This paper analyses three cases of female leadership in Game of Thrones, with a view to understanding how a popular television series constructs different forms of female leadership and, allegorically, represents the challenges female leaders face in international organisations from male subordinates and colleagues.
Drawing on the HR literature on leadership, particularly in cross-cultural settings, the paper argues that Daenerys Targaryen is constructed as a female leader who adopts a traditionally masculine model of leadership, Catelyn Stark as a female leader who operates within traditional gender roles, and Sansa Stark as a leader who hybridises the two. The paper considers the implications of the three characters’ story arcs and narrative fates for how gender and leadership are constructed in organisations, and how “appropriate” leadership styles are defined for women, especially in American and US-influenced business settings.
Finally, it contends that new models of leadership are emerging in organisations through discourses about leadership styles in popular culture and through cross-cultural exchange in HR management.
About the speaker
Fiona Moore is Professor of Business Anthropology at Royal Holloway, University of London. She received her doctorate from Oxford University, where she studied at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, in 2002.
Her research on identity in German multinational corporations has been published in the Journal of International Business Studies among others. She has written a monograph, Transnational Business Cultures, on German expatriates in the City of London, with a second monograph on Taiwanese elite skilled labour migrants in London and Toronto entitled Global Taiwanese: Asian Skilled Labour Migrants in a Changing World.
She is also the winner of the BSFA Award for her article series Project Management Lessons from Rogue One, the author of the BSFA and World Fantasy Award-shortlisted book Management Lessons from Game of Thrones, and a science fiction author. More information is available at www.fiona-moore.com.
This session will be moderated by Maral Muratbekova, Professor of the Department of Management, ESCP Business School, Paris, France.
About this series
This event is part of an IHRM Webinar Series, organized by the Centre for Global Workforce Strategy at Simon Fraser University (Canada), the Center for International Human Resource Studies at the Pennsylvania State University (USA), Pennsylvania Western University (USA), and ESCP Business School (Europe).