What if Bergson and Einstein’s dispute regarding time had become a dialogue? Towards leadership as temporal becoming

Our dominant understandings of leadership are underpinned by implicit assumptions about time that can be traced back to Einstein’s view of time as an objective and measurable phenomenon, whose objectivity depends on relational frames of reference. How might leadership theories have developed differently if Bergson, a prominent philosopher, and Einstein, a leading physicist, had engaged in dialogue rather than competition over their views of time? This paper attempts to respond to this question. It first teases out the assumptions of time ingrained in our dominant understandings of leadership. It then explains how a Bergsonian theorisation of time calls for taking temporal becoming seriously in our understandings of leadership, reconsidering how the process of leadership and contemporary leadership issues might be theorised differently, while also drawing out the methodological implications of such a shift. The paper concludes by arguing that a dialogue between Einstein’s and Bergson’s seemingly contradictory views of time is not merely an exercise in comparison, but it functions as a reflective practice that enriches our understandings of leadership.