On understanding the CEO work as a balancing act

This paper studies leadership from a practice-perspective and focuses on the question of agency by focusing on CEOs as carriers of leadership practices. The empirical material consists of a CEO survey with 250 respondents carried out in Finland in 2018, complemented with interviews and opinions of three individual Finnish CEOs. The study shows that the CEO work constitutes a balancing act and takes a dialectical approach to leadership, oscillating between heroic and post-heroic dispositions. The paper makes two important theoretical contributions. First, it contributes to the practice-based research on leadership by shedding light on both socio-historically constructed leadership practices and CEOs as carriers of these practices. Second, it contributes to the research on CEO work by elaborating on the way CEOs’ identities influence and are influenced by the leadership practices.