‘It Serves More Than One Purpose’: Pastoral power and the instrumentality of caring leadership

This paper addresses the conflict between an ethics of care and instrumental concerns in caring leadership. Caring leadership has become increasingly popular in organisation and management studies, encompassing a view of leadership that emphasises that paying attention to relational concerns is a fundamental duty of managers in contemporary organisations. It emphasises leaders seeing employees not as resources but as humans, and caring for them as individuals. However, there is a tension that underlies the relationship between instrumentality and care, and this is not problematised to any great extent in the caring leadership literature. We ask: How do managers and subordinates co-construct caring leadership, and what are the organisational effects of this? By locating the co-construction of care-oriented relationships in everyday work, this paper explores the experiences of knowledge workers and managers in a Norwegian knowledge-intensive firm in the maritime industry through interviews, observations and shadowing. By drawing on Foucault’s notion of pastoral power, caring leadership is approached as a co-constructed relationship. The findings highlight how managers probe subordinates for information, stage situations for disclosure and display care, and how care is demanded by subordinates. By drawing attention to how pastoral power shapes relationships, the paper shows that caring leadership involves genuine feelings of interpersonal care, yet is primarily concerned with instrumental organisational goals. While the positivity of caring leadership may seem attractive on an interpersonal and emotional level, this paper argues that caring leadership does not exist in opposition to forces of instrumentality. Instead, caring leadership helps to establish instrumentality and asymmetrical power relations by tying care for the individual and care for the organisation more tightly together, as if they are mutually beneficial. Ultimately, rather than aligning with an ethics of care, caring leadership – under the guise of care on an interpersonal and emotional level – intensifies instrumentality.