Leader-follower-ship as embodied and enacted practice: reflections from the dancefloor

This research is about understanding leader-follower relationships in work contexts, with the aim to deepen and conceptualise the understanding of how managers can improve their understanding of leader-follower-ship through embodied practice, and how the ‘lens’ of dancesport can help to achieve this. The empirical part of the project is based on a study of participants’ interactions (both bodily and verbal), perceptions and reflections in a workshop setting. Whilst most of the leadership and followership research focuses on either leaders or followers and behaviours or attributes associated with leaders or followers, a newer research field has been developing that aims to improve understanding of the relationship constituting ‘leader-follower-ship’ as emergent and enacted between people. This is the field that this study aims to contribute to. Based on the notion of embodied cognition, I used the medium of dancesport (or competitive ballroom dancing) as a lens on leader-follower-ship. In a set of 3 interactive workshops, delivered over a period of 2 months, participants (managers and staff from different organisational backgrounds) explored leader-follower relationships through partnering exercises and dance-based movement activities, which offered opportunities for reflection-in-action as well as reflection-on-action and for enhancing awareness of how relationships are enacted and maintained. This study takes a phenomenological approach: qualitative data were gathered throughout and between the workshops in the form of written notes (participant observation), complemented by interviews with participants, participants’ own reflective notes, and video and audio recordings. My role was complex, a sometimes ‘seamless’ combination of facilitator, researcher and participant. Data analysis was a mix of interpretative phenomenological analysis and thematic analysis, but also included autoethnographic elements, based on my ‘body knowledge’ of dance and dancesport. The findings of this study present contributions to both the theoretical understanding and practical application of leader-follower-ship. The physical-somatic activities, followed by reflection rounds, showed that leadership is deeply embodied and not purely rational, and that leading, leadership, following and followership meant very different things to different participants, which also meant that each individual had a different ‘leadership journey’. Through the immediacy of ‘body interaction’ and sensing, issues of agency, power, follower-leader relating, and implicit assumptions about leadership and followership were explored and expressed. Combined with reflexivity, this enabled individuals to surface and review some of those assumptions. The study also offers a novel model that highlights the fluid and reciprocal nature of leader-follower-ship roles and actions, as well as deconstructing the hierarchical implications from the inside out, as it were, dismantling the view of leaders as ‘all-powerful’ and the assumption that ‘all responsibility rests with the leader’ and thus revealing the assumption of leadership as ‘being in control’ as an illusion. Finally, it introduces methodological advancements by incorporating non-verbal data into qualitative research, thus broadening the scope and depth of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Finally, it adds a useful ‘tool’ for leadership development and coaching.