The Nature of Organizational Leadership Understanding the Performance Imperatives Confronting Today's Leaders

Leadership has been a major topic of research in psychology for almost a century and has spawned thousands of empirical and conceptual studies. Despite this level of effort, however, the various parts of this literature still appear disconnected and directionless. In our opinion, a major cause of this state of the field is that many studies of leadership are context free; that is, low consideration is given to organizational variables that influence the nature and impact of leadership. Such research, especially prominent in the social and organizational psychology literatures, tends to focus on interpersonal processes between individuals, nominally leaders and followers. Studies that explicitly examine leadership within organizational contexts, particularly from the strategic management literature, seem incomplete for other reasons. They typically ignore the cognitive, interpersonal, and social richness of this phenomenon, in that they fail to come to grips with processes that would explain or account for outcomes. While model building in the strategic management literature is typically focused on the examination of leadership occurring at upper organization levels, any insights offered regarding the selection, development, and training of potential leaders are not often grounded in strong conceptual frameworks having significant empirical support. These observations sometimes leave the student of leadership with the feeling that many wheels are spinning in a deepening rut.