Reviewing Leadership (Engaging Culture)

A Christian Evaluation of Current Approaches

Robert J. Banks, Bernice M. Ledbetter, David C. Greenhalgh, Dyrness, William A., Johnston, Robert, William A. Dyrness, Robert Johnston

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780801036293
• eBook ISBN: 9781441227188
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Evaluating Current Approaches to Leadership

This book offers a comprehensive evaluation of current approaches to leadership from a discerning Christian perspective. Combining expertise in leadership, theology, and ministry, the authors take a historical look at leadership and how it is viewed and used in today's context. The book is informed by both biblical and leadership studies scholarship and interacts with a number of popular marketplace writings on leadership. It also evaluates exemplary role models of Christian leadership. The second edition has been updated and revised throughout.

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leadership: an emerging academic discipline

Leadership is a big, intriguing idea, and it has been for a long time. It’s easy to recognize, yet difficult to define or prescribe. It touches each of our lives every day. With good leadership, we flourish; without it, we flounder; with the wrong kind, we suffer. Leadership is on the same level as other big concepts like organization or community or justice. It’s an applied wisdom. Understanding and appropriating the nature of good leadership is challenging and worthy of our best thinking and efforts. Yet unpacking its complexities could assist many of our endeavors.

Talk about leadership continues to abound today. Voices on many sides deplore its absence or mediocrity, betrayal or corruption. The young are suspicious of it, the middle-aged tend to resent it, and the elderly long for it. Articles in newspapers and magazines, material in surveys and reports, and titles of popular and serious books highlight leadership as an important issue. A growing band of consultants offers advice on developing it, new centers focusing on various aspects of leadership continue to appear, and every year a regular round of seminars, workshops, and conferences feature well-known experts in the field. It would seem, then, that leadership has become a leitmotif of our culture, one of its pivotal concerns.1 The topic has become an integral part of intellectual and everyday discourse.

And yet leadership has not been recognized as a unique discipline within the academy. At best it’s been a subset of business management, organizational studies, or industrial psychology. This may be changing. Leadership studies could be either a passing fad or an emerging discipline that will find its legitimate place. Sociology had a similar story when it was first introduced. It’s too early to tell for leadership, but we do know that a whole industry has grown up in the past twenty-five years that has fueled the study of leadership as a unique and a stand-alone subject. Hundreds of academic programs around the world testify to this. However, “stand-alone subject” is a slightly misleading descriptor, since leadership is a multidisciplinary subject that draws from classical literature, psychology, and sociology, and applies to business, nonprofit, education, and public sectors. Its interdisciplinary nature makes it difficult to place in the traditional classification schemes of the academy. Nevertheless, the fervent press for insights, the richness of the research efforts, and the continual demands of the public have created a burgeoning niche that is finding its way.

To one degree or another, every age has exhibited some interest in leaders. It had to, for sometimes it lived or died, or at other times was better or worse off, at the hands of such people. Even when people had little power over who led them—in the village, city, or country—it paid to know who was in charge and what they might do. But the current fascination with the subject goes far beyond this. It involves not just leaders as such but wider concerns about leadership itself. While this is not the first time reflection on the nature, scope, and methods of leadership has arisen, there is arguably a broader and more systematic interest in the topic today than in any time past.

One example of the systematizing of this rising interest is the establishment of academic programs devoted to the study of leadership and the commensurate associations and their academic journals. The first leadership studies program was founded by John Adair at Exeter University in the United Kingdom. The first American programs were founded at Catholic institutions; the first PhD in leadership was founded at the University of San Diego in 1979, and at Gonzaga University at about the same time. Since the founding of those programs, over fifteen hundred post-secondary institutions in the world now offer academic programs. This is a new phenomenon. New courses, certificates, diplomas, undergraduate majors and minors, master’s degrees, and doctorates have all been introduced in the past two decades. Two associations in particular support this new expansion: the International Leadership Association, based in the United States and founded in 1999, and the International Studying Leadership Conference, based in the United Kingdom and founded in 2002. The International Association of Leadership was formed after scholars and practitioners recognized the need for an umbrella organization to facilitate the growing interest in leadership. Since then, the International Association of Leadership has become the largest international and interdisciplinary membership organization devoted solely to the study and development of leadership. It is one of the few organizations to actively embrace academics, practitioners, consultants, the private industry, public leaders, not-for-profit organizations, and students. Commensurate with these academic programs and associations has been the rise in supporting peer-reviewed academic journals, including Leadership Quarterly (1990), Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies (1993), Leadership (2002), Journal of Leadership Studies (2007), and Leadership and the Humanities (2013). For decades popular media and trade journals have generated a plethora of books and articles, but for the first time competitive peer-reviewed journals are now available to the serious student.

