Introduction: A Contemporary Social Psychology of Leadership

From its inception as a distinct discipline devoted to the scientific study of how people influence and are influenced by others, social psychologists have explored the nature of leadership. After noting the origins of leadership research in the work of such early theorists as Le Bon, Freud, and Lewin, we discuss the four key themes addressed in this volume: (1) the characteristics of the leader; (2) people's perceptions of their leaders or their potential leaders ; (3) what it is that leaders actually do; and (4) the nature of the interaction between leaders and followers. No one discipline can claim the analysis of leadership as its sovereign dominion, but social psychology's emphasis on the scientific study of how people influence and respond to the influence of others makes it entirely appropriate that a collection of chapters written by the best minds in that field should stand beside ones examining leadership from the humanities on the one hand and political science on the other. Social psychology has much to say about leadership, hence its inclusion in the interdisciplinary Praeger set Leadership at the Crossroads. How has the social psychological study of leadership evolved over the years? When psychology and social psychology emerged from philosophy as distinctive disciplines in the late nineteenth century, leadership was a central concern for many in the field of social psychology. Allport (1968, p. 1), writing in his classic historical analysis of social psychology, noted that the C9760/Ciulla Page 2 field's intellectual ancestors were the political philosophers who understood that ''governments must conform to the nature of the men governed.'' social philosophers speculated about the nature of humans and their societies , but it remained for the emerging social sciences—economics, sociology, psychology, social psychology, political science, and anthropology—to seek out data to test the validity of their conjectures. For example, Le Bon in his 1895 book Psychologie des Foules described the way leaders can hold sway over individuals who have been transformed by their membership in a mob or crowd. Wilhelm Wundt, the recognized founder of scientific psychology, turned his attention in the early 1900s to the study of Volkerpsychologie, which included within it substantial conceptual material pertaining to leadership , particularly with regards to the subordination of the individual to the will of the leader. One of the first textbooks in social psychology, Ross's (1908) Social Psychology, included detailed discussions of the heroic leader and the …