When leaders fail: A typology of failures and framing strategies

In an era characterized by the widespread availability and accessibility of information and growing concerns over ethical and "authentic" leadership, business leaders are increasingly required to answer to public concerns about their past and present failures. Failure in the existing scholarly literature is largely confined to quantifiable measures of poor performance of a leader's direct actions.This article offers a more elaborate typology of leaders' failures and the framing strategies regularly employed by leaders, based on a discourse analysis of media texts. The author presents a framework through which the ways in which leaders actively construct and negotiate images of leadership style, effectiveness, and authenticity can be systematically explored. © The Author(s) 2010