Inclusive leadership & organizational aims: A critical exploration of tensions facing leaders in news media organizations

Abstract: In recent years, the concept of inclusive leadership (IL) has received significant attention from scholars and practitioners. Perhaps not surprising, given that the concept, understood as a leadership style focused on facilitating employees' sense of inclusion, has been proposed as a path for leaders and organizations to achieve both economic and social goals (e.g. Korkmaz et al., 2022). Emerging research, however, finds that the literature so far only to a limited extent has acknowledged challenges to implementing IL in practice. Seeking to address this gap in the literature, we investigate what tensions leaders face when implementing IL in news media organizations. We do this by building on ten qualitative interviews with journalists and editors and a theoretical framework informed by Randel et al. (2018). Our findings suggest that there exist several tensions between IL behaviors and the organizational aims of objectivity and ideology and that these tensions can be found across three contexts of importance to journalists' sense of inclusion, namely, the newsroom, the news content and the public sphere.