Making leadership as practice development visible: Learning from Activity Theory

Across the globe, organisations are facing significant challenges and operating in increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environments. In the context of such complexity, effective leadership is ever more important. Recently, a body of work known as ‘Leadership as practice’ and leadership as practice development has been developed as a useful way of thinking about leadership that is shared across organisational members as opposed to being inherent in the traits of individual leaders. At present methodological approaches for capturing and exploring leadership as practice remain in their infancy. This article contributes to leadership learning by arguing that we can learn a great deal about how leadership unfolds and is developed in practice by utilising a theoretical framework called Cultural Historical Activity Theory. Data from two leadership workshops are drawn upon to demonstrate the value of Cultural Historical Activity Theory for making visible the specificities of leadership that emerge collectively and collaboratively in practice. The article concludes with a critical discussion of what we can learn from the Cultural Historical Activity Theory approach and how this can be applied to the study of leadership, leadership learning and leadership development.