Identity work in developing collaborative leadership

This chapter uses leadership development as a portal to understanding how identity work is collaboratively practiced in organizations. At the same time it explores an organizationally sanctioned liminality that continuously produces identity work in the performative interweaving of traveling concepts. Advancing this link between leadership development and identity work, we engage a processual re-theorization that posits identity work as liminal practice - emergent, edgy, ephemeral, precarious, and fluid in nature - and leadership development as concerned with making visible the implicit identity work undertaken within this liminality. We illustrate our argument with insights from a leadership studio workshop, which sought to develop collaborative leadership within a recently formed public health and social care service where identity work continuously shapes, and is shaped by the development of a more inclusive and dynamic leadership practice.