Gender, Authenticity And Leadership: Thinking With Arendt
ILA Member Connector APRIL 2015Featured Author InterviewGender, Authenticity and Leadership:Thinking with Arendtby Rita A. Gardiner (Palgrave, February 2015)JULIA: Rita and I spokeduring a pre-interview andcreated a loose outline of ourtalk for today’s conversation.Both of us are committed tohaving an informal dialogueabout the book, but wewanted to give you, thereader, an overview of thefive key topics that we hope to address today.JULIA: Hello, my name is Julia Storberg-Walker and I havethe pleasure today of interviewing Rita Gardiner, who is amember of the International Leadership Association and theauthor of Gender, Authenticity and Leadership: Thinkingwith Arendt published this year by Palgrave.I’d like to begin by giving our readers a brief overview ofthe book. Gender, Authenticity and Leadership attempts totrace the conceptual underpinnings of authentic leadershipby exploring Western notions of authenticity and genderedsubjecthood from about the 18th century onward. Rita, likeHannah Arendt, believes that by examining the past, we canlearn more about problems in the present.Rita will first give you a brief overview of the ideas ofHannah Arendt. The second thing we’ll cover is a critiqueof authentic leadership theory and leadership studies, ingeneral. We’ll then discuss the gendered nature of the worldand its history, followed by the ethics of leadership. Finally,Rita will touch on the findings of a study she did and itsimplications for women in leadership. Of course, thesetopics may intertwine during our conversation. They allare interrelated and interconnected to the broader issues ofgender and authenticity.Welcome, Rita, and thank you so much for agreeing to thisconversation.RITA: It’s lovely to have the opportunity to talk about mywork.Rita A. Gardiner teachesleadership ethics,women’s studies, andfeminist theory at TheUniversity of WesternOntario and King’sUniversity College inLondon, Ontario. Herpublications focus onwomen’s leadership,and the work of HannahArendt and Simonede Beauvoir. In 2014,Rita received the Paul Begley Award for her outstandingcontribution to postgraduate research in educationalleadership, presented by the University Council forEducational Administration’s Consortium for the Study ofLeadership and Ethics in Education. A feminist theorist, Ritais also interested in the ways in which authentic leadershipcould be informed by a relational ethic in tandem withexistential, hermeneutic phenomenology.International Leadership AssociationJulie Storberg-Walkeris an associate professorin the ExecutiveLeadership Program ofthe Graduate School ofEducation and HumanDevelopment at GeorgeWashington University,and an affiliate facultyat George Washington’sGlobal Women’s Institute.Prior to her service inacademe, she served atDeloitte & Touche, LLP and Deloitte Consulting in multipleroles and locations. Julia’s has published and presentedglobally on theoretical and conceptual development forapplied disciplines. She is the recipient of multiple awardsincluding the Early Career Scholar Award (2011) fromthe Academy of Human Resource Development. Shecurrently serves as editor-in-chief of Human ResourceDevelopment Review.8www.ila-net.org
ILA Member Connector APRIL 2015Rita, is there anything else you want to add at this point?along with what is socially acceptable without reflecting uponwhat it means. Arendt was a scholar who was not drawn to aparticular ideology. She was not interested in being perceivedas a liberal or a conservative. She wanted to understand theworld in her own very particular way, and she encouragedeveryone else to do that, too.RITA: That sounds perfect.JULIA: Excellent. Rita, a lot of us may not know aboutHannah Arendt. Please tell us about her. What were her keycontributions to authentic leadership theory? How did youmake the connection between Hannah Arendt, who I read inpolitical science class, and women and leadership?She died in 1976 while she was writing The Life of the Mind,considered to be her most philosophical text. In The Life ofthe Mind, she had sections on thinking, willing, and whatis the most Arendtian way of looking at the world, judging.Unfortunately, she died while she was working on judgment.It’s only thanks to the novelist Mary McCarthy, who was agreat friend of Arendt’s, that we actually have the text of TheLife of the Mind.RITA: Arendt, for those who might not have heard of her,was born in 1906 in Germany, the only child of a Jewishcouple. She was a very bright young woman at universityand studied with Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. Then, inthe early 1930s, when the Nazis came into power, she had toescape Germany moving to Paris where she spent eight yearsmeeting people like John-Paul Sartre and becoming verygood friends with Walter Benjamin. After Paris, she moved tothe U.S. and spent most of her time in New York City.So, that’s about it, in terms of her background. Obviouslyshe was very influenced by existential hermeneuticphenomenology, as am I in my work. To get back toleadership