Debating Leaderless Management Can Employees Do Without Leaders?

Management research has traditionally assumed that leaders play an essential role in both public and private organizations and are required for a business to run smoothly. However, more recently, a vein of critical research has claimed that leaders can do more harm than good, creating confusion and putting their reputation before production and employee wellbeing. This book asks the question - what would happen if there were no leaders? Would employees be better off without formal (or informal) leaders? And even if such a utopia were desirable, would it be realizable in practice?

1. Why debating Leaderless Management.- Part I. For leaderless management.- 2. The Moral Necessity of Leaderless Organizations.- 3. Developing for Leaderless Organizations: Two Eco-Friendly Coaching Practices.- 4. When Matters are Too Important to be Left to Leaders and Better Left to Democratic control.- 5. Leaderless Management as the Solution to Struggles over the Moral  Center of Healthcare? Ward Nurses’ Critique of Management as “Real Utopias” in the Public Sector.- 6. Dissolving the Leader-Follower Schism: Autonomist Leadership and the Case of Word of Warcraft.- 7. In Favor of Leaderless Management: Follettian Perspective of Co-Leadership.- 8. Leaderless Leadership: Implications of the “Agora” and the “Public Library’’.- 9. Beyond Leaderlessness: Even Less Than Nothing Is Way Too Much.- Part II. In Between For And Against Leaderless Management.- 10. Leaderless Work and Workplace Participation.- 11. Who Sustains Whose Passion?.- 12. Leaderless Organization versus Leading for Creativity: The Case for Creative Leadership.- Part III. Against Leaderless Management.- 13. Why Leaders are Necessary.- 14. Ghostbusters! On the Narrative Creation of (Absent) Leader Characters.- 15. Against leaderless management: What Leaderless means in South Africa.- 16. Leaderless Management: No! Leaders at All Levels: Yes!.- 17. Principled leadership: The Antidote to Leaderless Management.- 18. The Enabling Role of Leadership in Realizing the Future.- Part  IV. Beyond Leaderless Management.- 19. Organizational Management is Paradoxically both Leaderless and Leaderful.

Frederik Hertel is Associate Professor of Organization, Communication and Management at Aalborg University Business School, Denmark. He has published articles on Leadership, Everyday Creativity in Organizations, Educational Anthropology, Philosophy of Management and Organizational Communication. He worked for 10 years in public organizations as a project manager and head of development before returning to academia. 

Anders Örtenblad is Professor of Working Life Science at the School of Business and Law, University of Agder, Norway, and Professor II at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway. He is the editing founder of the book series Palgrave Debates in Business and Management, for which he recently edited the following titles: Debating Equal Pay for All: Economy, Practicability and Ethics and Debating Bad Leadership: Reasons and Remedies. 

Kennet Mølbjerg Jørgensen isProfessor of Organization Studies at the Department of Urban Studies, Malmö University, Sweden. His research interests comprise storytelling, ethics, learning and power in organizations. Kenneth has authored, co-authored and edited numerous books, articles and book chapters on diverse topics such as business ethics, management education, sustainability as well as critical research methodology.