Paradoxes, double binds, and the construction of ‘creative’ managerial selves in art-based leadership development

•Discourses linking management, art and creativity favor particular managerial selves.•These selves are expected to display both heroic and post-heroic leadership styles.•These selves are expected to tolerate paradoxes and balance contradictory demands.•While these paradoxical demands may be paralyzing, they may also inspire creativity.

SummaryOver the last two decades, a managerial discourse has emerged that calls for introducing the logics of art and esthetics into the field of management. In this article, we seek to shed light on the ‘creative’ managerial subjectivity that is sanctioned by this discourse. For this purpose, we examine leadership development workshops that invite managers to conduct a choir, and thus embody the manager-as-artist analogy. We find that these workshops present managers with a variety of contradictory demands, and that the capacity to tolerate contradictions and paradoxes is itself construed as an essential virtue of the ‘creative’ managerial self. We conclude by calling for more research into the paradoxes and double binds encapsulated in the art-and-management discourse, and argue that these double binds may be paralyzing in some contexts and inspiring in others.