studies, per se, what Arendt’s work can give us isa way of thinking about leadership that really takes in diverseperspectives. She’s trying to think about leadership not just inthe past but also about how leadership works in the present.She’s trying to think about some of the problems as well assome of the opportunities with leadership.It wasn’t until Arendt was in her mid-40s that she publishedher first book in 1951, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Thebook is a very powerful examination of what had happenedin Germany as well as what was happening in Stalin’s Russiaat the time. It traces the origins of totalitarianism, which shesees as very different to other similar ways of leading, such astyranny. Then, in 1956 she published The Human Condition,which is one of the books that most people come to knowArendt through.JULIA: How you described her comment on Eichmann wasfascinating to me. So many would have seen Eichmann as anevil leader, but that wasn’t Arendt’s position.RITA: Why does she say he’s banal? Because she’s at thetrial — and the trial goes on for many, many weeks — andone of the things that Eichmann does is talk in clichés. Hehasn’t got an original idea. For our readers, I would like tosuggest they go see a fantastic movie by Margarethe vonTrotta that came out in 2012 about Hannah Arendt andspecifically about the Eichmann trial. Arendt’s view wasseen as appalling by many in the Jewish community. She wasvilified, absolutely vilified. She received hate mail. Yet, shedoesn’t waver from what she thinks. In her last book, TheLife of the Mind, she begins again in trying to think aboutwhy people perpetrate great evil. And she says it’s becausethey don’t think. They’re thoughtless. They choose to bethoughtless. They choose to go along with any regime, justbecause it’s easier that way and they can go up the hierarchy.One of the things that I love about The Human Condition isArendt’s notion of narrative and how narrative is key to theways in which we understand human existence. My motherwas Irish and I grew up learning lots of different fairy tales —all ones that she made up — because that was part of her oraltradition. I think one of the things that Arendt wanted to do inher work was to remember the rich oral tradition that was partof the Jewish community, much of which was lost due to theHolocaust.Fast forward a bit. Those two books, The Human Conditionand The Origins of Totalitarianism, make Arendt famous.However, she was to become infamous in 1963 when shepublished Eichmann in Jerusalem. The New Yorker sentArendt to Jerusalem in order to cover the war criminal AdolfEichmann’s trial. One of the things that Arendt said, to manypeople’s horror, was that although Eichmann’s deeds wereheinous, his evilness was banal. People like him in the Naziregime were banal because they were thoughtless. Thisquestion of thinking, in an Arendtian sense, is tied up withthe notion of critical thinking. That is, one doesn’t just goInternational Leadership AssociationJULIA: Yes. Connecting this to what we’ll talk about later,it’s almost as if today’s organizations allow and condone thatkind of non-thinking anonymity for leaders, which Arendtwill talk about.9www.ila-net.org
ILA Member Connector APRIL 2015RITA: Yes.Condition, I believe, she quotes Cicero who said somethingalong the lines of “I would rather go astray with Plato thankeep with people who dislike him.” If you are a thinker of thehighest order, and I would place Arendt in that sphere, youoften, in your own work, change the way that you think. Asreaders, we can see that in the thinker’s work itself. If youlook at Arendt’s work, she sometimes says things that, to meas a feminist theorist, are somewhat infuriating, but her workis so rich that I keep going back to her. For anyone who getsslightly interested in Arendt by this interview, I would suggestthat a great place to step into her work is with her essays.She wrote a book of essays titled Between Past and Futurewhere she looks at questions such as what is authenticity,what is freedom, what is education, etc. That’s a very longexplanation, Julia. [Laughs]JULIA: How did she process or what did she think about thisbacklash against her?RITA: Here’s the thing about Arendt. One of the things shesays about the way in which she worked is that what she’strying to do with any problem is to understand. She writes tounderstand. So for her, once her work goes out into the worldit’s for others to make a decision about it. At that point she’sfinished with it. She comes back to topics such as leadershipand evil in her later work, but her finished writing has anexistence independent from her.JULIA: Interesting. Your background on Arendt and herhistory lays the foundation for our next topic, which youhinted at it. That is, what made you, as a scholar, take thatinformation and connect it to authentic leadership theory andgender?JULIA: No, that’s really good. Rita, we’ve talked a bitabout Hannah Arendt and the connections that you drew andyou’ve also given us some good resources, including theEagly article and Arendt’s