Leadership

Leadership is a multidisciplinary concept. The foremost academic journal on the topic, The Leadership Quarterly, asserts that it is an international journal of the political, social, and behavioral sciences, indicating the breadth of the disciplinary subjects where the concept is discussed. Within this range of subjects, much of the cutting-edge leadership research is focused on leadership in the business world and, more specifically, leadership in organizations. As with any topic, this literature has its own competing perspectives and initially bewildering terminology—LMX theory, MLQ tests, and so on. However, during the last couple of decades, the dominant paradigm in this area has been the charismatic or transformational approach. More recently, there has been a shift toward a “postheroic” model of leadership that emphasizes relational, dynamic leadership more than individualism.

Although the study of leadership in certain areas is marked by a coherent body of literature with its own history and terminology, the study of leadership from a governance perspective, meaning leadership from the perspective of political science, public administration, international relations, political psychology, and related disciplines and subdisciplines, remains underdeveloped. Barbara Kellerman and Scott Webster argued in 2001 that scholarly work in public-sector leadership is sorely lacking. This is perhaps surprising in the sense that the transformational approach to leadership was initially formulated by James MacGregor Burns, a former president of the American Political Science Association, in a 1979 book that focused solely on political leaders. The task for students of leadership from a governance perspective is to try to formulate the concept more systematically and operationalize it more rigorously.

There was a considerable interest in the concept of leadership from a governance perspective in the 1970s and 1980s. However, this literature failed to establish a subdiscipline of leadership studies and no paradigmatic approach to political leadership emerged. Since then, the systematic study of political leadership has gone into abeyance. As a result, leadership from a governance perspective remains profoundly undertheorized. For example, there is no agreed-upon definition of political leadership. Kellerman and Webster state that a leader either creates changes or strives to do so. By contrast, Jean-Pascal Daloz wrote that the leadership relation involves two-way interaction, from top to bottom and vice versa. Burns provided a general definition when he wrote that leadership is a mixture of motives and purposes, mobilization, competition, and conflict; it involves institutions, politics, and psychology and seeks to arouse, engage, and satisfy followers. More often than not, though, writers fail to provide a definition of leadership and simply take the concept for granted. In any case, in the literature on political leadership there is no equivalent of the literature on power. It is not so much the case that, like the concept of power, the concept of political leadership [Page 514]remains essentially contested. It is more that in recent times the concept of political leadership has scarcely been contested at all. In short, the concept of leadership has remained almost completely untouched by political theorists for a couple of decades.

The undertheorization of political leadership means that only a few elements of the concept are generally recognized. There is a common recognition that leadership is not an individual process. Leadership must occur within a group context and constitutes a relationship between one or more people—the leader(s)—and the remainder of the group—the followers. Leadership must involve some form of activity by the leader, or aspiring leader. This activity may take many different forms, be it the articulation of an abstract vision or a set of specific proposals for policy change, but a leader is someone who is trying to change the status quo or who is knowingly trying to prevent the status quo from being changed where change would otherwise occur. Leaders must win support for their activities within the group context and they must do so by using essentially noncoercive means. Finally, political leadership may occur in both a constituted and nonconstituted context. That is to say, it may be exercised by people who hold formal positions of power as well as by people who hold no such position.

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