Leadership

Fearing that our overreliance on an individual, heroic model of leadership will only continue to dampen the energy and creativity of people in our organizations and communities, this essay proposes a practice perspective of leadership based on a collaborative agency mobilized through engaged social interaction. After briefly reviewing the emerging practice tradition in leadership studies, the article turns to the inseparable connection between leadership and agency and discusses how structure may pacify but, under dialogic conditions, release agency. Acknowledging the cultural constraints against collaborative agency, the account affirms its potential realization through interpersonal interaction and sociality. Specific leadership activities associated with collaborative agency and their conditions are illustrated. The paper concludes by showing how the collaborative agentic model might produce a more sustainable future for our world while suggesting avenues for future research of a collective rather than a personal approach to leadership.

Informed by the growing literature on narrative and embodied approaches to the study of leadership, this article explores Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation leadership as mediated by photographs, cartoon images, and his own writings and speeches. It argues that Roosevelt embodied his story about the natural world and the place of “man” in it through five different but related roles or personas: as proponent of “the strenuous life,” as cowboy, as Rough Rider, as hunter, and naturalist. It presents a critical analysis of Roosevelt’s conservation leadership that draws upon historical research, feminist and eco-feminist critique, and concepts from the field of organizational leadership including the “Virtual Leader Construct.” As such, the article makes a contribution to our historical understanding of Roosevelt, contemporary theorizing about leadership as a narrated and embodied practice, visual and esthetic approaches to the study of leadership, and to the emerging field of environmental leadership.

This paper examines the challenges and rewards of doing autobiographical, biographical, and archival, research on a leader. Using examples from extensive research on Nelson Mandela, it illustrates how historiography and careful comparison and interpretation of texts can alleviate some of these problems and yield new insights into leaders and leadership. It discusses why, when you have a more complex and nuanced picture of a leader like Mandela, he does not fit the mold of an authentic leader. The paper concludes with a hypothesis about why iconic leaders may be a different from other leaders.

This qualitative study examined the impact of the absence of social cues on perceptions of emergent leader behaviors in a highly anonymous virtual context. Participants were 149 students engaged in a distinct leadership-preparation process with identity fully hidden. Positively influential behaviors included specific types of contributions, task-focused behaviors, positive interaction style, and at times high participation rate. Excessive or minimal task focus and negative interaction style were perceived as negative influence. Further, emergent leaders often enacted behaviors in combination to achieve influence. Explicit assumptions about and references to social cues were absent in responses, suggesting that under highly anonymous conditions, we can get a less contaminated view of leader behaviors. The findings indicate that some existing leader behavior theories may be unbiased by social status, and also suggest that contextual nuances such as degrees of anonymity and availability of social cues are relevant for perceptions and practice of emergent leader behaviors.

This study examined the mediating role of leader–member exchange and psychological empowerment in the relationship between ethical leadership and employee creativity. Survey data were collected from 172 doctors who were working in a large public sector hospital located in Pakistan. Results showed that as hypothesized, leader–member exchange and psychological empowerment fully mediated the effects of ethical leadership on employee creativity. Additionally, it was found that leader–member exchange influenced creativity directly as well as indirectly through the mediating mechanism of psychological empowerment. The theoretical and practical implications of this research are discussed.

Contemporary surveys of leadership scholarship will occasionally mention the Great Man theory before moving on to more rigorous academic categories. Less a theory than a statement of faith, the Great Man theory does not fit into the rigorous scholarly theory and research that makes up the contemporary canon of leadership discourse. My goal in this article is to treat the Great Man theory seriously and to present a fuller notion of the theory. My intent is not to offer a defense of the theory or to “redeem” Thomas Carlyle as a leadership theorist. Rather, I will add a hitherto unacknowledged dimension: the element of Freudian psychology. In Freud's case, the Great Man was articulated not a moral proscription for how to act, but rather an analytic description of the elemental forces that lead people to seek heroes. The article suggests that the Great Man theory is worth considering because of its contemporary relevance. To consider the theory in full, however, Freud's work on leadership needs to be examined alongside that of Carlyle. It is Freud's description of the impulses that drive us toward authority figures, more than Carlyle's proselytizing for hero worship that can, and should offer valuable insights into how we—scholars, observers, and participants in the business world—react to corporate saviors.