Toward inclusive leadership scholarship: Inviting the excluded to theorize collective leadership

Growing interest in collective leadership challenges the heroic models of the leadership canon. In a post-leadership world, collective leadership would not represent a different form of leadership, but instead a broader lens to look for leadership. Theorizing leadership from the experience of marginalized groups in a post-leadership world demands incorporating critical thinking, if it is to offer insights about the human condition. As new voices shift from the margins to the center, and enter the theorizing space where leadership scholarship is reinvented and created a new, their prior subordination to the perspectives and voices of individuals located in traditional contexts or in positions of privilege eventually disappears. Post-leadership researchers would also be aware of and conversant with alternative methodologies, viewing them as legitimate choices—equal or preferred to the methods in the old canon. In the newly constituted post-leadership field, core principles of alternative standpoint research approaches, like feminist and Indigenous methodologies, would gain currency.