Deconstructing the Social Construction of Leadership: Disentangling Constructivism, Constructionism, Co-Construction, Critical Constructionism, and Other Constructions of Leadership

The phrase “leadership is socially constructed” is widely invoked but rarely clarified, creating conceptual ambiguity in leadership research. This paper disentangles the theoretical roots of constructionist thought in leadership studies by distinguishing four core traditions, constructivism, constructionism, co-construction, and critical constructionism, and extending the analysis to five additional perspectives: relational, discursive, narrative, performative, and Foucauldian. I argue that the general notion of social construction can be split into multiple distinct but related approaches, each with its own assumptions, strengths, and limitations. By distinguishing these traditions, I clarify how different strands of leadership scholarship conceptualize the processes through which leadership becomes meaningful in social life. The paper makes four contributions. First, it resolves conceptual slippage by offering a typology of nine constructionist traditions in leadership research, alongside five construction-adjacent perspectives that share constructionist assumptions. Second, it reframes leadership itself as a loosely bounded social concept sustained through shared linguistic conventions, helping explain why different constructionist traditions can coexist while examining different dimensions of leadership construction. Third, it develops a theoretical map of constructionist leadership research, showing how these traditions are complementary but epistemologically distinct. Fourth, it advances a non-essentialist research agenda that shifts attention from asking what leadership essentially is to examining how people, roles, actions, relationships, and outcomes become recognized, labeled, contested, or denied as leadership.