Leadership

This chapter focuses on leaders in a business or organisational context, and views leaders as key players in both devising and implementing organisational strategy. It considers how existing theories and frameworks help to address the question of what exactly makes a leader effective in a business or a working environment. Some concepts and models clearly derive from, and apply to, other areas of human activity such as politics, sport and warfare. The notion of leadership provides an enduring fascination – not only to academics such as psychologists and political or social scientists, but also to journalists, biographers, authors, dramatists and film-makers for whom it provides a rich source of material both factual and fictional. As we shall also see, many terms and metaphors associated with the study of leadership derive from sporting and military contexts. However, when we enter the more usual organisational arenas – businesses, public sector and governmental organisations, non-profit-making organisations such as charities – we tend to encounter the term ‘manager’ more frequently than the term ‘leader’ as the one to describe such key players. It is therefore important to start by considering how far these two related concepts, leadership and management, overlap.