics and issues were specified in general terms. The data generated from the interviews were examined, interpreted, and sorted out with the objective of identifying the societal purposes served by the leadership topic as it is understood and acted upon by informants. Once word-processed, the method used to manage the data is the ‘thematic matrix’, the purpose of which is to classify and organise data according to the themes, concepts and apparent categories emerging from transcripts so as to elaborate ‘a coherent and comprehensive analytic structure aligned with the research objectives’ (Ritchie, et al., 2003 p.221). With the aim to encourage informants to have a true freedom of speech, it was decided that the real names of MBA schools and the identity of informants be systematically anonymised. The theory of constitutive knowledge interests To help ensure that this inquiry is pursued through a wide range of possibilities, the analysis was guided by the theory of knowledge-constitutive interests developed by Jürgen Habermas (1972). A major concern of Habermas is the spread of instrumental reason to all areas of social life and its corollary, the rise of a ‘technocratic consciousness’, defined as an ideology emerging from the fusion of science, technology and industry realised through the pursuit of what Weber (1947) terms ‘means-end rationality’. Habermas describes technocratic consciousness as being not simply based on notions of just exchange, but also on ‘a technocratic justification of the social order sustained by a greater than ever involvement of administrators and technicians in social and economic affairs’ (1971 p.103). The risk is that technocratic consciousness not only justifies domination by a particular class (e.g. business leaders), but also affects the very structure of human interests notably because of an increasing tendency to define practical problems as technical issues.


But, for Habermas, it is possible to escape from the domination of instrumental reason and the ascendance of positivism by reaffirming the necessity of self-reflection and self-understanding through a systematic investigation of the specific human interests constituting the forms of knowledge in any particular domain. The modalities of this enquiry are contained in the theory of knowledge-constitutive interests, which postulates that knowledge is historically rooted and interest-bound and needs to be understood as the result of human activity. By this means, Habermas rejects the Kantian approach that such activity can emerge in an ‘ahistorical and transcendental subject’ but instead embraces the precept of ‘historical materialism’, stating that history, social reality and nature are all products of human labour (Held, 1980 p.255). From now on, the main objective of Habermas’s theory is to uncover the conditions for the possibility of knowledge in relation to human activity. In this attempt, knowledge is understood as reflective of problems people encounter in their effort to achieve social and economic development. People organise their experience according to ‘knowledge-constitutive interests’ or a priori interests for constructing and interpreting work and life experience (Habermas, 1972 p.196). In short, people must produce from nature what is needed for material existence, must communicate with others through the use of intersubjective forms of language within the context of a rule-governed society and must develop a reflective appropriation of human life through which the interest-bound quality of knowledge can be felt. Based on these perspectives, Habermas developed the hypothesis that human beings have three basic modes of interests. The first a priori interest is ‘technical’; a term indicating that knowledge is governed by instrumental reason, whereby natural phenomena are reified and objectified. At the level of leadership theory, instrumental reason enables the ascendance of positivism, through which the central purpose of leadership is to control and manipulate people’s needs and motivations mainly by using quantitative strategies. At the level of leadership action, instrumental reason gives rise to ‘technocratic consciousness’ or an increasing tendency to rationalize leadership challenges as tactical problems to be solved. Epistemologically, technical a priori interests in leadership are rooted in natural or empirically-analytical sciences, which are structured to generate knowledge in the forms of laws and theories that are grounded in the regularity of observable facts. The second a priori interest is ‘practical’; a term indicating that knowledge is governed by contextual circumstances and personal experiences. Here, the fundamental purpose of leadership knowledge is to give sense to the complexity of leadership reality by means of interpretive strategies, such as hermeneutics. For instance, within practical a priori interests in leadership, human perceptions of leadership situations are perceived as a socio-cultural phenomenon requiring interpretation; a process by which the language and the social context of the object is penetrated. In effect, what we know about leadership can be enhanced through the establishment of intersubjective understanding, thereby making this