essays. Let’s move to the topic ofthe critique of contemporary authentic leadership theory andleadership studies. Help us understand this critique that yourbook makes.RITA: I should back up a little bit and tell you that priorto going back to school to do a PhD I was a universityadministrator at a liberal arts women’s college with a verystrong social justice mission. One of my tasks was to setup an institute for women in leadership and the connectionbetween gender justice and social justice was very importantin the way that we thought about leadership. One of thethings I noticed was that women who came to the conferencesand workshops we hosted were very interested in thisquestion of how one could be a genuine human being whilebeing involved in a bureaucracy with the problems that cansometimes arise.RITA: To start we have to look at the body of work that hasbeen created by Bruce Avolio and others where there’s a realconcentration on specific characteristics that they say makesomeone authentic.JULIA: Like the four characteristics.RITA: Yes, the four characteristics — self-awareness,relational transparency, balanced information processing,and internalized moral perspective. When I read their work,I found it puzzling. How do these characteristics necessarilymean that someone is or isn’t authentic? Looking at thisthrough an Arendtian lens, one thing she does is try to get usto see that we often construct specific models to understandthe world. This is something that happens consistently insocial science research. But, when we do that, she says, weconfuse knowledge with meaning.That led me to go back to school to do the PhD. I wantedto look at gender authenticity and leadership. I want to sayhere that I was really influenced by the work of Alice Eagly.I think the article she wrote in 2005 looking at relationalauthenticity is fabulous. It got me thinking about questionsof relationality, not from a social psychology perspective aswith Eagly, but from a feminist theory and phenomenologicalperspective. That’s how I connected with Arendt, who Ishould mention is not someone who had strong feministleanings. For instance, in an interview she gave with GünterGrass around the mid-60s she said she didn’t think womenshould give orders!What I’m trying to get at with my book is how to understandthe different ways in which authentic leadership manifestsitself in the world and how it affects gendered relations. It’sa really different approach to thinking and one that obviouslyis influenced by philosophy and also, from my perspective,by feminist theory — specifically intersectionality.Intersectionality, for me, gives us a way of really thinkingthrough some of the problems with authentic leadership whenit’s constructed or modeled in a particular way.But what Arendt shows us is that even though she was oldfashioned in the way she thought about women’s place in theworld, nevertheless, she herself showed leadership constantly.So you have that paradox between what she sometimes saidand how she acts. I think this is important. In The HumanInternational Leadership Association10www.ila-net.org
ILA Member Connector APRIL 2015Specifically, intersectionality allows us to understandsituational context in a much deeper way. How in oneinstance, a man might feel prejudice because of race orbecause he’s gay, while in another a woman might experienceprejudice because of her age or because of her gender. It’sthis complexity that we need to think about when we thinkthrough authenticity and leadership and its connection togender. Arendt, in my opinion, allows us to do that.notion of law and order into Athenian society. What this did,according to Arendt, is to deny the fact that leadership is notjust about a singular person, it’s connected to action.One of the things that Plato disliked was the fact that we cannever know the outcome of action. We may think somethingis going to happen as a consequence of a particular action,but we can never know. Arendt writes about how Plato sawpeople as puppets on a stage controlled by the whims offate. So, he downplayed the role of action — action is notimportant; what is important is law and order. Arendt is agood existentialist and in her analysis she says the questionsof freedom or questions of what action does within a broadercontext get lost. We need to rethink the way in which theoriginal notion of leadership from the Greek archein means tobegin and to lead, that is, to put something forward, to bringsomething into life, if you will. That’s something that wasreally important to her.JULIA: A big element in your book is about ethics inauthenticity, as well. One of the questions you pose that reallystruck me was, “if you imagine a world full of authenticleaders, will it necessarily be a better place?” There seemsto be a default assumption in much contemporary, authenticleadership scholarship that authenticity means good andthere’s actually no theoretical justification for that.RITA: Right. Right. I think this is one of the other thingsthat we need to think about when we write on authenticleadership. We need to