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Given the increasingly acknowledged insight that people do not act as self‐contained individuals but in relation to others and embedded in context, relational social constructionist leadership (RSCL) has recently gained exciting momentum. Unfortunately, this development has not been accompanied by sufficient efforts at clarification. This systematic concept‐centric review, which consists of 47 empirical RSCL studies, contributes to a better understanding of RSCL as part of the relationality movement in leadership. The results help to clear up some misunderstandings on relational leadership and suggest a more analytical and critical treatment of RSCL approaches to advance the development of RSCL. As a major contribution for dealing appropriately with RSCL, the authors propose a three‐component RSCL model, composed of: (1) social construction (i.e. processes of intersubjectively creating social realities through ongoing interpretation and interaction), representing the leadership mechanism, (2) high‐quality relating and communicating (i.e. all the visible and invisible threads that connect people) representing the leadership content; and (3) influence (emerging at the interpersonal interaction level or the collective level), representing the leadership manifestation. This model permits: first, clearer boundaries to be drawn between RSCL and other relational leadership forms and general relationship forms; second, power and influence in RSCL to be addressed adequately; and third, potential ‘dark sides of RSCL’ to be considered in full. The authors believe that this model may help to reduce the risk of diluting the distinctiveness of RSCL, and to balance potential tendencies towards developing overly idealistic or implicit ideological leadership approaches within the promising field of RSCL.
Endres et al. (Wed,) studied this question.