Demanding followers, empowered leaders : dance as an “embodied metaphor” for leader-follower-ship

In this paper, we explore how leadership and followership are relational, mutually constructed and mutually enabled. Using dancesport as metaphor and medium, we focus on the embodied, corporeal aspects and dynamics of leading and following, relating them to lead/follow roles and tasks of people in organizations. In a mainly autoethnographic exploration of the lived experiences of people in leader-follower-relationships, we use the concept of embodied cognition as a basis and argue that dance can provide a vehicle for immediate, implicit “insights” and even “aha effects” through sensory, bodily experiences.