Abstract
Before discussing what makes leaders effective or ineffective, it is important to define what leadership is and is not, since the term is often used loosely to describe a wide array of relationships between the formal or informal head of a group and its members. Because virtually all human beings experience leadership throughout their lives, most believe that they can recognize it when they see it, though few might define the term in precisely the same way. Thus, the definition of leadership on which any comprehensive theory is based must be broad enough to encompass the full range of relationships that most people would regard as leadership.
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Notes
Most notably by James MacGregor Burns, Leadership (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 12–23; but by many others as well, e.g., Ronald A. Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1994), 23–24, 57–61; and Joseph C. Rost, Leadership for the Twenty-First Century (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1991), 105–107, 156–160.
Social psychologists John French and Bertram Raven defined five categories of power in their often-cited 1959 book, The Bases of Social Power : coercive (based on force), reward, referent (based on admiration), expert, and legitimate (positional). See French and Raven, “Bases of Social Power,” in Dorwin Cartwright, ed., Studies in Social Power (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Center for Group Dynamics, 1959), 150–167. In our view, all five categories can be abused and exercised coercively in certain circumstances. Conversely, leaders can also use them more benignly as a complement to persuasion.
Francis Oakley, Kingship (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 7, 10–14.
Max Weber terms this “bureaucratic authority” in the context of public government in the modern world and “bureaucratic management” in the context of the private economy. See Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds. and trans. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 196–197. We, however, use the term “management” to describe a position of authority in any institution in any domain, even including a hereditary ruler or an elected head of state, church, or private enterprise.
See, e.g., Howard Gardner, Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership (New York: BasicBooks, 1996), 297–298; Barbara Kellerman, Bad Leadership (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004), 8–9, 11–14; and Rost, Leadership for the Twenty-First Century, 124–126.
Heifetz formulates his criterion of “socially useful results” as a means of avoiding the problem of using a hierarchy of moral values as part of his definition of leadership. He worries that such “a hierarchy that would apply across cultures and organizational settings risks either being so general as to be impractical or so specific as to be culturally imperialistic is its application” (Leadership Without Easy Answers, 21). He does so, however, in support of his belief that leadership is not “value-neutral,” unlike others such as Kellerman, Rost, and Gardner.
Joyce Hogan and Robert Hogan, “Evidence for the Big-Five Personality Dimensions,” in Goethals and Sorenson, Encyclopedia of Leadership, vol. 1, 97.
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© 2013 G. Donald Chandler, III and John W. Chandler
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Chandler, G.D., Chandler, J.W. (2013). The Leadership Conundrum. In: On Effective Leadership. Jepson Studies in Leadership. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318329_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318329_1
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