Burns' (1978) book 'Leadership' is held to be one of the most influential books in the leadership field in the last 50 years. Despite its pre-eminence the fundamental concepts behind Burns' analysis of leadership have remained empirically untested. Burns argues that 'to understand the nature of leadership requires understanding of the nature of power' (p. 3), but the concept of followers as power holders in the leadership relationship has been greatly understated in much of the extant leadership research. Power is regarded as a problematic and complex concept that does not always sit comfortably with the ideology, and values espoused in much of the management literature. Many leadership models assume that power is the natural fiat of management and power derives from management's control of the main resources within the organisation and fail to recognise that power is dispersed across the various actors in the organisation. Burns argues that motives and resources are the two essentials of power, but whilst a review of the literature on transformational leadership (TL) will throw up many references to TL raising followers to higher level motives, there are scant references or discussion on the pivotal role the other essential, resource, plays in the leadership process. Much of the TL literature fails to recognise the exchange aspects of the leaderfollower relationships and the influence of power upon them. It also fails to recognise the influence of followers on the leadership style in the organisation, assuming a top-down model of unilateral activity where organisational agents select their behaviours whilst hermetically sealed from any external influence. Contrary to Burns' theory, these models proffer a simplistic model of leadership with a clear causality between leader behaviour and follower outcomes, rather than a series of complex, reciprocal relationships. This research sought firstly to test Burns' theory that a demonstration of TL will result in a higher level of motivation amongst followers, and consequently a higher commitment of resources. Secondly, to explore in more detail the influence of resource in Burns' theory the research contrasted followers' perception of leadership levels, motivation and OCB between knowledge workers and non-knowledge workers. It is argued that if Burn's theory of transforming leadership is valid, the centrality of knowledge as a resource within knowledge-based organisations will have constructed a new leadership relationship between knowledge workers and leaders where the satisfaction of higher level motivators will be evident. Drawing on Crozier's Strategic Contingency Theory (1964) it is proposed that the knowledge workers will use their position as the main source of organisational uncertainty and will expect leaders within organisation to recognise their control over the key strategic resource and manifest that recognition in an enhanced content of the psychological contract. The research used the psychological contract as a construct to measure the level of follower motivation and OCB to measure the level of personal resource commitment. Measures of the six TL behaviours in the Transformational Leadership Questionnaire (Alimo-Metcalfe and Alban-Metcalfe 2000), the Psychological Contract Inventory (Rousseau 2000) and three elements of OCI3 (Podsakoff et al 1997) were obtained from 426 employees from a range of organisations in Scotland including an electronics company, a bio-tech company and a government department. The research found that transformational leadership is strongly correlated to the higher level motivators in Maslow's (1954) hierarchy as encapsulated in the Balanced Psychological contract, but it is also strongly correlated to the mid-range motivators such as loyalty, security and belonging. The findings of the research also support Burns' claim of a correlation between a demonstration of transforming leadership and a high level of resource commitment, as represented in this research as OCB. This research suggests that where the higher level motivators are being addressed, in the forms of a fulfilled balanced and relational psychological contract, there is a greater commitment of resources in the form of a higher level of OCB. This research supports Burns' assertion that power is the central factor in the leadership relationship and challenges the leadership theory that dependent followers exert little or no upward influence on the behaviour of the leader. The research has found that TL is more positively correlated with KWs than non-KWs, more positively correlated with a balanced and a relational psychological contract and is also more positively correlated with OCB with KWs than non-KWs. This would suggest that leaders in KBOs are responding to the shift in uncertainty and knowledge workers have greater expectations of their psychological contract. Leaders in KBOs are responding to the changes in the power balance and are demonstrating higher levels of TL to secure more OCB, the source of competitive advantage in KBOs.

My thesis provides an account of the 1st and 2nd person action research I have undertaken in the context of leading three separate co-inquiry groups with Danish business leaders inquiring into the question: How can I better develop meaningful leadership practice with others? In the thesis, I recount a series of episodes taking place in the third co-inquiry group in an experiential narrative voice to illustrate how our 2nd person practical knowing of meaningful leading and learning develop in the messy complex reality of ongoing co-construction of our mutual practices. With this outset, I go on to track and reflect upon, how, over time and across different contexts, my own 1 st person understanding and practice have been challenged and changed with respect to different lines of inquiry and development. These include for example, how I construct experiences as meaningful in practice: I show how I shift from trying to 'implement' in my practice preconceived ideological, generalized, intellectual, and static ideas of the meaningful towards increasingly constructing experiences of meaningful practice in a more contextualized, embodied, relational, and emergent fashion. Other lines of inquiry concerns my attempts deal with authority, power, and leadership in less unilateral, role-constricted, static ways in favour of more mutual, eo- constructed, distributed and dynamic patterns. With respect to how I understand and approach practice learning, my thesis illustrate my journey of moving from a largely instrumental, individualized, controlled and bounded approach towards a more social constructionist understanding and practice, where learning approaches a quality of 'reflexive relational being' rather than 'directive individualized doing'. With the unique accounts of 1 st and 2nd person practical knowing I have developed, I seek to offer a (3rd person) contribution to knowledge in the context of what I see as a currently emerging new discourse of leadership. Towards this end, I further seek to crystallise a developing personal 'living theory in the experimental form of a set of 'guiding poetics'. I connect and discuss these contributions in relation to e.g. constructive developmentalist theories of post-conventional action- logics and meaning making; social constructivist thinking; theories of complex responsive processes; and theories on social fields of consciousness. I also discuss how much of the current academic and popular writings on spirituality and leadership which inspired me at the outset of the research, I now consider to be restrictive and corruptive by what I see as its embedding in conventional modernist discourse. Following the idea that 'style is theory', I attempt with this thesis to draw attention to and experiment with the need to embrace different genres of writing and create new discourses that can become more adequate resources in support of developing post-modern meaningful leadership practices.