knowledge subject to constant revision. From this perspective, the search for laws or law-like generalisations specified above with technical interests is irrelevant and predictions of leadership behaviour are inherently problematic. The third a priori interest is ‘critical’; a term chosen in reference to critical sciences, which aims to provide people with an adequate understanding of all social practices notably by disclosing deformations of communication. For Habermas, the main guiding principle of critical sciences is emancipatory, a concept drawn from Marx’s conception of the nature of organisation and from a personal interpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis theory. The former conceives the development of social organisations in terms directly dependent on the productive forces (working class). The latter focuses on the development of socially expressible needs and motivational patterns, which can be the result of unconscious mechanisms rather than conscious control. In sum, the principle of emancipation consists of ‘not only overcoming the constraints of nature, like scarcity, but also dissolving systems of distorted communication’ (Held, 1980 p.277). Within critical a priori interests, the aim of leadership is to deliver a commendable agenda for people and society by means of self-understanding, intellectual freedom and autonomy. The process of self-reflection and autonomy is grounded in both theory and practice, enabling the achievement of a true unity of knowledge and interest; ‘it is in accomplishing self-reflection that reason grasps itself as interested’ (Habermas, 1972 p.212). In contrast to the two other modes of knowledge interests, this one is not immediately connected to the utilisation of knowledge nor can it be reduced to an independent form of thinking based on informed judgement. Rather, from this mode of interests, it will be possible to explain that leadership objectivity can be a positivistic illusion and that language distortions make underpinning ideologies and their reinforcing effect on existing power structures difficult to penetrate. From there, leadership action depends on an individual and collective consciousness of the influencing forces or hypostatised powers that condition what we know and do in regard to leadership; in particular those produced by positivist and interpretivist strategies. Of course, Habermas’ three-fold conceptualisation of knowledge and a priori knowledge interests might not do justice to the full array of knowledge interests in leadership. Nevertheless, a key advantage of this conceptualisation at the level of this inquiry is to recognise that MBA lecturers’ curriculum interests in leadership can be driven by at least three basic ontological and epistemological needs which are not mutually exclusive. Therefore, throughout the analysis of data collected from the interviews, MBA lecturers’ curriculum interests in leadership were evaluated through the light of these three a priori knowledge interests, namely technical, practical and critical.


Key findings The analysis of the data gathered for this study confirmed the relevance of using Habermas’ theory of knowledge constitutive interests. Firstly, the analysis revealed six categories of dominant lecturers’ curriculum interests in leadership which have been grouped into three clusters (performative, idiosyncratic, and reformative). Then, on closer inspection, it has been possible to link each of these clusters with each of the three a priori knowledge interests identified by Habermas as well as with the two overall societal projects suggested by Foster (1989) and discussed above (see Figure 1).

Performative

A priori knowledge

Interests

Idiosyncratic

Reformative

Technical

Practical

Critical

Clusters of

curriculum interests in

leadership

Broad societal projects

supported by leadership

Bureaucratic-

managerial

Emancipatory

Figure 1: Overview of the clusters of MBA lecturers’ curriculum interests in leadership and the relationships established with Habermas’ three basic a priori knowledge interests and the two basic kinds of societal projects, which might be supported by leadership studies.

Performative curriculum interests The ‘performative’ cluster of curriculum interests represents forty-eight percent of the informants of this study. The word ‘performative’ is derived from ‘performativity’, a term used by Lyotard (1984) to conceptualize a changing condition of knowledge in post-industrial society, which, ‘fuelled’ by progress in technology and the expansion of capitalism, drives the rise of a new spirit that replaces the true and false distinction in favour of the efficient and inefficient distinction. Underpinning this new spirit is performativity, a new basis for knowledge, whose criterion for legitimation has become unresponsive to grand narratives but depends on its capacity to achieve the maximization of input-output


ratio. Although identifying with different emphases, namely ‘biased’, ‘competitive’ and ‘pseudo-defeatist’ (see Table 1), the MBA lecturers driven by performative curriculum interests or ‘performative lecturers’ share the belief that the ultimate intent of leadership studies is to help participants to maximize corporate profitability.

Performative curriculum interests

Categories Main purposes

Competitive

Leadership points to changes in the marketplace, so the need to develop responsive strategies for increasing the competitive advantages of companies.

Biased

Leadership points to new societal changes (corporate responsibility and sustainability), so highlighting the need to adapt to new situations but essentially for preserving profitability.

Pseudo-defeatist

Leadership could be used as a means for undermining the capitalist order, but this view cannot be imposed on participants and, therefore, the only choice left is to meet market needs.

