Advancing constructionist leadership research through paradigm interplay: An application in the leadership–trust domain

Abstract

While relational leadership constructionist scholarship has gained a powerful voice in the leadership conversation, mainstream leadership studies continue to ignore its contributions. Paradigm interplay represents an approach to knowledge construction that may help constructionists contribute to the cumulative relational leadership conversation, while reasserting their interpretive commitments. The article first explains why paradigm interplay is a promising strategy for overcoming two existing complications in relational leadership research and in its constructionist stream. It then offers an application of paradigm interplay in the leadership–trust research domain, to demonstrate how this approach works in practice, showing its promise for building a robust constructionist empirical research agenda to explore the role of trust in relational leadership. The article closes with a discussion of selected challenges associated with conducting paradigm interplay, and with a call to bridge distinct relational leadership perspectives to advance robust and actionable knowledge in the field.