Debating Leaderless Management [electronic resource] : Can Employees Do Without Leaders? / edited by Frederik Hertel, Anders Örtenblad, Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen.

1. Why debating Leaderless Management -- Part I. For leaderless management -- 2. The Moral Necessity of Leaderless Organizations -- 3. Developing for Leaderless Organizations: Two Eco-Friendly Coaching Practices -- 4. When Matters are Too Important to be Left to Leaders and Better Left to Democratic control -- 5. Leaderless Management as the Solution to Struggles over the Moral Center of Healthcare? Ward Nurses' Critique of Management as "Real Utopias" in the Public Sector -- 6. Dissolving the Leader-Follower Schism: Autonomist Leadership and the Case of Word of Warcraft -- 7. In Favor of Leaderless Management: Follettian Perspective of Co-Leadership -- 8. Leaderless Leadership: Implications of the "Agora" and the "Public Library'' -- 9. Beyond Leaderlessness: Even Less Than Nothing Is Way Too Much -- Part II. In Between For And Against Leaderless Management -- 10. Leaderless Work and Workplace Participation -- 11. Who Sustains Whose Passion? -- 12. Leaderless Organization versus Leading for Creativity: The Case for Creative Leadership -- Part III. Against Leaderless Management -- 13. Why Leaders are Necessary -- 14. Ghostbusters! On the Narrative Creation of (Absent) Leader Characters -- 15. Against leaderless management: What Leaderless means in South Africa -- 16. Leaderless Management: No! Leaders at All Levels: Yes! -- 17. Principled leadership: The Antidote to Leaderless Management -- 18. The Enabling Role of Leadership in Realizing the Future -- Part IV. Beyond Leaderless Management -- 19. Organizational Management is Paradoxically both Leaderless and Leaderful.

Management research has traditionally assumed that leaders play an essential role in both public and private organizations and are required for a business to run smoothly. However, more recently, a vein of critical research has claimed that leaders can do more harm than good, creating confusion and putting their reputation before production and employee wellbeing. This book asks the question - what would happen if there were no leaders? Would employees be better off without formal (or informal) leaders? And even if such a utopia were desirable, would it be realizable in practice?