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Part I Introduction
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Chapter 1 Leadership: Past, Present, and Future
John Antonakis
David V. Day
There are few problems of interest to behavioral scientists with as much apparent relevance to the problems of society as the study of leadership. The effective functioning of social systems [to countries] is assumed to be dependent on the quality of their leadership. This assumption is reflected in our tendency to blame a football coach for a losing season or to credit a general for a military victory. . . . [T]he critical importance of executive functions and of those who carry them out to the survival and effectiveness of the organization cannot be denied.
āVroom (1976, p. 1527)
The epigraph above captures three important themes in the study of leadership. First, Victor Vroom suggests that leadership objectively matters; who is at the helm determines to a large extent what will happen to the vessel, whether it is a team, an institution, or even a country. Second, Vroom demonstrates that most laypeople believe leadership matters and that the ābuck stopsā with leaders. In other words, leaders are ultimately responsible for what happens to the entities they lead. It is the leaders who are in the limelight and it is they who reap the rewards or are pilloried. Third, the above suggests an interesting cognitive phenomenon that occurs in the minds of observers. Independent of what the leader does, those who observe leaders tend to āfill in the blanks.ā If things go well (or poorly) they will tend to evaluate the leader, whether on leadership behaviors or other variables, in very favorable (or unfavorable) terms independent from what the leader might have actually done (Lord, Binning, Rush, & Thomas, 1978; Rush, Thomas, & Lord, 1977). That is, the outcomes āmakeā the leader, whether or not responsibility for the outcome is traceable to the leader or whether it was due to some exogenous event beyond the leaderās control (Weber, Camerer, Rottenstreich, & Knez, 2001).
The above three themes seem contradictory. The first two themes say that leaders matter. The third theme suggests that leaders may not matter, in that leadership may well be a social construction (Gemmill & Oakley, 1992; Meindl, 1995). As leadership scholars, we obviously believe that leadership matters; however, both the realist and the social constructionist perspectives contribute to explaining what happens in that alchemy called āleadership.ā But what is leadership, exactly? That question turns out to be challenging to answer, and it is a guiding question of the book.
More than 100 years of leadership research have led to several paradigm shifts, as well as zeniths and nadirs, and much confusion. On several occasions, scholars of leadership became quite frustrated by the large amounts of false starts, incremental theoretical advances, and contradictory findings. As stated almost six decades ago by Warren Bennis (1959, pp. 259ā260), āOf all the hazy and confounding areas in social psychology, leadership theory undoubtedly contends for top nomination. . . . Probably more has been written and less is known about leadership than about any other topic in the behavioral sciences.ā In a similar vein, Richard Hackman and Ruth Wageman (2007) more recently concluded that the leadership field is ācuriously unformedā (p. 43). How could such big names make such belittling statements about leadership?
For those who are not aware of the various crises leadership researchers have faced, imagine taking pieces of several sets of jigsaw puzzles, mixing them, and then asking someone to put the pieces together into one cohesive picture. Relatedly, leadership researchers have struggled for most of the last century to put together an integrated, theoretically cohesive view of the nature of leadership, invariably leading to disappointment in those who attempted it. Also, the puzzle itself is changing and leadership is an evolving construct (Day, 2012). For all these reasons, there has been much dissatisfaction and pessimism in the leadership field (Greene, 1977; Schriesheim & Kerr, 1977)āeven calls for a moratorium on leadership research (Miner, 1975).
Fortunately, a clearer picture is beginning to emerge. Leadership scholars have been re-energized by new directions in the field, and research efforts have revitalized areas previously abandoned for apparent lack of consistency in findings (e.g., leadership trait theory). Our accumulated knowledge now allows us to explaināwith a high degree of confidenceāwhat leadership is, whether its antecedents, contextual constraints, or consequences. This accumulated knowledge is reflected in our volume, which will provide readers with a thorough overview of leadership that is sufficiently broad in scope to cover the...