think about how not all people whosay they’re authentic in their leadership are good. Believingthat authenticity equals good leadership doesn’t allow us tolook at questions of evil or questions of hypocrisy. Hypocrisyis something that Arendt looks at in her work, as I do in mine.It’s really important that we get a much more nuanced wayof thinking about whether authenticity is actually good forleadership, and if it is, in what ways?JULIA: Very interesting. She seems very much positioned inopposition to the binaries and the categories that we see in alot of traditional western thought.RITA: I’m not certain it’s opposing so much as just bringingforward different perspectives. You know, she lovedSocrates. She loved Socrates because, she says, one of thethings Socrates does is go out into the marketplace and askquestions. He never really has the answer because peoplemight dispute an answer. Instead he asks, what is truth? Andhe’ll have a conversation on truth. Then, at the end, he’ll say,“well, I don’t really know,” and the conversation will end. It’sthis kind of aporetic conversation that gets us to think a littlebit more deeply about questions that we maybe don’t thinkabout, questions such as what is authenticity. Thinking moredeeply about that is one of the things that I’m trying to do inmy book.My thinking on ethics is very much influenced by the work oftwo scholars, Joanne Ciulla and Donna Ladkin. What I findwhen I read the literature on authentic leadership is that wesee questions of efficiency almost obscuring notions of ethics.While I can understand that you often need to be efficientto be successful, what I want to say, in concert with JoanneCiulla, is if ethics is at the heart of leadership, then we needto spend more time really thinking about what authenticitydoes and what it does in different contexts.JULIA: Speaking of history, there’s a big focus in your bookon the role of gender in history and leadership. How hasgender been portrayed, or how has Arendt talked about it?JULIA: Very interesting. Beyond authenticity, how wouldyou present an Arendtian critique of leadership studies just ingeneral?RITA: I try to understand how we got to the place ofauthentic leadership being perceived in a certain way. Iwanted to look at authenticity historically. I trace the conceptof authenticity back through time to the 18th Century,which is when modern notions of authenticity come intoplay. Question of authenticity — and if anyone’s interested,the work of Lionel Trilling is a fantastic place to start —are really tied up with notions of bourgeois subjectivity.Very briefly, what I argue in my book is that what we seehappening is that the middle class, the bourgeoisie, try toRITA: Oh, nothing but the big questions here! [Laughs] Withregards to leadership, I think one of the things that Arendtwould have a problem with is the way that there is often —and by no means am I the first scholar to say this — too muchfocus on the leader. One of the things we see, if we read withArendt, how we can trace this notion of the heroic leader allthe way back to Athenian thought and to Plato. One of thethings that Arendt says, that some of our readers will know,is that after the death of Socrates, what Plato did was put theInternational Leadership Association11www.ila-net.org
ILA Member Connector APRIL 2015distinguish themselves from the aristocracy and what they seeas the aristocracy’s lack of morals. The way they do this wasto take up the notion of virtue. For a man virtue was seen inhis actions, in what he did. We see this in Rousseau, who’sreally important here. But for a woman, virtue depends onhow others see her. This is a huge problem, and it’s one thatMary Wollstonecraft rails against in her work.totally useless, in their opinion, to the way in which they led.There are two chapters in my book devoted to the study, onewhere I look at narratives that women told me, and anotherwhere I look at themes. Some of the themes that came upwill probably not be a surprise to many people. Questionsof gender and embodiment, for example, and how wardrobeissues still matter, having gray hair is still a no-no, how wehave to conform to a particular ideal way of looking as awoman leader and how problematic that is. Now, one couldsay that men have to contend with this also, but the women Iinterviewed said there was more pressure on them to do so.I should just say right now that Mary Wollstonecraft isone of my heroines! My students probably get fed up withme talking about Mary Wollstonecraft, but she is criticallyimportant in understanding what is happening in the 18thCentury. We have this notion from Kant where he says themost important thing is for people tojudge for themselves, yet for women it’sAdvancing W
of authentic leadership theory and leadership studies, in general. We’ll then discuss the gendered nature of the world and its history, followed by the ethics of leadership. Finally, Rita will touch on the findings of a study she did and its implications for women in leadership. Of course, the
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