Legitimating Leader Admiration: A Social Constructionist Perspective on a Classroom Experiment

MBA student teams at a Middle-Eastern, American-style, universityself-organized to complete a ‘Follower Analysis Project’ based on interviewing prominent acquaintances about leaders who inspired them. The relationship of respect they constructed with interviewees shaped subsequent learning. They sought to manage the anxiety surrounding raising dissonant facts and interpretations from their own research. Interviewees defused this anxiety by convincing the students that their leader admiration was based on appreciative learning. The outcome of the interview was that students formed a consensual admiration of the leaders and revisited the leadership literature to find a vocabulary and rationale for the lessons they derived from the interview. The projects provided rich qualitative data for reflection on practice. The persistence of the pattern we observed and its sensitivity to instructor interventions designed to address the biases associated with the social construction of respect could be a subject of further research.