Sammendrag
Leadership Discourses and Images of Female Leadership in Sport Organizations Female leadership represents a scarcity in sport as well as in most influential societal institutions. Feminist critique of leadership research have during the last decade emphasized how dominant leadership discourses have contributed to a renewed focus on leadership skills and ideals closely linked to what is characterized as ?heroic? masculinity, but presented as gender neutral. Most discourses accept thus the implicit masculinity to exist as general and the masculine and rational individual as the ideal. Similar notions of leadership are identified in studies of sport organizations. I will in this paper examine how these discourses affect images of female leadership in sport organizations. The paper is based on a study of gender relations in sport leadership. The study consists of 16 qualitative interviews among male and female board members of Norwegian sports federations. The analyses indicate that both male and female leaders construct their images of female leadership in reference to dominant androcentric leadership discourses, but from different positions. Most of the male leaders construct their images based on underlying suggestions of leadership skills as individual and performance related, while their female counterparts mostly emphasize leadership skills as relational and contextual. The female leadership images are shaped by both a positive and negative difference according to dominant leadership discourses. The negative images are concentrated around how female leaders show lacking leadership abilities and represent a lag in relation to the dominant ideal. The positive images are mostly focused on how female leaders can make a difference through alternative approaches and practices
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