The leadership categorisation theory suggests that followers rely on a hierarchical cognitive structure in perceiving leaders and the leadership process, which consists of three levels; superordinate, basic and subordinate. The predominant view is that followers rely on Implicit Leadership Theories (ILTs) at the basic level in making judgments about managers. The thesis examines whether this presumption is true by proposing and testing two competing conceptualisations; namely the congruence between the basic level ILTs (general leader) and actual manager perceptions, and subordinate level ILTs (job-specific leader) and actual manager. The conceptualisation at the job-specific level builds on context-related assertions of the ILT explanatory models: leadership categorisation, information processing and connectionist network theories. Further, the thesis addresses the effects of ILT congruence at the group level. The hypothesised model suggests that Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) will act as a mediator between ILT congruence and outcomes. Three studies examined the proposed model. The first was cross-sectional with 175 students reporting on work experience during a 1-year industrial placement. The second was longitudinal and had a sample of 343 students engaging in a business simulation in groups with formal leadership. The final study was a cross-sectional survey in several organisations with a sample of 178. A novel approach was taken to congruence analysis; the hypothesised models were tested using Latent Congruence Modelling (LCM), which accounts for measurement error and overcomes the majority of limitations of traditional approaches. The first two studies confirm the traditional theorised view that employees rely on basic-level ILTs in making judgments about their managers with important implications, and show that LMX mediates the relationship between ILT congruence and work-related outcomes (performance, job satisfaction, well-being, task satisfaction, intragroup conflict, group satisfaction, team realness, team-member exchange, group performance). The third study confirms this with conflict, well-being, self-rated performance and commitment as outcomes.

The thesis contributes to the evolving process of moving the study of Complexity from the arena of metaphor to something real and operational. Acknowledging this phenomenon ultimately changes the underlying assumptions made about working environments and leadership; organisations are dynamic and so should their leaders be. Dynamic leaders are behaviourally complex. Behavioural Complexity is a product of behavioural repertoire - range of behaviours; and behavioural differentiation - where effective leaders apply appropriate behaviour to the demands of the situation. Behavioural Complexity was operationalised using the Competing Values Framework (CVF). The CVF is a measure that captures the extent to which leaders demonstrate four behaviours on four quadrants: Control, Compete, Collaborate and Create, which are argued to be critical to all types of organisational leadership. The results provide evidence to suggest Behavioural Complexity is an enabler of leadership effectiveness; Organisational Complexity (captured using a new measure developed in the thesis) moderates Behavioural Complexity and leadership effectiveness; and leadership training supports Behavioural Complexity in contributing to leadership effectiveness. Most definitions of leadership come down to changing people’s behaviour. Such definitions have contributed to a popularity of focus in leadership research intent on exploring how to elicit change in others when maybe some of the popularity of attention should have been on eliciting change in the leader them self. It is hoped that this research will provoke interest into the factors that cause behavioural change in leaders that in turn enable leadership effectiveness and in doing so contribute to a better understanding of leadership in organisations.

This thesis reports on a self study into educational learning, energized and guided by the question 'how do I improve my practice'?' as I coach mature students on a distance learning Masters in Leadership Studies at Exeter University. My 'living' educational inquiry" captures and articulates the development of online pedagogic practices which stimulate a 'virtual' culture of inquiry. These regular 'diaiogically structured':" web-based interactions help students successfully negotiate learning barriers posed by the online medium, allowing them to notice and exploit the variety of opportunities for learning and development available in their everyday lives, and the many different forms of knowing embedded in these. Through developing richer epistemologies and more resourceful ontologies, students increase their receptiveness and responsiveness to challenges in the situations they study and work in. Through detailed analysis of textual and audio-visual data, I offer glimpses of such learning and development, and the coaching associated with this, in fleeting moments of educational influencing which spark 'primitive reactions', in development episodes where 'indwelling,iV transforms these into new 'language-games', and in reflexive biographies which trace the longer term development of new ontological skills involved in 'knowing how to go on' At the heart of the online coaching pedagogy is an original 'inclusional' vi coaching process I call presencing'" empathetic responsiveness which I use to encourage students to contextualise and presence their learning under conditions of epistemological and ontological uncertainty. This 'ontological' form of coaching enables students to become agents in the production of their own lives despite the masking and insidious effects of disciplinary power, so they can learn to contribute effectively in a world characterised by 'supercomplexity'

