What is Leadership? Reflexive Provocation in the Business School Classroom

Critical leadership education entails working with students to highlight the hegemonic discourses, beliefs, and assumptions that perpetuate the romance of leadership and the idealization of individual leaders. But the very nature of hegemony means that most (especially business school) students have been encouraged to reproduce these dominant assumptions as their own when asked to define leadership. Theories of critical reflexivity and provocation propose ways to counteract such hegemonic thinking, but raise ethical concerns about student care and hierarchical relations of authority in the classroom. We theorize reflexive provocation as an approach to resolving these issues by means of three key practices: (1) mirroring for students the way they reproduce dominant assumptions; (2) inviting them into dialogue with themselves and others about how and why they have internalized dominant assumptions; and (3) expanding the range of perspectives available to them for understanding leadership. We exemplify these practices by means of the “What Is Leadership?” exercise, which provokes student reflexivity in a dialogic manner to introduce relational, processual, and critical alternatives to conventional leadership discourses. We conclude by discussing the strengths, limitations, and ethical dimensions of our approach to reflexive provocation and dialogue about leadership together with students in the classroom setting.