Research context and overview

Stories and manifestations of abusive leadership in the arts and cultural sector have never been far from industry news headlines in recent years and sadly they circulate informally all too often amongst arts and cultural workers in venue bars and cafes.

Despite this prevalence within the sector and the global visibility and impact of the #MeToo movement, abusive leadership remains significantly under-explored in academic research. This paper addresses this gap by reviewing the scholarly literature on cultural leadership and governance, and on abusive leadership in particular, and then by undertaking, analysing and presenting a rich body of new empirical research.

Literature review

The paper undertakes a systematic review of published research from the fields of arts management, cultural leadership and governance, psychology, sociology, and business and management studies. Given the paucity of arts-related research on abusive leadership, the review draws heavily on business and management literature, which provides a generic but nonetheless useful context for our empirical research. For example, in a recent study by the psychologist Kenneth Matos (2017), 56 per cent of employees described their managers as displaying some degree of toxic leadership.

However, our key source is the existing literature review on charismatic leadership co-authored by two of the authors (Nisbett and Walmsley, 2016). This extensive review highlighted cultural leadership as an under-researched topic, but our new literature search broadens the scope of the previous review to include references to bullying and other forms of abusive leadership. It also reviews the grey literature to include significant projects reports such as Barbican Stories (2021) and the Panic! report (O’Brien, Brook and Taylor, 2018). These are significant recent UK studies exposing inequality particularly in the contexts of racism and classism respectively.

Research questions

Based on the finding of the literature review and analysis of the current research context, the authors derived the following core research questions:
1. If charismatic leadership is so integral to arts and cultural organisations, how should those governing such institutions manage it?
2. How do senior managers and boards of trustees handle instances of abuse?
3. What responsibilities do those governing organisations have to victims and institutions?
4. What are the implications of boards that do not engage, or engage poorly, in governance?

Methodology

This study is based on 18 semi-structured interviews conducted with participants from a range of professional roles and art forms. Our interviewees represented a mix of genders, ages, disabilities, neurodivergence, ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds, types and sizes of organisation. Over half of them had some governance experience with some having served as Chairs and two having delivered governance training.

Qualitative, semi-structured interviews provided thick and rich (Geertz, 1973) first-hand accounts of how abusive behaviour was handled. Generalisability was not our intention as this was a small-scale, exploratory study (Mason, 2001). Our sample initially self-selected in response to a Twitter call-out and we supplemented this via snowball sampling. Inherent in our project was a range of ethical and legal considerations: as our primary focus was on governance, we were not directly seeking victims’ perspectives, but we still had to enact care. We were clear that this was not a reporting line or call for allegations and we did not want to elicit accusations. We were not holding a space to air grievances, nor attempting to therapize. The foundations of the research and its boundaries needed to be set from the outset and the attendant methodology required thoughtful consideration and planning as well as careful procedural navigation.

Interviewees and organisations were anonymised and no identifiable information is provided in our account. We generated introductory opening questions for each participant, beginning with their role and connection to the topic before progressing to how cases of abusive leadership were handled and managed. Open questions enabled participants to talk freely about their experiences while allowing for some digression, in line with the “constructed storytelling” approach outlined by Huberman and Miles (2002: 39). Interviews were conducted online, lasted between 60-90 minutes and were analysed using thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006), a data-driven technique that uses a systematic process of coding, note-making and conceptual mapping to identify patterns and themes.

Key findings

Our interviewees painted a woeful picture of organisations rife with abusive leadership, exacerbated by weak governance structures. They spoke not only of their current organisation but their experience and careers over the years (decades in some cases). Although this is a small exploratory sample, these accounts suggest that they are neither unusual nor atypical. As one interviewee expressed: “I’ve never experienced a cultural organisation that hasn’t had bullying very central to its make-up.” Abusive leadership may be more widespread and entrenched than originally anticipated.

Our overarching discovery was that instances of abusive leadership were almost universally mismanaged by those in governance roles. In light of previous studies, this in itself was not surprising; but in the context of a largely charitable sector that holds itself up to higher values and ethical standards, this finding should send shock waves across the art world.

Although bullying emerged as the most prevalent manifestation of abusive leadership, our interview data incorporated detailed accounts of racial, sexual and age discrimination; physical assault; sexual harassment; bullying; intimidation; control and coercion; fraud and financial mismanagement; class prejudice; victimization and sidelining.

In some of our cases, chief executives were the perpetrators of abuse, and there was a consensus across the interviews that these roles often attract dangerously charismatic leaders who are more prone to abusive behaviour than the quieter, relational leaders that are rarely recruited by boards. One participant commented: “the people at the top are driven by narcissism because we support that, but we don’t support quiet trained people who have the skillset to actually lead”. The arts sector is known for flat organizational structures but in reality, abusive leaders and complicit managers enforce deeply hierarchical modes of behaviour.

According to our study, when abuse was reported, outcomes were often negative for victims, as human resources (HR) processes were reportedly poor to non-existent. HR professionals were described as systematically failing to fulfil their vital roles as shapers and arbiters of ethical organisational standards. More often, HR functions were described as non-existent (especially in smaller organisations), absent (e.g. on leave and not replaced), under-skilled, poorly trained, under-resourced and under-valued, with very limited power to hold abusive leaders to account.

