Leading at a Distance

Today, leadership in organizations is generally perceived as a relationship or interaction between a leader and his or her immediate followers. Most people have personal experience of this kind of leadership. Indeed, a large part of our knowledge of leadership and followership is gained from this dyadic relation. Our experiences tend to be of leadership in groups because nearly every leadership relation is embedded in a group context. Leadership scholars have written at length about this basic constellation and have developed appropriate theories.

In contrast, our knowledge and understanding of leadership in conjunction with the concept of distance is apparently limited. In 2002, the scholars John Antonakis and Leanne Atwater still had to conclude that “with few exceptions, leadership scholars have not expressly defined nor discussed leader distance, how distance is implicated in the legitimization of a leader, and how distance affects leader outcomes” (Antonakis and Atwater 2002, 673). This might be a surprise for those who remember how scientific research on leadership started. Leadership research was inspired by myths and legends about great leaders, mostly perceived as heroes. All that was known about these people came from historians, books and newspapers, or questionable sources. Sometimes people received second-hand information, but hardly anyone made up their minds about the character of a leader or whether to follow a leader based on direct evidence and independent assessment. What people had, therefore, was an image of leaders, and that image influenced their perceptions and the actions. Distance—geographical (physical) distance—is an essential component of this leadership relation. For different reasons, leadership research has not continued to focus on this phenomenon intensively. With the exception of some psychoanalytical ideas about the effects of mass psychology [Page 875]on leading people, mainstream research turned to methodologically isolated people or faceto-face interactions to obtain information about the traits or behaviors of leaders and their effects in concrete settings. The result has been that a very natural type of influence over people—something every one of us is confronted with regularly—has been almost ignored for quite a long time.