Sizing up leadership : Norms and normativity in and around leadership measures

Sammanfattning: This thesis explores the role played by norms and social actors in establishing the acceptability and the purported validity of leadership measures. Taking an interpretivist and critical approach, I examine the subjective and normative side of supposedly objective quantitative assessment tools.Through observations, interviews, and document analysis I uncover the normative agendas and social contexts of four different measurement tools for leadership and personality assessment. I deploy two concepts – normalising potentials and mediating strategies – to argue that we should understand the performative effects of quantitative assessment tools in relation to test practitioners’ and test takers’ interaction with them.Leadership measures and personality tests have normalising potentials, the actualisation of which depends on their broader context, as well as the norms test practitioners mobilise and the mediating strategies they employ. The interaction between hard statistical norms and soft mediating norms is critical for understanding how measurement tools come to have normalising effects on test takers.These insights extend and add to the existing critical literature on quantitative measures by refocusing attention away from the tools themselves, their powers and effects, to the work and influence of social actors in organisations who develop, frame, sell, present, receive, and interpret the instruments. Future studies on quantitative assessment tools should thus consider the social context surrounding such measures and the mediating work on which these measures’ performative potential relies.