Moving complementarily and concurrently: Exploring relational leadership in ballet and ice hockey

Abstract

<p>This paper explores leadership as a relational activity. Even if the prevailing leadership literature acknowledges plural forms of leadership, in our view, the theoretical understandings and the empirical illustrations of these forms have remained scattered. In this paper, we aim at uncovering the collectively shared qualities of relational leadership in ballet and ice-hockey. By combining insights from the two diverse contexts, we make a joint effort to explore a complex phenomenon of relational leadership in greater detail. Based on the findings of this paper, we argue that relational actions build on concurrent and complementary movements among collaborative agents in the field. Therefore, this paper argues for a more nuanced and co-constructive theorization of relational leadership in organization studies. <br /></p>