Table 1: Main purposes of the categories making the performative curriculum interests cluster

Basically, performative curriculum interests pursue a common goal, namely to operate effectively within business environments in terms of assets and incomes maximization. The empirical evidence provided in this research shows that the MBA lecturers whose overriding objective is to help MBA participants to maximize companies’ assets share the belief that leadership and organisational performance are unambiguously linked. On the one hand, the view that leadership has an impact on company results is regarded as a fact. On the other hand, studying leadership for improving company performance is, in itself, a worthwhile project for society in terms of wealth and income distribution. So, the underlying beliefs and assumptions about the study of leadership are sympathetic to what is usually referred to as an American approach in business studies, which is renowned for its ‘unfailing support’ of business and market values (Clarke and Newman, 1997, Crainer and Dearlove, 1998, Engwall and Zamagni, 1998, Locke, 1989).


In attempting to help companies to operate more effectively in this world, performative lecturers are inclined to objectify leadership behaviour, making it a tangible variable of business performance. In doing so, they promote the view that leadership reality is objective because it can be associated with tangible and systematic facts. The process of objectifying leadership is essentially based on two arguments. Firstly, in a world of change, where turmoil, uncertainty, and volatility prevail, the need for leadership becomes more acute and significant. As stated by an English lecturer, ‘in this fast changing and complex world, the need for effective leadership is keenly felt’. Secondly, there is the idea that market forces are ‘reified’ because they are felt to be omnipotent in the sense that they have an immediate, profound and far-reaching impact on societies and their economic development. In other words, the consequences of poor leadership can be disastrous and measurable. From a micro perspective, poor leadership means incompetence and creates a demotivated, frustrated workforce, high employee turnover, low morale and loss of productivity. From a macro perspective, poor leadership reduces the performance of companies, destroys jobs and eventually hampers economic growth. These two perspectives suggest that the main challenge of leadership is to deal effectively and opportunistically with market forces so that leadership effectiveness can be measured in terms of incomes, productivity, market shares and stock values. The idea that leadership effectiveness ultimately focuses on company performance is expressed by a French MBA lecturer for whom the project of changing society from his curriculum agenda is clearly inappropriate:

What you expect from a leader is his capacity to understand the society in which we live. His role is not to change it but to anticipate its needs and expectations. In understanding the world in which we live, a leader could adapt and organize available resources in an optimal fashion.

Supporting performative interests in leadership implies a particular way of thinking about the workforce and how people can effectively contribute to improving the performance of companies and maximizing their assets. The central idea about the workforce is the need to treat it right because a satisfied worker is more productive than an unsatisfied one. More specifically, in this ever changing and complex world, the challenges posed by an increasingly educated workforce have become ‘undeniable’ for companies. For instance, in expressing this view, an English lecturer said:

More than ever, people must be treated as human beings…. It is becoming axiomatic that effective leaders should never underestimate the importance of human factors in business success.

But beyond recognizing and emphasizing the importance of the human dimension in achieving business success, two underlying assumptions are also made. Firstly,


appropriate leadership, more than any other causes, determines the level of workforce motivation and compliance. Secondly, the properties under which the level of engagement of the workforce can be improved are identifiable and measurable, preferably by means of large-scale empirical surveys and psychometric tests. It is therefore unsurprising that performative lecturers are keen to find effective ways of rationalizing leadership behaviour and performance. For instance, five lecturers from two different MBA schools located on both sides of the channel clearly expressed their interests in representing ‘leadership effectiveness’ in an equation form. Their core belief is that ‘leadership effectiveness’ (LQ) can be factorized so that it results from computing ‘emotional intelligence’ (EQ) with ‘cognitive intelligence’ (IQ) and ‘networking intelligence’ (NQ):

‘LQ = EQ + IQ + NQ’ In addition, this study reveals that performative lecturers are fundamentally trying to develop participants’ quality of being adequately qualified to lead business activities through people rather than for people. The expression ‘leading for people’ suggests a servant-leadership role, which emphasizes service to others at work where sharing of power in decision making is practised even when it is not in the financial interest of the organisation (Greenleaf, 1977). The expression ‘leading through people’ involves a different emphasis. Here, the main challenge of leaders is to help business organisations to achieve success by means of a supportive workforce and so is the main purpose of leadership study. This view of leadership generating performance through a motivated and ‘recognized’ workforce implies that workers are seen more as performers, whose motivation and commitment to company interests can be maximized and controlled. The emphasis on company interests also suggests that the space allowed to the workforce to develop its full potential as human beings is marginal. In this context, the expression ‘leadership competence’ is essentially used as a metaphor to designate mere performance through workers who are seen ‘more as performers rather than reflective actors’ (Barnett, 1994 p.77). As a result, it can be said that performative curriculum interests reflect the technical a priori interests in leadership outlined before on the following basis: firstly, both interests are inclined to objectify the business reality, considering organisational performance to be the cornerstone of leadership; secondly, within both performative and technical a priori interests attempts are made to measure and predict leadership behaviour; thirdly, constituents of leadership behaviour can be surveyed by means of positivistic methodologies, such as large-scale surveys, enabling the development of formulas and standardised leadership questionnaires. From a societal perspective, performative interests are essentially supporting the project of a bureaucratic-managerial society mainly because they explicitly and unambiguously tie the purpose of leadership to improving organisations and their efficiency rather than transforming the world.


