ABSTRACT
In Chapter 5 we challenge the assumption that leadership is necessarily “good” and analyse how a darker side of leadership is sometimes enacted in leadership stories. More specifically, in this chapter we use membership categorisation analysis to analyse stories relating to the rank and yank system of performance appraisal told during celebrity interviews with Jack Welch. We argue that Welch, in his storied category work, is in fact promoting a “dark version” of leadership in which leaders have to be cruel to be kind. This version of leadership also promotes neoliberal employment policies that involve “culling the weak” and that, arguably, have a negative impact on the organisation. Thus, we show that the category work that stories of leadership do is not necessarily benign and therefore should be held up to more critical analysis.
