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Grassroots Leadership

The development of grassroots leadership is one of the primary objectives of community organizing and development. It is closely linked to many of the fundamental values of community organization, such as selfdetermination, empowerment, and democratic participation. The concept of grassroots leadership differs significantly from traditional views of leadership and challenges many long-held assumptions about the characteristics of effective leaders, what kinds of people make good leaders, and the functions of leadership in the process of community development and change. In the twenty-first century, as a consequence of economic globalization and the impact of technological change (such as the Internet), the creation of grassroots leadership is a critical component of the process of enabling people to take responsibility for their own problems and to initiate collective efforts on their own behalf.

Traditional Views of Leadership

Traditional views of leadership assumed that certain individuals are “natural leaders” as a result of inherited characteristics of stature, intelligence, and personality. These views of leadership justified the hierarchical organization of societies and the hereditary nature of power, wealth, and status. Often the leader of the community was regarded as the embodiment of its system of values and beliefs, both religious and secular. German sociologist Max Weber linked this phenomenon to the community's acknowledgment of the leader's charisma.

Traditional views of leadership, therefore, have tended to ascribe community or societal changes to the acts of key individuals and have often ignored the role that context plays in the emergence of leaders. Consequently, elite views of leadership have largely excluded most people, particularly women, nonwhite persons, and individuals with disabilities, from leadership positions. By defining leadership in a top-down (controlled from the top of a hierarchy) nonrational manner and distinguishing between leaders and followers, these views have maintained the hierarchical structure of communities.

Theories of Leadership

Philosophical justifications of traditional leadership models can be found in the religious texts of most civilizations and in the writings of such Western philosophers as the Greeks Plato and Aristotle, Italian Thomas Aquinas, and Germans Georg Wilhelm Hegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. Often these writings justified the preservation of traditional authority by linking it to natural law or divine will or by equating individual leaders with the state. However, beginning with the emergence of social contract theory in the seventeenth century, which posted a set of mutual obligations between the government and the governed, an alternative view of leadership began to appear.

Political thinkers such as Englishmen Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and U.S. President Thomas Jefferson argued that leaders rule solely by the consent of the population. To paraphrase U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, the leadership of a community must be “of the people, by the people, for the people.” During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a more democratic model of leadership emerged closely tied to the principle of popular sovereignty.

History of Grassroots Leadership

Prior to the nineteenth century, theories of change treated “the people” as if they were incapable of continuous, calculated pursuit of their collective interests. The people allegedly responded largely to impulses—good and bad—and to manipulation by elites. This antidemocratic view persists today among theorists of all political persuasions who explicitly or implicitly mistrust democratic processes.

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