Idiosyncratic curriculum interests The ‘idiosyncratic’ cluster represents forty-four percent of the informants of this study. It consists of two categories of curriculum interests in leadership, namely ‘careerist’ and ‘self-awareness’. For the supporters of self-awareness curriculum interests, the cornerstone of leadership study is to prompt MBA participants to reflect on their needs and to develop new patterns of thinking so that they can act in accord with their own values and improve their personal leadership effectiveness. For the supporters of careerist curriculum interests, the fundamental purpose of what they do in respect of leadership in their teaching is to respond effectively to participants’ personal career needs and goals. The analysis showed that the common project of these two curriculum interests is to develop participants’ selves as decision-makers, hence to focus on them as individuals, with unique needs and capabilities. It also revealed that their common objective is to improve participants’ self-capacity or self-determination to succeed professionally. In summary, idiosyncratic lecturers aim to realize participants’ full potential and personal goals as corporate executives. This intent to develop participants’ selves is behind the choice to name this cluster of curriculum interests idiosyncratic. Etymologically, ‘idiosyncrasy’ comes from the Greek word idiosunkrasia made of idios meaning ‘own’ or ‘private’, sun meaning ‘with’ and krasis meaning ‘mixture’. So, underpinning the use of the term idiosyncratic is an intention to qualify something that is personal with a particular blend of characteristics. In some respects, idiosyncratic curriculum interests share with Schön (1984) the belief that the challenge of developing professional leadership is to promote the idea that participants should recognize and conciliate their own ‘espoused theory of action’ with their own ‘theory-in-use’. For instance, an English lecturer pointed to ‘self-awareness’ as ‘this extra set of tools, or frameworks, for understanding people and themselves’ MBA participants need to become ‘effective leaders’. Another one asserted that it is crucial to develop participants’ self-awareness because ‘leadership competencies can be enhanced through self-awareness and a capacity for self-reflective judgement’. For her, MBA participants who ‘demonstrate a heightened capacity for introspection and self-discovery’ are generally those with ‘the strongest leadership potential’. The underlying principle behind these approaches is ‘know thyself’ and the premise that ‘you cannot lead others until you have first led yourself through a struggle with opposing values’ (Kouzes and Posner, 1987 p.301). As such, the practice of leadership is embedded in a ‘reflection-in-action’ process, whereby decision-makers are encouraged to question the assumptive structure of their knowing-in-action, which gives them the opportunity to reframe problems and restructure their strategy of action.


The primary concern for idiosyncratic lecturers is to help MBA participants to operate ‘self-consciously’, namely to perform in the corporate world with an acute knowledge of oneself as decision-maker carrying a professional project or simply as a conscious being with a will of one’s own. As stated by a French lecturer: Having leadership requires an ability to influence others, but also to be influenced by others. Too often, decision-makers from large corporations that I know miss out the second point and thus behave like manipulators… In order to influence while being consciously influenced there is need for a great dose of self-knowledge. This is the reason why I often say that one of the conditions for developing one’s own leadership is to start with a genuine introspection. The underlying assumption of this statement is that leadership is a shared process of influence and, as such, requires the highest possible level of self-knowledge as a condition for interacting successfully with others. Leadership is conceived more as a social process than a specialized role and the main leadership challenge for decision-makers is to deal with the personal capabilities and the aspirations of people. However, when prompted to elaborate about the downside of leadership manipulation, this lecturer explained that ‘manipulation is indissociable from leadership and hence, is inevitable... So, it is the leadership’s job to ensure that people always trust their leaders’. The perspective about practical a priori interests provided by Habermas (1972) is associated with idiosyncratic curriculum interests on the following basis. For Habermas, the establishment of an intersubjective understanding is a condition and a mode though which knowledge can be enhanced. From this perspective, curricular activities do not disclose the reality of leadership situations as they appear within a behavioural system of instrumental action. Rather, they are directed toward the transcendental structure of various actual forms of leadership life, within each of which the reality of leadership situations is interpreted according to a specific grammar of apprehension and of leadership action. Therefore, by using Habermas’ theory of knowledge-constitutive interests, it is possible to provide a distinct philosophical ground for idiosyncratic curriculum interests from which leadership is essentially a social process conditioned by language activities or communication. However, although idiosyncratic lecturers showed an intense interest in the interactivity of leadership influence between working team-mates, yet, they never in any way tried to link the study of leadership with any form of engagement towards improving people’s lives or the dominant socio-economic order. Rather, throughout the interviews, idiosyncratic lecturers insisted on the importance of letting participants develop their own understanding and belief of what is leadership for. When the pedagogical focus of leadership study is the realisation of participants’ personal goals, idiosyncratic lecturers did not show their intention to


