Organization 21C: Someday All Organizations Will Lead This Way

Does Leadership Matter?

There is a school of thought that questions the importance of organizational leadership. The argument is that many variables influence organizational outcomes—the external environment, an organization's culture, the sales force, and rapid technological changes, to name a few—and leaders are simply responding to these variables.^[1],^[2],^[3],^[4] Others in this school of thought have argued that precedence plays a critical role—that previous organizational decisions and actions affect final strategic decisions more than leaders do.^[5],^[6]

These positions that question the importance of leaders, however, are quite dependent on how leadership is defined, the methods used in research studies, and the types of statistical analyses ...