Examining leadership through critical feminist readings.

Purpose: This paper seeks to explore a critique of the limitations of mainstream leadership research and publications and offers a critical management analysis through drawing on a feminist reading of leadership in organizations.

Design/methodology/approach: There has recently been witnessed a growing interest in the promotion of effective leadership within both organizational studies literature and organisational policy as the route to ensuring employee commitment and enhanced organisational performance and the achievement of ever demanding goals and targets. This turn to leadership is represented in both an upsurge of research studies and a proliferation in the promotion of leadership as the organisational panacea. An analysis of the literature on leadership was undertaken, giving due consideration to mainstream and more critical accounts in relation to illustrations drawn from the UK National Health Service (NHS).

Findings: This paper explores mainstream literature on leadership and finds it wanting, in terms of its failure to deliver a common understanding of the concept, in its generally uncritical accounts, and its inability to expose the androcentric nature of the core assumptions within hegemonic discourses of leadership. Drawing on critical feminist readings in relation to the UK NHS, a more critical account of leadership is presented.

Practical Implications: Greater awareness is required for the adoption of culturally sensitive and locally-based approaches that take account of individuals' experiences, identities and power relations and that allows for the presence of a range of masculine and feminine workplace behaviours.

Originality/value: This paper provides an overview of the dominant themes within the literature on leadership as they relate to the UK NHS, and presents a feminist critique of the more subtle ways in which notions of leadership in organisations fail to consider their potential for bias.