Summary
Leadership is often treated as something a person possesses: a set of traits, behaviors, or capabilities that can be identified, evaluated, and developed. New theoretical work by Jon Billsberry at La Trobe University asks us to consider an earlier question: How do people decide what counts as leadership in the first place?
Billsberry examines the different ways leadership scholars have described leadership as “socially constructed” and argues that these theoretical perspectives illuminate different dimensions of the same broader phenomenon. Some scholars focus on how people form expectations about leaders, while others emphasize relationships and interaction, language and narratives, or the organizational norms and power structures that shape how leadership is understood.
Across these perspectives, Billsberry offers a useful way to think about leadership: as a loosely bounded social concept. People generally understand what leadership means, yet there is no universal set of characteristics that determines which people, actions, or relationships will be recognized as leaders or expressions of leadership across different settings.
Rather than asking only what leadership is, Billsberry therefore encourages researchers to examine how something comes to be recognized as leadership. For organizations, this distinction matters. How leadership is recognized can influence whose contributions become visible, who receives authority and developmental opportunities, and who is credited for collective success.
The Leadership Challenge
Organizations routinely make decisions based on assumptions about what leadership looks like. Job descriptions designate leadership positions. Talent reviews identify leadership potential. Development programs cultivate leadership capabilities. Promotion and succession processes determine who appears ready to lead next.
These practices are necessary, but they generally begin after an organization has already formed an idea of what should count as leadership.
Consider someone who challenges a team’s current direction when a problem emerges. One group might view that intervention as leadership. Another might see the same behavior as resistance or interference. A technical expert might shape an important decision without formal authority, while a manager with a leadership title may hold authority without necessarily providing the influence others recognize as leadership.
Billsberry’s analysis draws an important distinction between formal authority and recognized leadership. When organizations equate leadership with designated roles, they may focus attention on formal leaders while overlooking leadership that emerges informally, collectively, or through relationships and influence.
The challenge is not to disregard formal roles. It is to recognize that organizations do more than discover leadership. Through their expectations, language, routines, and decisions, they also shape what becomes recognizable as leadership and who is most likely to receive that recognition.
Rethinking How Leadership Becomes Recognized
Billsberry begins with a problem inside leadership research itself. The idea that leadership is socially constructed is now widely accepted, but the phrase is used to describe several distinct theoretical traditions. Treating those traditions as interchangeable can obscure what each helps us understand.
Some approaches emphasize the mental models people use when deciding whether someone resembles a leader. Others focus on how leadership develops through relationships and interaction. Still others examine the language and stories through which leadership is described, or the social and institutional arrangements that make some forms of influence easier to recognize than others.
Billsberry disentangles these perspectives while showing how they can contribute to a broader understanding of leadership. The result is a shift in emphasis. Instead of assuming leadership is a fixed category and then studying the people who fit within it, researchers can examine the processes through which people, actions, relationships, and outcomes come to be understood as leadership.
This matters because applying the leadership label has consequences.
Someone who coordinates a struggling team, challenges an established practice, speaks on behalf of colleagues, or contributes critical expertise might be described as demonstrating leadership. The same contribution might instead be called management, activism, professionalism, interference, or simply doing one’s job.
Those distinctions are more than semantic. Calling something leadership can confer legitimacy and draw attention to a person’s influence. It can affect who is listened to, who is trusted with greater responsibility, who receives developmental investment, and who receives credit when a collective effort succeeds.
The opposite is also true. When leadership is attributed primarily to one visible individual, other contributions can recede from view. Collective accomplishment can become associated with a single leader, while expertise, coordination, questioning, or behind-the-scenes influence may receive less recognition.
Leadership recognition is also context dependent. A behavior that strongly matches one group’s expectations of leadership may not match another’s. This helps explain why leadership cannot be understood only as a quality an individual carries unchanged from one setting to another. Recognition emerges partly from the relationship among the contribution being made, the people interpreting it, and the context in which it occurs.
What This Means for Leaders
Billsberry argues that leadership research should move “one step earlier.” Rather than beginning only after people have already been identified as leaders, researchers should examine how that identification occurred in the first place.
For practitioners, the same logic offers a useful discipline. Organizations can continue to identify leadership competencies, develop employees, and establish formal leadership roles while also examining the assumptions that shape who and what they recognize as leadership.
This has implications for talent identification, promotion, succession planning, performance evaluation, and leadership development. If an organization begins with an unexamined image of what a leader looks or sounds like, its systems may repeatedly reward people who fit that image while overlooking influence expressed in less familiar ways.
Formal leaders can apply the same perspective within teams. Rather than assuming that direction, expertise, coordination, or responsibility will come from the person with the highest-ranking title, they can pay closer attention to how leadership is actually emerging across the group. They can also consider how the language they use distributes recognition and credit.
The goal is not to call every valuable contribution leadership. Nor does Billsberry’s argument require organizations to abandon leadership competencies or formal roles. Instead, it invites greater attention to the judgments that precede those systems and to what happens once the leadership label is applied.
For leaders and organizations, four questions provide a useful starting point:
- What are we recognizing when we call something leadership?
- Why does that contribution count as leadership in this organization or context?
- Whose assumptions and expectations shape that judgment?
- Who or what becomes less visible when recognition is directed elsewhere?
Asking these questions can widen an organization’s understanding of where leadership comes from without making the concept meaningless. The deeper challenge is not simply to identify more leaders, but to understand how leadership becomes visible, legitimate, and consequential 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
