Critical Leadership: Leader-Follower Dynamics in a Public Organization (Routledge Critical Studies in Public Management)

Critical approaches to leadership studies have sought to challenge the normative position of leadership as residing solely within the formal leader and have gone as far as to undermine the traditionally held assumption of leadership as a "real" phenomenon.

The book offers a critical account of the nature of leadership and management in modern organizations. Specifically it examines the forces that affect the influence relationships between leaders and followers in public sector organizational settings and thus, how these relationships inform social influence processes. Although the book focuses on the case of a public sector organization in the UK, the findings are placed in the context of both leadership theory and research across the globe and the dissemination of 'new public management' worldwide.

By acknowledging the criticisms concerning the weaknesses of conventional or mainstream leadership study and through the adoption of a critical perspective, Critical Leadership provides a deep and rich interpretation of the empirical material on leadership, thus making an outstanding contribution to the current literature.

Paul Evans is Lecture in Business Analysis at Manchester Business School, UK

John Hassard is Professor of Organizational Analysis at Manchester Business School, UK andis a Visiting  Fellow in Management Learning at the Judge Business School, Cambridge University, UK. His main research interests lie in the areas of organization theory and change and he is co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Organizational Change (2011)

Paula Hyde is Senior Lecturer in Organization Studies at Manchester Business School, UK and is co-founder of the cross-faculty Healthcare Workforce Research Network at the Institute of Health Sciences, University of Manchester, UK. Her main research interests lie in the areas of psychodynamic theory and organizational change and she is the co-editor of Culture and Climate in Health Care Organizations (2010, Palgrave Macmillan)