Chapter Two: Why Leadership at Work is Important
What is Leadership?
It is surprisingly difficult to find an agreed-upon definition of leadership. There are hundreds of definitions in both the academic and business literature. Two decades ago, leadership scholar, Joseph Rost, identified more than 200 distinct definitions of leadership. Subsequently, this list has expanded exponentially. Not surprisingly, this has resulted in a general confusion about what leadership is and what it is not, and who is a leader and who is not. To understand the definition of leadership adopted in the Study of Australian Leadership, it is useful to address a number of distinctions that have impeded efforts towards a unifying definition.
Leader or Leadership?
Leadership literature over the twentieth century focuses on the individual leader, a person in a designated role of authority and responsibility over people and resources tasked to achieve particular outcomes. This conception of leadership helps us understand the role individuals play in defining and shaping relationships between leaders and their subordinates.
However, this approach has the implicit assumption that good leadership is found in heroic individuals endowed with particular traits or attributes that make them appealing to follow. This trait-based model of leadership has informed research, both in academic and popular works, on individual leaders with ‘the right stuff’.
Current leadership research focuses on particular leadership styles: from transactional and transformational leadership, to authentic, ethical and servant leadership. This line of research is plagued by a growing catalogue of newly discovered styles and their consequences for organisational outcomes. The problem is that the difference between these styles is rarely spelled out. They typically present a perspective on what leaders should ideally be and do, with little connection to what leaders actually do or which of those traits and behaviours correlate with leader effectiveness. This is more problematic when researchers conflate aspects of leadership style with consequences. These problems have led scholars to suggest that we abandon framing leadership in terms of styles, in favour of identifying the essential behaviours or tasks of leadership and how these combine to influence outcomes.
