The Participatory Theater Framework of Leadership

The traditional conceptualization of leadership can be understood as the leader occupying centerstage whilst the audience of 'followers' remains largely in the dark. Furthermore, as an actor on stage would perceive a booing member of the audience as malevolent or ignorant, the extant literature mainly depicts non-followers as obstacles, inefficiencies, or irritants that should be corrected so that they can become productive members of the group (Ford & Harding, 2018). Yet, leadership does not only revolve around the leader and his/her ability to create 'good followers' (Collinson, 2006). It is the compilation of cooperating and clashing individual agencies of the group members that results in more than mere aggregation. Through their support, opposition, and even apathy, every group member is a participant of the leadership phenomenon and they individually and collectively influence the group goal and to what extent it is actualized. As such, this dissertation is dedicated to understanding who the constituents of leadership really are and how leadership as a multilevel social phenomenon that is co-created by all group members actually works. In this dissertation, I introduce the participatory theater framework (PTF) of leadership as a novel and holistic theoretical approach that can enable us to answer the questions above. The participatory theater framework recognizes everyone in the group, including the leader and all forms of followers and non-followers, individually and collectively, as agentic performers of leadership. Deriving its foundations from various research areas such as social and cognitive psychology, moral philosophy, and game theory, this dissertation (i) establishes the theoretical foundation of the PTF and proposes a typology of roles people adopt in leadership situations, (ii) demonstrates that even those who are most commonly thought to be passive (i.e., devoted followers of toxic leaders; frequently called 'sheep' ) are indeed willful co-creators of the leadership phenomenon, and (iii) presents empirical evidence for the existence of the proposed typology of roles.