Leadership

Defining Leadership

A leader is the group member who exerts more influence on group performance and decision making than do other members.

Beyond this simple definition, leadership is a diffuse concept; nearly everyone knows what it means from her or his own perspective. It is an emotive term that may have positive associations such as “vision,” “intelligence,” and “integrity,” or negative associations such as “arrogance,” “domination,” and “corruption,” depending on individual experiences of leadership.

Because leadership often involves the use of power, there is always the possibility for abuse of that power. Yet leaders have been insane, egocentric, authoritarian, or charismatic and, at times, these qualities have produced effective leaders for a set of circumstances. Ancient Rome reached the height of its power, wealth, and culture from 54 to 68 CE during the rule of Nero, who was certainly egocentric and charismatic and possibly insane.

Leadership categories for human actions may include political (such as Sirimavo Bandaranaike), military (Horatio Nelson), community (Eddie Mabo), movement and activist (Martin Luther King, Jr.), spiritual and moral (Muhammad), business and institutional (Anita Roddick), intellectual (Karl Marx), scientific (Albert Einstein), or creative (William Shakespeare). Many leaders fit into more than one category: military/political (Mustafa Kemal Ataturk), movement/political (Aung San Suu Kyi), community/intellectual (Paulo Freire), or creative/activist/political (Vaclav Havel).

But categories are of limited use in examining a leader's influence and contribution. Gandhi's leadership of the Indian independence movement has influenced many types of human action since that time. And it is possible to describe Hitler as a successful political leader for the Nazi Party in the 1930s, an unsuccessful military leader for Germany in the 1940s, and a criminally misguiding intellectual leader for his twentiethcentury followers.

Also hard to categorize are the unknown individuals whose immediate actions influence subsequent history—such as the man who shot an officer during Russia's 1917 October Revolution, allowing soldiers and protesters to intermingle, or the unknown protester who affected world opinion by standing in front of a column of tanks during the 1989 Tiananmen Square civil uprising in China.

Leadership is also difficult to define because it is often equated with the numerous “fads” of management literature, which emphasize techniques for successful business organization.

In fact, leaders, their leadership, and their followers are among the most written-about subjects in scholarly and popular culture. “We peer into the private lives of leaders, as though their sleeping habits, eating preferences, sexual practices, dogs and hobbies carry messages of profound significance” (Burns 1978, p. 1); but there is little common agreement on how this social process functions or what constitutes successful leadership.

[Page 845]A decline in the quality of leadership—or a perceived decline—has also been a recurrent theme from ancient to modern times: from Aristophanes' complaint that “under every stone lurks a politician ready to sting us” in 410 BCE (Thesmophoriazusae, lines 529–530) to the “the crisis of leadership” of post-Vietnam and Watergate America in the 1970s.

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