Love Will Tear Us Apart: Transformational Leadership and Love in a Call Centre

Call centres are organised around the control and surveillance of employee performance, which naturally suggests the relevance of transactional leadership. In our case study, however, we find that leaders in a call centre pursue transformational leadership to the point where employees relate to their leaders, each others and their jobs in terms of love. To be able to encourage emotions of love in call centre workers can be seen as very successful transformational leadership, while challenging our basic assumptions about love as an authentic, higher order feeling. We use Plato's classic work on love to provoke and develop our common sense understanding of love and conclude that to see love as artificiality provides new possibilities in a transformational leadership practice.