Realizing Influence in Leadership: Negotiating Agency Through Push and Pull Moves

While leadership is generally understood as an agentic process, there are divergent positions in the literature regarding the extent to which agency is to be understood as centralized in individuals and individual actions or distributed among actors and located in the collaborative process itself. In this study, we align with post-heroic studies of the realization of moments of leadership through interaction, to explore how actors themselves relate to the issue of agency and interpersonal influence. We draw on an ethnomethodological study of calls to action in management meetings to empirically identify two forms of agentic moves, which are distinguishable through the sequential organization of interaction: push moves, which claim agency (e.g., through requests), and pull moves, which grant agency to the recipient. Our analysis shows that, in practice, influence consists of a varied combination of such moves, through which a distribution of agency, acceptable to the actors and appropriate in relation to the organizational circumstances, is achieved. Moreover, we observed how actors engaged in extensive interactional work to mitigate interpersonal friction associated with claims to agency and potential restrictions on recipient autonomy. Our results demonstrate that process-oriented approaches to leadership can indeed involve close attention to individual moves, understood as reflexively designed by individual participants based on the gradually evolving interaction. Our study thus opens possibilities for future post-heroic research on leadership to explore in detail how influence is realized across a variety of settings, as well as the extensive work dedicated to maintaining interpersonal relationships during moments of leadership.