List of Figures

List of Tables

Abbreviations

List of Contributors

Introduction: Reading Tolstoy's Wave

I. CLASSICAL LEADERSHIP

1. The Republic Originally written 2,000 years ago, this is the original defence of expertise as the basis for leadership and incorporates a stinging critique of democracy--a large and dangerous animal--as a method for selecting leaders.

Plato

2. The Art of War The Eastern parallel to Plato's account of leadership, Sun Tzu's review of Chinese military and political leadership, written between 500 and 300 BC, has, if anything, increased in popularity in the last decade with many contemporary business leaders adopting it as a guide to action.

Sun Tzu

3. The Prince Machiavelli's treatise on power remains as relevant today as it was for its original sixteenth-century Florentine princes. Condemned by many as the work of the devil, The Prince embodies lessons in leadership that are as uncomfortable as they are important.

Niccolo Machiavelli

4. The Treatise on General Sociology One of the original elite theorists, the Italian Pareto provides a pivotal account of the enduring requirement for leadership and a crucial analysis of the inevitable cycle of birth and decline that haunts all leaders.

Vilfredo Pareto

II. TRADITIONAL LEADERSHIP

5. The Nature of Leadership Barnard's early post-war summary of leadership is an early challenge to the popular assumption that leaders are the only critical component of leadership. Instead Barnard surveys his own vast business experience to suggest that followers and the conditions of action are equally relevant.

Chester Barnard

6. Leadership, Membership, and Organization Stogdill was a leading member of the Ohio State Leadership Studies; which attempted to develop a scientific approach to leadership but one embedded in its organizational context. In this piece he introduces the approach and attempts to demonstrate the way leadership can be contextually measured and explained.

R. M. Stogdill

7. Situational Control and a Dynamic Theory of Leadership Fiedler was one of the original exponents of a contingency or situational approach to leadership and this piece reviews his application of the method to group behaviour under quasi-scientific controlled conditions.

Fred E. Fiedler

III. MODERN LEADERSHIP

8. A Definition and Illustration of Democratic Leadership Gastil's chapter introduces us to some contemporary issues in leadership and it will be apparent that this takes us straight back to Plato. For Gastil the `large and dangerous animal' has its place, but it is not a universal solution to organizational control problems.

John Gastil

9. Top Management Styles in Europe: Implications for Business and Cross-National Teams The development of Europe as an identifiable economic and political unit and the rise of global companies poses questions about the cultural identity and leadership style of corporate leaders. This chapter suggests that, although identifiably different styles of leadership do exist, there is little prospect in the immediate future of a European form breaking out.

A. Kakabadse

A. Myers

T. McMahon

G. Spony

10. Shatter the Glass Ceiling: Women May Make Better Managers The rise of women leaders--and their general invisibility--reveals another important concern of modern leadership and in this piece Bass and Avolio suggest that women's `transformational' leadership style, is better suited to the developing organization of the next century than the traditional `transactional' style adopted by men.

Bernard M. Bass

Bruce J. Avolio

11. Sexual Static Rosener takes this argument a stage further by considering the way the very term `leadership' is conventionally associated with male `attributes', and that, for women to rise to the top of the corporate ladder, both genders need to take a closer look at how they communicate with each other through the `sexual static'.

Judy B. Rosener

IV. MYTHICAL LEADERSHIP

12. The Gentleman and the Hero: Wellington and Napoleon in the Nineteenth Century Pears opens the section on the myths of leadership by considering the way the characters of national leaders are configured through the prism of national cultures--and vice versa. The result is a remarkable reconstruction of Napoleon and Wellington against the formative background of French and British military and political antagonism--and yet another problem for those trying to discover the `real' leaders.

Iain Pears

13. The Leadership Mystique Kets de Vries has a different problem to plague us with: this one concerns the nature of leaders as individuals with scores to settle with--or against--the world. If leaders are as narcissistic as de Vries maintains, then we should be ever-more vigilant for signs of alienation.

Manfred R. F. Kets de Vries

14. Leadership: An Alienating Social Myth? Alienation is also the subject of the work by Gemmill and Oakley, but their approach is to suggest that the entire edifice of leadership can be construed as a myth designed to persuade us mere followers that leaders are both necessary and very often disturbingly authoritarian.

Gary Gemmill

Judith Oakley

V. ALTERNATIVE LEADERSHIP

15. Organizing, Leadership, and Skilful Process Hosking introduces the last section by asking us to abandon organization as a noun and introduce organizing as a verb. In this approach it is the bringing-off of leadership that is critical, and this is an active and skilful process not the inevitable result of static hierarchies of command and control.

Dian Marie Hosking

16. Correspondents' Images of Martin Luther King, Jr.: An Interpretive Theory of Movement Leadership Martin Luther King poses an example of the approach that Hosking is concerned with for King's actions appear to generate movement rather than merely follow movement. However, Lilley and Platt's argument suggests that the interpretive accounts of King's followers constructed a leader who appears to embody a positively ambiguous image.

Stephen J. Lilley

Gerald M. Platt

17. Voicing Seduction to Silence Leadership This final chapter introduces feminist and postmodernist approaches to the leadership problem by demonstrating the way different readings of texts are possible and plausible. The result is not to provide the solution to the question `what is leadership?' but to suggest that the question is far more complex that we may have thought in the first place.

Marta B. Calas

Linda Smircich

Index