The making of managerial heroes: A long journey with a liberating leader

Picard, Hélène [Grenoble Ecole de Management] Taskin, Laurent [UCL]

The need to open the way for managerial practices that will permit employees to achieve personal success and to express and liberate themselves has been brought back into the limelight in recent managerial trends. Among the alternatives to the (less and less) traditional hierarchical and authority-based organization, the ‘liberated company’ constitutes one credible and widely broadcasted contemporary initiative. This liberating movement is operated by a ‘liberating leader’ portrayed as a modern times’ hero. In this research, we study in depth the making of such a managerial ‘hero’, drawing on a case study spanning over thirteen years, in which we follow the trajectory of a developer who proudly implemented and advertised such ‘radical’ changes. Being today considered -and claiming himself to be- a ‘liberating leader’, the narrative analysis of his trajectory gives us the opportunity to question the making of this hero. In particular, with regard to the current literature on heroism in organization studies, we show how this heroization differs from existing figures, characteristics and processes of heroism by, inter alia, the central and paradoxical role given to the entrepreneurship of the self. By doing so, we also show how a long term analysis, including other narrators and different media, may benefit to narrative analysis and help identifying the relation between narratives and actions.