challenge the nature of these goals. Similarly, when leadership learning aims to improve participants’ professional trajectories, idiosyncratic lecturers did not show a keen interest in influencing the nature and direction of these trajectories. As a result, idiosyncratic lecturers are inclined to act as facilitators of personal success but do not attempt to encourage MBA participants to challenge their assumptions relative to their leadership roles in society. From a societal perspective, this inclination suggests that the overall project supported by idiosyncratic interests is left open-ended. Yet, when considering the reasons behind the decision to invest time and money in an MBA, the nature of this project appears less indeterminate. For instance, it is widely accepted that participants’ choice to attend an MBA programme is essentially driven by career advancement and income growth (Bickerstaffe, 2007, Pfeffer and Fong, 2002). As a result, by default, it is mainly the bureaucratic-managerial project that is likely to be supported by idiosyncratic curriculum interests in leadership. Reformative curriculum interests Only eight percent of the informants have been identified with ‘reformative’ curriculum interests. For them, the main purpose of leadership study is to promote social changes in the workplace. By emphasising the declining public trust of business and political leaders they describe leadership as a moral activity, in which the primary issue is whether leadership power is used wisely and well. In that sense they give support to Greenleaf (1977) and Burns (2003) for whom leadership has the potential to call followers to moral purposes that exceed their own desires, thereby expanding their range of interest and increasing the worthwhileness they might accomplish in the world. The core belief of reformative lecturers is that decision-makers need to operate purposefully as ‘enlightened’ promoters of moral, democratic and environmentally sensitive projects for business organisations, people and society. Therefore, by means of a workforce fully integrated into the leadership processes, the concept of leadership can be ‘positively’ instrumentalized to bring about progressive transformations in society. The underlying idea of the expression ‘progressive transformation in society’ is that progress cannot be restricted to the wealth of corporations, nor can it be alienated by its fragmentation into everyone’s own personal motives and interests. Alternatively, other forms of progress, which are more democratic and more accountable to the concerns of a much wider constituency than shareholders and top executives, exist and need to be implemented. The choice of the word ‘reformative’ for qualifying this cluster of curriculum interests is justified by the general idea it conveys. Its root-word ‘reform’ introduces the notion of gradual and moral change for the better, in which, as suggested by the Oxford Dictionary of English (ODE, 2003), a reform action involves a ‘change in something (especially in an institution or practice) in order to


