Unintended Disempowerment Process: Dynamics of Empowering Leadership Practices

Other conference contribution, 2025

While ideals such as empowerment, inclusion, and participation are widely promoted as progressive alternatives to hierarchical leadership, their enactment in highly institutionalized contexts may produce unintended consequences. This paper offers an empirically grounded critique of such new leadership ideals by developing a process model based on a interview study of managers leading digital transformation. Drawing on a grounded theory approach and informed by Practice-Driven Institutionalism, we introduce the concepts of institutional saturation and performative fidelity to explain how well-intentioned leadership practices—such as coaching, inclusion, and dialogue—can drift into forms like nagging, ethical manipulation, and consensus paralysis. These shifts are not failures of leadership per se, but consequences of reflexive overperformance of leadership norms in saturated institutional contexts. Our findings contribute to Critical Leadership Studies by offering a situated, processual account of how leadership ideals may unintentionally constrain agency and reinforce authority asymmetry.