Global Leadership Without a Passport:

Hospital Chaplains and the Micro-Construction of Organizational Culture

Abstract

Background: Global leadership scholarship has treated the national border as a proxy for cultural complexity, which confines the field to leaders who travel. Research on organizational culture, for its part, tends to assume that culture is made by executives or by established occupational subcultures. Neither literature has a place for the practitioner who works across several cultural worlds within a single institution while holding no formal rank and belonging to no occupational community. Objectives: This article introduces the concept of non-positional cultural leadership to account for how such practitioners take part in the micro-construction of organizational culture. Methods/Approach: Board-certified hospital chaplains serve as an extreme case. The article draws on five theoretical traditions in sequence (cultural intelligence, boundary spanning, leadership-as-practice, relational leadership, and micro-constructionism) to explain how influence can arise from the margins of an organization. Results: The explanation rests on a mechanism the article calls witnessed repetition: relational encounters, repeated in view of colleagues over long periods, gradually change what a unit assumes a clinical encounter should contain. Four testable propositions follow, concerning how these practitioners work within institutional hierarchies and why standard measures of cultural intelligence may perform poorly when the stakes are existential rather than commercial. Conclusions: Moving the unit of analysis from the executive suite to the bedside shows cultural leadership to be widespread and largely unrecorded. The article closes by marking the limits of third-person theory and calling for phenomenological research into how practitioners themselves experience this work.