Collective Leadership as ‘Plumbing and Poetry’: Navigating Paradoxical Tensions Through Community Identity Work

Anniversary Essay.
Unlike other scholarly associations, the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) gave up the tradition of publishing presidential addresses in its journals a long time ago. However, at times, it might still make sense to reflect on what EGOS stands for – and where it is heading. The future of EGOS is discussed each year at its Colloquium (the association’s annual conference) as well as in other fora. Yet, these discussions tend to revolve around specific questions and more current, operational, or otherwise practical issues, while broader reflections on our scholarship and EGOS as our ‘home domain’ are rare (as an exception, see, for example, Lammers, 1998). Now that EGOS has entered its sixth decade of existence and recently celebrated its 40th Colloquium (Colloquia used to be biennial events in the early years), we deem it important to pause in order to reflect upon what EGOS stands for in terms of its core identity and purpose. This requires discussion not only of future opportunities and challenges, but also of the development of the association and how we got where we find ourselves, as a community, today.
In this essay, we offer our personal interpretation of the history of EGOS from an identity work perspective. We start from Snow and Anderson’s (1987, p. 1348) original definition of identity work (‘the range of activities individuals engage in to create, present, and sustain personal identities that are congruent with and supportive of the self-concept’) but emphasize two dimensions: first, identity work shapes not only one’s self-concept but also others’ conceptions, in cycles of interactions between internal and external identity work; second, we focus on community identity work to highlight that we refer to organizational identity achieved not only by the EGOS Executive Board but together with the broader community it serves. Indeed, based on our selective analysis of EGOS’ recent history, we argue that the identity of EGOS is not defined by its formal leaders’ decisions, choices or statements so much as by the discussions and debates about issues of concern for the community – i.e. through dialogic identity work (Beech, 2008). In this essay, we more specifically suggest that underlying many of these issues are paradoxes that we confront time and again, albeit often in somewhat varying forms. By paradoxes we mean persistent, non-resolvable, contradictory demands that create tensions in dealing with such issues (Putnam, Fairhurst & Banghart, 2016). Navigating these paradoxes in pluralistic contexts, such as the EGOS community, involves a both/and approach (Smith & Lewis, 2011) and collective leadership (Denis, Lamothe & Langley, 2001), as we detail below.