AUTHOR=Seyama-Mokhaneli Sadi , Belang Thato 

TITLE=Decolonial identities in the leadership coaching space: against neoliberal leader identity regulation

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=Volume 15 - 2024

YEAR=2024

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1380610

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1380610

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=The study draws from the decolonial lens to disrupt the contentious dominance of whiteness in management and organization studies (MOS) of leadership development, not to mention in coaching. It contributes insights into how a decolonizing coaching space enables and guides a coachee to reflect and re-think the navigation of the realities of her decolonial identity. The decolonial identity encapsulates the authentic self, and the neoliberal identity is the plastic self in a neoliberal university context. Universities’ pervasive and normalized neoliberal discourse has become a ‘paradigm’ – the overarching worldview through which universities’ visions, missions, strategic objectives, and values are constructed.  For academics to thrive in their performance and ‘walk on water’ in achieving performance targets, they ought to embrace being academic capitalists, which shapes idealized neoliberal identities – conforming identities, complicit in undermining social, economic, and epistemic justice. Qualitative research methods were utilized to conduct a reflexive study, and data collected from leadership development coaching sessions’ reflections and reflexive dialogues and journals were thematically analyzed. 
The study reveals that the coach and coachee’s shared decolonial identity offered counter-narratives that unmask the dominant great ‘white’ man leadership in organizations. It also illuminates insights into the significance of the black feminist pedagogy in the coaching process to honor the cochee’s decolonial identity and rich cultural experiences. It enabled her to explore them critically and derive meanings from developing decolonizing, critically conscious leadership strategies for emerging transformation challenges. Meaningful dialogue dimensions emerged, which served as lenses that steered a decolonial approach in supporting the coachee to reflect and re-think the leadership performance vision, strategic objectives, action plans, implementation, and monitoring.