Leadership: Leaders, Followers, Environments

Leaders and leadership

When people are asked to define leadership, a common tendency is to think in terms of the qualities and characteristics of a leader. However, there is growing recognition that leadership is not a person. A leader, of course, is a person, but he or she needs followers to achieve group goals; the environmental contexts within which leader-follower interactions take place affect how or if these goals are reached. There are a number of forces, such as globalization and technological change that increase transparency and limit managerial discretion and flexibility in many organizational settings. One only needs to consider the dramatic declines in the influence of dictators and totalitarian rulers, especially in Latin America and the Middle East, the political gridlocks, or checks and balances, in many governments that prevent leaders from doing what they want, and the seemingly instant “revolts” of consumers upset with arbitrary CEO decisions to appreciate the new limits to power. With frequent examples of failure and ill-advised decisions from industries, universities, and governments over the last two decades, the notion of the super-leader or celebrity CEO has suffered a big blow, although compensation for top managers continues at historically high levels.