improve it’. The idea that change must be gradual comes from a common distinction made by political scholars between reform and revolution (Luxemburg, 1973, Steger, 1997). Both terms address the need to transform fundamentally and lastingly society, yet through a different approach. On the one hand, revolution connotes sudden, drastic and far-reaching change, whereas reform implies the notion of gradual and progressive change. Within reformative curriculum interests, attention is given to the number of people and things that can be affected by corporate decisions, which far exceed shareholders’ and top executives’ interests. For instance, as seen in the case of Enron, fraud, mismanagement and profiteering not only affected the lives of workers, but also those of their families. Similarly, the consequences of narrow conceptions of leadership action might affect the health of a greater number of people than shareholders and top executives as illustrated by the diethylstilbestrol (DES) tragedy (Apfel and Fisher, 1984). Currently, the economic and social impact of the subprime crisis is being felt far beyond the sphere of corporate finance. On a global scale, such misconducts and overconfidence in the invisible hand of the free market economy (Smith, 1776) tarnish the reputation and compromise the integrity of the whole business community. So, what counts within these curriculum interests is to promote the view of leadership practice as operating purposefully, in the best interests of the wider population. Evidence indicates that, within reformative curriculum interests, the topic of leadership is viewed as a catalyst, through which MBA participants can rethink their expectations about business life and role as leaders in a capitalist society. Based on the magnitude of inequalities in this world resulting from the expansion of unbridled or unaccountable forms of business practice, leadership reality appears to be essentially biased. For instance, an English lecturer emphasized the importance of inequalities of income and wealth which are widening in market economies and becoming a real threat to democracy because the interests of business organisations and everyone else are increasingly diverging. In response to this situation, he argued that the concept of leadership ‘must be freed from the business ethos’ and must be taught as ‘an ability to break the old paradigm of doing business and replace it by something more in tune with the demands of society’. Similarly, a French lecturer insisted on the fact that we live in a world where social, cultural and economic inequalities have become too obvious and ‘what is expected from leadership is to be a catalyst for an alternative project for society’. When prompted to specify the kind of society she wants to see she replied ‘obviously, a fairer society, showing solidarity with people and being more human’. For these two lecturers, the ‘rhetoric of change’ contained in textbooks and thrown around by management consultants is meaningless. Leading change requires something higher than just maximising corporate profits and satisfying MBA participants’ materialistic ambitions. It should be directed toward making the


workplace a more democratic place, truly committed to sustainability and seriously involved in fulfilling human needs. The relationship between reformative curriculum interests and critical a priori interests offered by Habermas (1972) has been established on the basis that they both call for self-reflection and self-determination as an essential means to deal effectively with meta-issues, such as capitalism, democracy and human freedom. More specifically, both interests aim to secure freedom from reified forces, such as market forces, and conditions of distorted communication, such as the dominant discourses in MBA programmes, which take as given the principles of the free market economy. In pursuing critical a priori interests, reformative lecturers are actively engaged in influencing participants to reconceptualise their assumptions and beliefs about the purpose of leadership action in the light of critical theory. By this means, the study of leadership is clearly engaged towards supporting an emancipatory project for people and society.

Conclusion In the light of the methodological challenge posed by the nature of this inquiry the analytical outcomes of this study need to be handled with some caution, notably in regard to the issues of validity and reliability. For instance, the number of informants and the typology of the settings involved in this study limit the extent to which the findings can be generalised to other settings. A second limitation has to do with the biased nature of social research (Giddens, 1976) and the perspective that this study does not allow global or definitive statements about the beliefs and assumptions of MBA lecturers. A third limitation derives from the idea that ‘a way of seeing is also a way of not seeing’ (Poggi, 1965 p.284) from which it is doubtful that this study has explored every kind of curriculum interests in leadership. Despites these limitations, this study provides research-based evidence of the prevailing interests in the teaching of leadership in MBA curricula. The first key outcome of this study has been the substantiation of the problematic nature of leadership at an MBA curriculum level. By drawing upon the theory of human knowledge interests developed by Jürgen Habermas and data generated from the empirical research conducted in five MBA schools it has been possible to uncover and conceptualise three different lecturers’ curriculum interests in leadership. Even though this conceptualisation does not exhaust all the possibilities of knowledge in relation to leadership, it nevertheless provides insight into the kinds of societal projects lecturers are keen to support through what they try to achieve with the topic of leadership and MBA participants.


The second key outcome of this study highlights the significant proportion of MBA lecturers driven by idiosyncratic and reformative curriculum interests. This finding suggests that the majority of the MBA lecturers are not typically driven by performative curriculum interests, thereby undermining the argument that instrumental rationality might be the only ontology in MBA curricula. Therefore, although leadership studies might have been typically drawn on ‘a narrow range of functionalist theories, using positivist methodologies and producing quantitative findings’ (Collinson and Grint, 2005), it would be mistaken to assume that MBA lecturers developed a unitary kind of curriculum interests in leadership that would be essentially positivist in nature. The third key outcome of this study relates to the very small number of lecturers driven by reformative curriculum interests. From a societal perspective, this finding suggests that only a minority of MBA lecturers have their prevailing interests in the teaching of leadership driven by critical a priori interests. This finding suggests that the majority of these lecturers are not seriously engaged in providing participants with an understanding of leadership that could effectively challenge the project of bureaucratic-managerial society. As such, the chances for MBA participants to be confronted with a full understanding of leadership are very limited and the overall level of criticality in relation to leadership encountered by MBA participants might be lower than it should be.


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MBA Lecturers’ Curriculum Interests in Leadership

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