Christian institutions parallel the same trends. The colleges and universities that belong to the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities have begun new academic programs, including new doctoral programs at Azusa Pacific University, Eastern University, Indiana Wesleyan University, and Regent University in Virginia. Seminaries report new courses and a sharp increase in the number of these that address leadership. A simple Google search for the terms “Christian,” “leadership,” and “development” will generate over one thousand hits, identifying consulting agencies, institutes, conferences, resource centers, newsletters, and blogs.

All this growth raises more questions: Why this burst of interest? What have we learned so far? Has it made a difference? Have we reached a saturation point, and will the interest soon fade? These are important questions but somewhat speculative. If you are eager to delve into this topic, the more relevant questions are: Where do I begin? What are the major schools of thought? How do I approach the study of leadership? What resources are available to me? What are the current issues? And, if you are a committed Christian: How does my faith inform my study?

Building a Conceptual Framework? Categories, Definitions, and Historical Roots

It has been said that there is a new leadership book published every five minutes, which seems the case if one frequents airport bookstores. Databases of journal articles, blogs, e-newsletters, discussion groups, and apps provide daily advice on how to be a more effective leader. SmartBrief on Leadership is a good example.2 Many books and online sources have excellent insights and advice, but the volume is overwhelming. How does one sort all this out? Which literature is worth reading, and which is poorly grounded? The serious student needs to form some working categories, a frame of reference, to organize this material and at times sift out the chaff.

First, the student will benefit from recognizing and drawing from literature that stems from both the humanities and from social science. The humanities—theology, philosophy, history, literature, and language—provide a rich source of leadership material stemming from ancient times. This includes the biblical narratives around Moses, Joshua, Samuel, Saul, David, the prophets, Nehemiah, Daniel, Jesus, and Paul, as well as the classical literature from East and West, including Plato, Aristotle, Sun Tzu, Xenophon, Marcus Aurelius, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Carlyle, and Gandhi. As philosopher Joanne Ciulla states, “Perhaps the most important benefit of the humanities approach to leadership studies is that it does not allow us to study leader effectiveness without looking at the ethics of what leaders do and how and why they do it.”3 This perspective has been recently affirmed with the founding of the European journal Leadership and the Humanities. In contrast, social science literature is only about one hundred years old, with a proliferation of research and publications in the past thirty-five years. Social science literature is driven by empirical research and always asks the question: Where is the data? As this kind of research matures, it leads to theory development and generalizations. Both domains, humanities and social science, provide helpful insights, though they approach the subject with different methods.

A second useful categorization is leader versus process. Literature focused on the leader emphasizes traits, personality, character, skills, and behaviors necessary to be effective. This dimension has dominated the leadership literature for decades and continues to interest researchers and the public. The basic question is: What are the essential qualities of a leader? The process literature asks: How does leadership manifest itself? What is the interaction between follower and leader? What is the leadership dynamic and impact within the organization? How does the situation affect leadership? These are largely descriptive questions where the social sciences make a significant contribution.

Third, the student can organize the literature as either normative or contextual. Normative literature has to do with answering the question: What is good or moral leadership? This domain cuts across time and place and is considered universally applicable. This literature has more to do with the ethical dimensions of leadership and draws heavily from the humanities. In contrast, a large body of leadership literature is focused on the context of leadership, taking into account such things as culture, cross-cultural issues, gender, age, and changing circumstances. One of the challenges of leadership research is to appropriately account for the obvious reality that every situation is unique. Readers will need to develop a critical sophistication that can extrapolate general insights from normative and contextual studies and at the same time make appropriate application to their particular situations.

