Leadership Copyright © 2010 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC) Vol 6(1): 1–19 DOI: 10.1177/1742715009354235 http://lea.sagepub.com Studying Leadership Critically: A Psychosocial Lens on Leadership Identities Jackie Ford, University of Bradford School of Management, UK Abstract This article explores a new approach to researching leadership in organi- zations through drawing on psychosocial accounts of the lives of managers as leaders. This study of managers’ lives through a critical, psychosocial analysis presents a different account of leadership identities and how these are constructed and how they function in oppressive ways. The analysis concludes that managers are not transcendental and are not homogeneous. Managers construct multiple, compet- ing and ambiguous narratives of the selves. Key to this more critical approach is the contextual location and partiality of accounts of leadership, and the recognition that our sense of selves are not only entwined within the context and the situations in which they are performed, but also within the hegemonic discourses and culturally shaped narrative conventions. Keywords leadership identities; narrative selves; psychosocial analyses Introduction This article presents a critical exploration of the narrated lives and experiences of managers charged with responsibilities as leaders in a UK local government organ- ization. The research seeks to propose new ways of theorizing and researching leadership by drawing on discursive and psychoanalytic perspectives that develop a more critical, inter-related psychosocial analysis of managers’ biographical narra- tives. In particular, it examines the importance of exploring leadership dynamics through poststructuralist feminist lenses. The article is structured into two parts. Part One provides a brief critique of dominant discourses of leadership through feminist poststructural lenses. This highlights the importance of more subjectivist interpretations of managerial lives and shows the complex inter-relations of gender, the psyche and narratives of the self that play such a key part in the leadership discourses of managers. Part Two explores a psychosocial analysis through the focus on a single case study of a senior manager from within a UK local government organization.