This chapter reviews briefly the two different approaches, i.e. mainstream leadership research (starting
in the 1930s) which focuses on the leader-follower dyad and is embedded in the psychology
discipline, and the strategic management research, which has relatively recently (in the 1980s) started
to consider the role of leadership of top-level managers in formulating and implementing the overall
strategy of an organization. The following section (section 2.2) delves into the common elements for
both disciplinary streams of research, i.e. leadership and organizations. Section 2.3 describes some of
the main differences between the two.
2.2 LEADERSHIP AND ORGANIZATIONS
³$ TXLFN SHUXVDO RI PRVW RUJDQL]DWLRQDO EHKDYLRU WH[WERRNV VKRZV KRZ OHDGHUVKLS SURFHVVHV DUH
typically casted DWWKHVPDOOJURXS PLFUR OHYHO ́(Waldman et al., 2004, p.358). House and Aditya
(1997) noted tKDW³WRWKLVGD\WKHGRPLQDQWSURSRrtion of the more than 3000 studies listed by Bass
(1990a) is primarily concerned with the relationship between leaders and their immediate followers,
DQGODUJHO\LJQRUHVWKHNLQGRIRUJDQL]DWLRQDQGFXOWXUHLQZKLFKOHDGHUVIXQFWLRQ ́(p.409). This claim
has been repeated often (Antonakis et al., 2004). /HDGHUVKLS WKHRULHV ³GR QRW FRQVLGHU KRZ
environmental and orJDQL]DWLRQDO FRQWH[W LQIOXHQFH WKH OHDGHUVKLS SURFHVV ́(Boal & Hooijberg,
2000, p.528). The reasons for the pre-occupation with face-to-face leadership stems from the
embedment of leadership studies in the psychology discipline. These models of leadership have
typically centered on the impact of leader behavior on his or her group of direct reports (other word
for subordinates), while often either discounting or oversimplifying the context in which the behavior
is embedded (Bass, 1990a; Capelli & Sherer, 1991; Hunt, 1991; Rousseau, 1985; Salancik et al., 1975;
Tosi, 1991; Yammarino & Bass, 1990; Yammarino & Dubinsky, 1992). Primary research in
leadership has paid far more attention to the development of theoretical explanations of what
constitutes leadership than to defining the types of criteria needed to fully and appropriately evaluate
leadership in relation to theoretically relevant criteria (Day, 2000; Kaiser et al., 2008; Zaccaro &
Klimoski, 2001).
Very few leadership studies, with the exception of those studies of Bennis and Nanus (1985) and
Sashkin and Fulmer (1988), include organizational outcomes in their analyses. Even those researchers
who have questioned the role of leadership (Meindl et al., 1985) have focused on the efficacy of the
OHDGHU DQG RQ IROORZHUV¶ attributions about the leader (with no direct link with organizational
outcomes). Even those contextual factors that were introduced as substitutes for leadership in
organizations (Kerr & Jermier, 1978) were factors that had an impact on follower behavior,
disregarding the potential impact of leadership on organizational outcomes.