Summary
Leadership is often treated as something a person possesses: a set of traits, behaviors, or capabilities that distinguish leaders from everyone else. New theoretical work by Jon Billsberry out of La Trobe University challenges that assumption by asking a more fundamental question: How do people decide what counts as leadership in the first place? His analysis shows that leadership becomes meaningful through perception, relationships, language, social expectations, and systems of power. For organizations, the implication is significant. How leadership is recognized influences who receives authority, credit, visibility, and opportunities to develop, while potentially leaving other forms of contribution unseen.
The Leadership Challenge
Organizations devote considerable attention to finding, developing, and rewarding leaders. Job descriptions designate leadership roles. Talent reviews identify leadership potential. Development programs cultivate leadership capabilities. Promotion and succession processes determine who is ready to lead next.
Underlying many of these practices is a familiar assumption: leadership is something that can be identified in an individual and then evaluated, strengthened, or rewarded.
But organizational life is rarely that straightforward. Consider a team member who sees a problem developing and challenges the group’s current direction. Colleagues might regard that person as demonstrating leadership. They might just as easily see the same behavior as interference or resistance. A technical expert may bring a group together around a difficult decision without holding formal authority. A colleague may quietly coordinate work, support others, or take responsibility when a project begins to fail. Whether these actions are recognized as leadership depends partly on how other people interpret them.
This creates an important challenge for practitioners. Organizations do not simply discover leadership. Through their expectations, language, routines, and decisions, they also help determine what leadership looks like and who gets recognized for providing it.
Getting to the Source of the Problem
The idea that leadership is “socially constructed” is well established in leadership research, but Billsberry argues that the phrase has become so widely used that its meaning is often unclear. Different strands of research use it to describe very different processes. Some focus on the mental models people use to recognize leaders. Others examine how leadership develops through relationships and interaction. Still others consider how language, stories, organizational practices, or power shape who can be seen as a leader.
Billsberry disentangles these perspectives rather than treating them as interchangeable. His analysis shows that each illuminates a different part of how leadership becomes meaningful. One perspective might reveal how expectations shape perceptions of a leader. Another might show how leadership develops through interaction among team members. A different approach might uncover how organizational language or established power structures make certain forms of leadership more visible than others.
The larger insight is that leadership may be better understood not as a phenomenon with one fixed defining feature, but as a social concept whose meaning is recognizable while remaining open to interpretation. People generally understand what someone means when they use the word “leadership,” yet there is no universal agreement about exactly which behaviors, relationships, or forms of influence qualify. Billsberry therefore encourages a shift away from asking only “What is leadership?” toward asking “How does something come to be recognized as leadership?”
New Findings with Implications for Leadership Recognition
One important implication concerns the relationship between formal authority and leadership. Organizations routinely designate people in supervisory or executive positions as leaders before examining whether leadership is actually occurring. Billsberry argues that this “pre-naming” can focus attention on formal role-holders while making leadership that emerges informally, collectively, or relationally harder to see. A title may confer authority, but treating the title itself as evidence of leadership risks overlooking influence occurring elsewhere in the organization.
A second insight is that disagreements about what counts as leadership are not merely semantic. They have practical consequences. Imagine someone who coordinates a struggling team, challenges an established practice, speaks on behalf of colleagues, or contributes specialist expertise to an important decision. Depending on the organization and the people involved, the same action might be described as leadership, management, activism, professionalism, interference, or simply doing one’s job.
Those distinctions matter because labels influence legitimacy. They affect who is encouraged to speak, whose influence is accepted, who is expected to take responsibility, and who receives credit or blame when collective efforts succeed or fail.
Billsberry takes this argument one step further. Applying the leadership label does not simply describe what happened. It can change how people interpret the person or action being labeled. Recognition as leadership can bring authority, admiration, developmental investment, and retrospective credit. At the same time, concentrating attention on one recognized leader can make the contributions of others less visible or turn collective accomplishment into an individual achievement.
Recognition is also context dependent. People may demonstrate behaviors that one audience readily recognizes as leadership while another does not. Existing assumptions about what a leader should look like or how a leader should behave can affect whether particular people or contributions receive the leadership label at all. Leadership, from this perspective, is not simply something carried from setting to setting by an individual. Recognition emerges in the relationship between actions, audiences, expectations, and context.
What This Means for Leaders
For practitioners, Billsberry’s analysis suggests that leadership development should begin one step earlier than it often does.
Organizations naturally ask which leadership capabilities they want employees to develop. They might also ask how their organization currently decides who counts as a leader. Who is routinely identified as having leadership potential? Which contributions attract attention and recognition? Does the organization equate leadership with formal authority, visibility, confidence, or decisiveness? Which forms of expertise, coordination, care, questioning, or collective influence receive less recognition?
These questions matter for selection, promotion, succession planning, performance evaluation, and leadership development. If organizations begin with an unexamined image of what a leader looks like, their systems may repeatedly recognize people who fit that image while overlooking leadership emerging in less familiar forms. Billsberry notes, for example, that individual expectations and prototypes already influence how people evaluate leadership potential, with implications for recruitment and inclusion.
The same insight applies to teams. Formal leaders can pay closer attention to where direction, coordination, expertise, and responsibility actually emerge rather than assuming they will come from the person with the highest-ranking title. They can also consider how their own language distributes recognition. When a successful outcome is attributed to one individual, whose contribution disappears from the story? When someone challenges established thinking, what determines whether that behavior is interpreted as leadership or resistance?
This does not mean that leadership competencies, behaviors, or formal roles are irrelevant. Billsberry explicitly leaves room for research and practice that treat leadership as a relatively stable category when doing so is useful. His challenge is more precise: those approaches begin after leadership has already been recognized and named. Leaders and organizations should therefore remain attentive to the assumptions underlying that act of recognition and the consequences that follow from it.
Seeing Leadership Differently
The practical value of this research lies in shifting attention from leadership as a possession to leadership as something people continually interpret and recognize.
For organizations facing complex problems that require expertise and influence from across traditional boundaries, that shift can widen the field of view. Leadership may emerge from a formal executive, but it may also appear when someone reframes a problem, coordinates collective action, brings overlooked expertise into a decision, questions an assumption, or helps a group make sense of uncertainty.
The challenge is not to label every useful contribution as leadership. It is to become more thoughtful about what happens when we apply that label and when we withhold it.
The next time someone is described as a leader, Billsberry’s analysis suggests several questions worth considering: What exactly are we recognizing as leadership? Why does it count here? Who helped determine that? And what people or contributions might become harder to see as a result?
Those questions can help organizations move beyond simply identifying leaders toward a deeper understanding of how leadership becomes possible, legitimate, and visible in the first place.
Access the full research paper here: Billsberry, J. (2026). Deconstructing the social construction of leadership: Disentangling constructivism, constructionism, co-construction, critical constructionism, and other constructions of leadership. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/15480518261475379
