Leadership under construction: A qualitative exploration of leadership processes in construction companies in sweden

Leadership has increasingly been advocated as a potent organizing practice, linked positively to several performance dimensions as well as successful organizational development and change. Despite these alleged promises, the specific characteristics of leadership processes as they unfold in a construction context have not been fully captured by construction researchers. This paper is predicated on an identified lack of methodological richness underlying leadership studies in construction. While a growing number of contributions have quantitatively tested the ideas and models of leadership scholars, few have qualitatively explored the experiences and interpretations of the actual people that practice leadership in their daily work in construction companies. Drawing on a rich qualitative interview study, this paper analyzes open-ended stories about leadership in the largest construction companies in Sweden. The findings show how leadership styles have been shaped to align with traditional work and organizing principles, but also how they, by the same token, pose a seemingly unresolved tension with change initiatives that seek to reorganize to improve organizational performance. Altogether, these findings indicate that there are grounds to question the transformative potential of leadership in construction companies, as practiced today. The paper concludes by outlining the practical implications of these findings, together with some analytical generalizations that can serve as pointers for a strengthened leadership agenda in construction research, one that is characterized by an increased methodological richness and accentuated focus on the context-specific aspects of leadership.