Leadership Theories

Abstract

Leadership is like beauty: it’s hard to define, but you know it when you see it.¹ Leadership is now a much-studied, much-defined and much-taught subject. By the mid-1990s Manfred Kets de Vries² had already identified 70 published definitions of leadership, and there are no doubt more by now. In fact, according to Van Seters and Field³ we are already in at least the ninth identifiable era of thinking about leadership, which started with the great man theories, and continues today with transformational leadership – the leader as change agent. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the volume of study has not produced the same amount of clarity – Bennis and Nanus, who have contributed more than most to our understanding of leadership, say ‘leadership is the most studied and least understood topic of any in the social sciences’.⁴