There are more categories to be introduced, but for now just understanding these three sets—humanities versus social science, leader versus process, and normative versus context—will help the reader build a frame of reference for approaching the study of leadership. This brings us to the need for a working definition of leadership.

Joseph Rost, a leadership scholar focused on the post-industrial twenty-first century, defined leadership as “an influence relationship among leaders and followers who intend real changes that reflect their mutual purposes.”4 Note the four essential elements: (1) that the influence relationship is multidirectional, (2) the influence is non-coercive, (3) it involves meaningful change toward a purpose, and (4) followers are active participants. Even though scholars do not agree on a universally accepted definition, there would be wide agreement with these elements. It should be recognized by now that even though we have an intuitive understanding of its meaning, leadership studies, like other disciplines, has many layers of complexity, and while a working definition may be useful, it’s only a starting point to explore its many dimensions. Ciulla wisely cautions that “scholars in history, biology and other disciplines don’t necessarily agree on a definition of their discipline and even if they did, it would not help them to understand it better.”5 The same is true for leadership.

Besides the limitations of any definition, it is enlightening to realize that definitions of leadership have dramatically changed over time. Consider this definition, published in 1927: “Leadership is the ability to impress the will of the leader on those led and induce obedience, respect, loyalty and cooperation.”6 Compare that with this definition, written in the 1990s: “Leadership assists in mobilizing a group to make a hard decision.”7 The change in these definitions reflects the changing times, from a time of focus on the leader and power to a less authority-bound definition where leadership emerges from wherever someone mobilizes others to address significant challenges. “Mobilizing” is a much softer term and infers the critical role of followers with an emphasis on mutuality and empowerment. This underscores the changing understanding of leadership based on shifts in the larger culture. Definitions reflect the conditions of life at a particular time in a particular society and the values that are important to either the public or the leaders. Definitions of leadership are social constructions.

Students are helped when authors expand a succinct definition and include key components or essential aspects of leadership. One example is the work of Keith Grint in his book Leadership: A Very Short Introduction. He uses a fourfold typology that encompasses many of the aspects of leadership. It includes positional aspects, that is, what do those in authority do; aspects focused on the person, what are the traits of leaders; an emphasis on process, that is how leaders get things done; and finally results, what leaders achieve. These four dimensions are an example of one helpful conceptual tool that strengthens a definition of leadership to clarify what particular aspect of the leadership spectrum is being addressed. There are many such examples.

Streams of Focus

It would be too strong to suggest that formal schools of thought have developed over the years. Rather, leadership studies have clustered around key elements as indicated in the definition above, such as the qualities of the leader, the dynamics of the process between leader and followers, and the expression of leadership in unique contexts or cultures. These three streams of focus frame the following section.

Focus on the Leader

Typically this focus is mentioned first, since it has the longest tradition. It is rooted in Thomas Carlyle’s nineteenth-century theory of great men, which argues that history is the history of great men. But before Carlyle did so, Lao-Tzu, Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and Machiavelli also identified the qualities of effective leaders. It seems intuitive that we should recognize great leadership in history and then parse out the particular qualities or traits of that leader. Once those traits are understood, one could simply identify them in others or promote them for others to emulate. Scientifically, this line of inquiry was active for the first fifty years of the twentieth century, and after a thirty-year hiatus has had a resurgence of interest. The emphasis here is on traits or certain stable dispositional characteristics that are consistently manifest across a variety of situations. They have more to do with one’s genetic make-up. Traits like intelligenc...

Table of contents

• cover
• series page
• title page
• copyright page
• dedication
• contents
• foreword
• preface to the second edition
• introduction
• 1. leadership: an emerging academic discipline
• 2. biblical, historical, and denominational perspectives on leadership
• 3. spiritual and religious dimensions of leadership: the ethical foundation
• 4. faith-based approaches to leadership
• 5. practicing leadership through faithfulness, integrity, and service
• 6. leader development: leaving a legacy
• 7. governance: practicing faith-based leadership
• 8. christian leadership in action: some exemplary case studies
• conclusion: the future of leadership
• notes
• bibliography
• index
• back cover