This thesis presents a critical exploration of the reported lives and experiences of managers charged with responsibilities as leaders in a UK local government organization. It seeks to propose new ways of theorising leadership by drawing on discursive and psychoanalytic perspectives that develop a more critical, inter-related psychosocial analysis of managers' biographical narratives,in particular, it examines the importance of exploring leadership dynamics through a poststructuralist feminist analysis of discourse(s), identity/ies and gender.

The present research revolves around the fact that dramaturgy, especially at the organizational level and in particular in Greek organizations, has not been explored in-depth before. In other terms, the study tries to break free from the dramaturgical 'small case studies' approach that was pursued hitherto and formulate a theory on organizational studies that is absent so far. By doing so, the study combined leadership dramaturgy with ideas of social network analysis. Consequently, in order to examine the theory's validity a total of 126 interviews and 216 questionnaires were employed, in Greece, across three different sectors, namely, the public service sector, the defense sector and the business sector, and within a total of eight organizations in two different cities. The specific approach included cultural aspects hence, making cross-cultural comparisons possible. Moreover, so as to develop further- understanding in leadership dramaturgy ethnography was utilized for atime span of about ten , months. The empirical findings indicated that leadership dramaturgy exists in all regions of an organization and when an objective is to be obtained the employees' interactions are goal- driven, a range of facades are implemented and social network's networking is utilized. Furthermore, although Greek organizations were structured around Anglo-Saxon models differences were observed in their operational level that was due to cultural influences. Finally, the theory's propositions and examinations in the present study provide an alternative way of approaching leadership dramaturgy.

This study examines the importance of good and ethical leadership in transforming the Kuwaiti economy. The study provides important insights into the concepts related to good and ethical leadership in a non-Western environment and enriches our knowledge in this sector of the management field. The research contributes to knowledge on leadership in Kuwait (an Arab, Islamic country) by conceptualizing a framework on virtuous leadership, which emphasises the instrumental nature that factors such as morals play in shaping the leaders' qualities and behaviours. The research indicates that whilst the content of leadership may not change significantly, the context of leadership is important and is able to alter the quality and behaviour of leaders, especially in respect to their moral integrity. The research finds that moral judgement enable leaders to assess such things as right and wrong and move beyond themselves to be able to better understand the needs of others. The research is based on a constructionist approach within which 40 leaders from Kuwaiti organisations were interviewed, in the banking, investment, and real estate and services sectors. The findings indicate that it was possible to classify leaders into those that displayed ethically questionable behaviours, for example; those who sought personal gains or seemingly unfair competitive advantage from those defined as virtuous leaders who for example advocated a well-lived life and good character and looked beyond simply profit maximization, in order to serve the greater good. The implications of the research relate closely to the way in which management education, development and leadership practice are managed.

I was beginning the second year of a new job as head of marketing at Peacocks, a national fashion clothing retailer based in Cardiff, when I received a leaflet in the post announcing a new course at a nearby university - a 'Guided Doctorate in Organisational Leadership and Change ... a programme for senior managers who wish to pursue research into their practice in their own organisations'. This sounded interesting and could help me to understand the dynamics of my new position with my identity. I had previously thought about how I had worked within the structure and culture of the organisations I had been employed by. As new senior positions in new organisations reflected my career growth, I became increasingly conscious of my identity (Adams 2007) at work and wondered how leadership (Yukl 1998) contributed to my practice, if at all. As I later found out, the course was part of an emerging trend of practitioner doctorates where senior executives undertook doctoral research in their own organisations (Coghlan 2007). This approach could provide the answers to some searching questions that were already concerning me in my new job. I found the organisational culture (Schein 1997) and management style (Handy 1993) at Peacocks to be very different to anything I had previously experienced. I had even wondered whether they really needed the 'experienced retail marketer with an MBA' that the Sunday Times advertisement had stipulated. I experienced a period of uncertainty in how I felt my colleagues perceived me and my performance that led me to question my practice. The organisational setting was somewhat unusual and I was the 'new boy', one that was not adept at playing politics (Hope 2010), an activity that I increasingly felt clashed with my values (Michie & Gooty 2005) of trust, fairness and honesty (Burns 1978). Despite these concerns, I was resolved to continue working at Peacocks and to attempt to make the changes to the organisation that I considered were necessary. The Guided Doctorate course appealed to me as a way to contribute to my work and for me to understand, learn and create my practice as a leader. My research journey had begun.

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