Leadership: Leaders, Followers, Environments

The leader–follower dynamic

One way to view the leader–follower process is to examine why people follow leaders. Freud, Jung, and Weber suggested that certain leaders exert some sort of influence over their followers, in part due to the charismatic or compelling personalities of such leaders.¹⁴ The personal characteristics of these leaders are interlaced with the needs and aspirations of their followers. In particular, such leaders are thought to inspire followers, present visions that motivate the group to higher performance, and collaborate with and mentor followers. Recent work on charismatic, authentic, and transformational leadership is based on these roots.¹⁵

A second way to consider the leader-follower dance is to invoke evolutionary and biological arguments.¹⁶ A dominance and submission perspective is useful when considering totalitarian regimes, where force and brutality are used to suppress dissent and achieve the toxic leader’s goals. Totalitarianism is unfortunately more common than we might think, particularly in parts of the world where standards of living are dismal, educational attainment is low, and social and legal institutions are weak. In more “normal” situations, however, where organizational goals require the commitment and buy-in of many followers, forceful behavior to achieve objectives is severely limited. In hunter-gatherer ancestral groups, members concocted a number of techniques and practices to keep dominant members under control. In controlled experiments, ...