Making Sense of Leadership Concepts

This paper focuses on the development of leadership in the tension field between externally imposed demands for a more unified approach to leadership and individual leaders’ need to modify their management style according to the local context. We investigate how meaning is developed in a group of local government leaders during a change process unfolding in the tension field between a functionalist top-down understanding of management development and a postmodern bottom-up understanding, within which leadership develops in dialogical processes based on daily practice. Our intension is to transgress the divergence between organizational demands, in this case leadership development, and the individual leader’s social sensemaking processes (Weick, 1995, 2001) as they take place in leaders’ community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998).