Call for papers
The Dracula Conference on Bad Leadership
June 3–5, 2026
Transilvania University of Brașov, Romania
Beyond Black and White: Exploring the Shades of Grey in Leadership
Leadership, as a field of research and practice, remains haunted by binaries. The good leader vs. the bad one. The ethical hero vs. the toxic villain. While these stark contrasts dominate popular and scholarly discourse alike, they often obscure the lived reality of leadership: messy, ambiguous, contradictory, and contextual. Between the extremes of moral heroism and outright destructiveness lies a vast terrain of what we call “grey leadership.” This conference invites contributors to explore that terrain—and to trouble the very boundaries that frame how we think about leadership, failure, harm, and responsibility.
Building on the momentum of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook on Bad Leadership, this inaugural academic gathering aims to provide a space for rethinking the causes, consequences, dynamics, and responses to bad leadership (from black to dark and lighter grey) across sectors, cultures, and systems. While much leadership research has historically emphasized “good” or idealized leadership, this conference centers on exploring the ambiguous, contested, and everyday forms of imperfect leadership that shape organizations, societies, and institutions.
Conference Aims
This event seeks to gather an international, interdisciplinary community of scholars to:
-
Re-examine and deconstruct binary assumptions about “good” and “bad” leadership;
-
Explore the shades of grey in leadership practice: subtle transgressions, moral compromises, complicity, and silence;
-
Promote relational and dialectical approaches to understanding leadership, with attention to power, context, and narrative;
-
Reflect critically on the leadership development industry and its role in sustaining (or resisting) leadership myths;
-
Amplify voices and experiences from diverse regions, professions, and epistemological standpoints.
Suggested Themes
We invite both empirical and theoretical contributions that engage with (but are not limited to) the following themes:
-
Grey Leadership: How can we define, theorize, and measure leadership that is not quite “bad,” yet far from “good”? What is its lived texture?
-
The Continuum of Harm: From absenteeism to abuse, from passive complicity to overt destruction - what lies in between?
-
Everyday Ethics and Moral Drift: What happens when ethical erosion occurs in tiny steps? How do small acts accumulate into systemic dysfunction?
-
Follower Perspectives: How do followers experience, enable, or resist grey leadership? What is the role of silence, complicity, or strategic compliance?
-
The Ambiguities of Power: When is rule-bending an act of leadership? When is it self-serving? Can grey leadership ever be generative?
-
Healing or Punishing?: Institutional and personal responses to bad leadership - justice, accountability, reconciliation, and organizational repair
-
Teaching (About) Bad Leadership: Pedagogical innovations, curriculum design, classroom dilemmas, and ethical challenges in educating future leaders about grey zones, failure, harm, and responsibility
-
Postcolonial and Decolonial Critiques: Whose leadership is labeled “bad”? How do cultural, racialized, and geopolitical assumptions shape these narratives?
-
Reflexive and Lived Accounts: Autoethnographic or narrative explorations of one’s own complicity, disillusionment, or resistance within grey leadership structures
-
Methodological Reflections: What methodological approaches (e.g., ethnography, critical discourse analysis, narrative methods) can capture ambiguity and contradiction?
-
The Leadership Industry Revisited: How has the commercialization of leadership education contributed to the very conditions it claims to cure?
We welcome critical engagements with foundational leadership theories and hope to provoke conversations that challenge disciplinary orthodoxies. Submissions from leadership studies, organization theory, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, political science, education, ethics, theology, philosophy, and related fields are encouraged.
Submission Guidelines:
Submit an abstract of 1000 words, including title, author(s) affiliation(s), and 3-5 keywords
Submission deadline: 15 November 2025
Notifications of acceptance: 15 January 2026
Authors of accepted abstracts are invited to author a full paper that they need to submit 30 days before the conference date.
Venue and Context
Hosted by Transilvania University of Brașov, Romania, the conference takes place at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, in a region as symbolically rich as the topic itself. The “Dracula” in our name nods not to gimmick, but to power, myth, fear, and fascination - all central to leadership and its critique.
Publication Opportunities
Select papers will be invited for submission to the proposed special journal issue “Beyond Black and White: Shades of Grey Leadership”
Conference fees
Graduate students
Regular fee – 270 euros
(includes welcome package, lunches, and coffee breaks)
All-inclusive fee - 420 euros
(includes welcome package, lunches, coffee breaks, visit to Dracula's Castle & Viscri UNESCO Heritage Village, dinners)
Academics and Professionals
Regular fee – 400 euros
(includes welcome package, lunches, and coffee breaks)
All-inclusive fee – 550 euros
(includes welcome package, lunches, coffee breaks, visit to Dracula's Castle & Viscri UNESCO Heritage Village, dinners)
***Optional packages (available only with regular fees):
Visit to Dracula’s Castle and dinner = 120 euros
Visit to Viscri UNESCO Heritage Village and dinner = 100 euros
Contact
For questions or expressions of interest:
horia.moasa@unitbv.ro
This conference is an invitation to explore the complexity of leadership as it actually unfolds in real life - not as ideal, not as villainy, but in the awkward, uncertain, ethically charged spaces in between.
We look forward to seeing you in Brașov.