Measuring Leadership, Performing Gender: Critical Perspectives on Leadership Assessments and Inventories

This chapter contributes to debates about the significance and usefulness of leadership assessments, tests, surveys, questionnaires, and inventories—not by questioning specific scales, measures, or methods, but by drawing together critical research on how such tools get taken up and used by various stakeholders in organisational and leadership development contexts. From this perspective, the rigour and objectivity of leadership assessments hinges less on hard science and more on how these tools get framed, managed, mediated, and consumed by test givers and test takers. The authors summarise the history of leadership assessments and the key assumptions about leadership and science they reflect and perpetuate. They pay particular attention to the very conventional and binary preconceptions about gender and difference attached to leadership assessments and to the ways that differently gendered bodies encounter and process such tools. The authors conclude that not only researchers but assessment subjects themselves also need to fully understand the interactions and performances that occur around leadership assessments, as well as the ways that various actors attempt to make use of them as they navigate their way through the complex morass of gender and power dynamics in the context of leadership and organisations.