Leadership: Leaders, Followers, Environments

Introduction

We study leaders and leadership for various reasons. Some explore the topic out of intellectual curiosity, much as we might read biographies and history, to learn about specific leadership episodes or about successful or failed leaders. The journeys of extraordinary individuals and related events often provide inspiration and guidance as we travel our own roads and careers. Others read about leadership because they have aspirations to be leaders themselves, hoping to find out how others reach the top and how to avoid pitfalls and dead ends.

The ability to select effective leaders and to explain and predict what might happen in particular leadership occurrences is another important reason to study leadership. However, when it comes to forecasting who will be good and who will not, the results are not great. Could anyone have predicted the amazing success of Steve Jobs at Apple after he returned to the company from which he was fired 11 years before? Many leaders and managers fail. Scholars are more facile with explanations about what happened than they are at divining the future. This is not meant to be critical of previous efforts but rather to acknowledge the beautiful complexity of identifying, hiring, and evaluating leaders and in predicting possible outcomes of leadership episodes and attributing responsibility for them.

Chapter objectives

A principal objective for this book was to write about leadership not in academese, but in English, for readers who want to ...