The Struggle of Leadership Work: Three Interactional Challenges in Mobilizing Actors to Commit to Future Action

Although it is widely recognized that leadership concerns organizing future actions and mobilizing organizational actors to pursue them, our understanding of how this is accomplished in situated work interactions is relatively limited. Recent ethnographic studies have focused on leadership work resulting in the emergence of direction. This study explores the efforts involved in attempting to mobilize actors to act in such direction. Drawing on video recordings of managerial meetings in two Danish organizations, we take an ethnomethodological approach to explore in detail what is at stake in the leadership work of mobilizing future action. Our analysis demonstrates that leadership in these meetings largely consists of what we term interactional organizing work, involving three central challenges: establishing a shared understanding of what the problem at hand is, who owns the problem and is accountable for it, and how the problem should be addressed. Rather than a smooth flow of emerging direction, we see a struggle between different interests with different implications, leading us to suggest that agency be treated as less of an either individual or relational matter and consider leadership to be a collaborative process that builds and grows from individual agencies.