Conclusions, implications and impact

Research on abusive behaviour in the arts recognises that it is largely hidden but our study paints a disturbing picture of the “workplace injustice” described by Greenberg (1990: 180) and “petty tyranny” depicted by Ashforth (1997). Only by sharing these accounts and persisting with critical reflection on why such behaviours endure can we have any hope of addressing the problem. Our research adds its voice to this conversation and extends it by highlighting weak governance structures as a core underlying problem.

Our research also shows that in some cases, there is no forceful charismatic leader who is impossible to reign in, but rather, dysfunctional middle managers and disengaged or complicit board members who lack the necessary competences to effectively deal with problems. This is especially pertinent in light of the silence and acquiescence of arts councils and city councils as funders, which ultimately creates a dangerous leadership and accountability vacuum.
Our conclusions go way beyond ethical responsibility around diminished wellbeing: our study suggests that many arts and cultural organisations are preventing their workers from accessing support and impinging their legal rights. All employees are entitled to dignity, fairness and respect, yet our exploratory study highlighted frequent transgressions on this with many organisations systematically breaking laws on working hours, harassment and discrimination. These conclusions have explosive implications, as boards continue to ignore the legal requirement to create safe and non-abusive workplaces and cultural workers have legal routes for redress.

References

Ashforth, B. 1997. Petty tyranny in organizations: A preliminary examination of antecedents and consequences. Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences, 14, pp.126–140.

Barbican Stories. 2021. Barbican Stories: Everything you need to know about the Barbican; an indispensable record of discrimination in the workplace. [Online]. Available at: https://issuu.com/barbicanstories/docs/barbican_stories_digital_pdf_june_2021

Braun, V. and Clarke, V. 2006. Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology. 3(2), pp. 77—101.

Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.

Greenberg, J. 1990. Organizational justice: Yesterday, to- day, and tomorrow. Journal of Management, 16: 399–432.

Huberman, M. and Miles, M. 2002. The Qualitative Researcher’s Companion. London; Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Mason, J. 2001. Qualitative Researching. London: Sage.

Matos, K. 2017. Detoxifying your culture and encouraging more mindful leadership. Chicago, IL: Life Meets Work.

Nisbett, M. and Walmsley, B. 2016. The romanticization of charismatic leadership in the arts. The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society. 46(1), pp. 2–12.

O’Brien, D., Brook, O. and Taylor, M. 2018. Panic! It’s an Arts Emergency. [Online]. Available at: https://createlondon.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Panic-Social-Class-Taste-and-Inequalities-in-the-Creative-Industries1.pdf

Quigg, A.-M. 2017. Bullying in the Arts: Vocation, exploitation and abuse of power. London: Routledge.

Cultural sector governance in the UK is substantially based on a broader charitable and voluntary sector model that typically places unpaid trustees or board members in a position of legal responsibility for the organisation’s operation with overall ownership of the organisation’s vision, mission and values. This gives them formal authority over the paid members of staff to whom executive responsibility for day to day activity is delegated and who may co-ordinate other layers of paid and voluntary work in pursuit of the company’s goals. Exercising that authority is complicated, however, by organisational culture and the interplay of individual personalities in conjunction with structural factors, time pressures and external expectations. This paper argues that, as a result, there is a fundamental mismatch between how cultural organisations are supposed to work in theory and how they actually function in practice. The issue is highlighted especially where the organisation’s founders occupy executive positions. Organisations are founded in order to make a change or to fill gaps in cultural life and in most cases their founders want to be practically involved in delivering the work of the company in which they’ve invested energy, time, belief and–often–their own money to set up. Typically, they need to take paid executive positions within their new organisation, which means recruiting non-executive board members to oversee that work in order to fulfil the expectations of good governance held by the majority of relevant funders and policy makers. Ceding real control of the organisation to those board members is far from straightforward, however, even if a suitably strong board can be recruited, which itself cannot be assumed. As the original articulators of the organisation’s purpose, and being in many cases centrally involved with recruiting other key executive roles as well as the non-executive positions, founders remain the embodiment of the mission, are often symbolic figureheads, and carry moral authority in the eyes of stakeholders at all levels that can trump or subvert the legal authority of the board. This stores up problems that may not become apparent until conditions change and the mission or identity of the organisation has to evolve. If the board decides it needs a new direction, or supporters call for change, or the founders themselves decide to move on, hidden tensions can emerge. At worst, this can lead to those forms of conflict or stasis often pejoratively diagnosed as “founder syndrome”, a label which implicitly locates responsibility with one or more problematic individuals, but which may conceal deeper structural issues relating to the organisational models inherited or adopted by the sector more generally. Informed by case studies of two arts organisations in Leeds and their founders’ experiences as they simultaneously undertake succession planning in respect of key retirements, the research explores these dynamics through empirical data. It seeks to articulate the ways in which different de facto and de jure forms of authority emerge within cultural organisations of this type, along with the associated dangers. These considerations raise questions as to the suitability and continuing relevance of the underlying governance model and the implications that need to be addressed by boards, executives and policy makers to establish the next generation of cultural organisations on a more secure foundation.