Let’s start our discussion for this installment with a simple question—What is leadership? Quick, take out a pencil and piece of paper and jot down your own personal definition. Now take a look at it. If there is anything in there about "leading others" or the "the process of leading" you are probably suffering from the same tautological problem that has faced most people working with and in the area of leadership. Of course, you’re in good company, as one of our contributors will point out later on. The fact is, however, that it is human nature to have some understanding and/or recognition of leadership. For example, we all know the concept—or at least think we know it. We all deal with it in some form on a daily basis in our professional and even personal lives, whether we are serving in the role of leader or leadee (my preferred label for the term follower). Moreover, most of us would probably even admit to being able to recognize a "good" versus a "bad" leader if we came into contact with one. If you don’t believe me, go ahead, briefly conjure up your opinion of the current or a past president of the United States, your favorite CEO, the current dean or president of your institution, or even your current manager and see if you can’t make some sort of spot judgment in this regard. Furthermore, it doesn’t take an I/O professional to assess the qualities of another’s leadership abilities—just ask anyone at your next holiday get-together about what is going on in their company and you’ll have an answer. The point is, many people think they know a great deal about leadership even without having read through the volumes of material in the professional and academic literature on the subject.

These days, I often feel sorry for students planning to do research on leadership. I mean, after so many years, how can there be anything left to study? Of course, the answer to this question (which can be applied to almost any area of study in almost any field, for that matter) is we can always learn more. But if we think about it hard enough, we must be able to identify some basics that we know by now, right? In other words, if we had to make a definitive statement about the current state of leadership theory, practice, and research what would it contain? Herein lies the impetus for our discussion in this issue. Given the fact that all four individuals approached agreed to respond to the question at hand and that I have a page limit to maintain, I am going to just get out of the way and let these researchers and practitioners make their comments in response to the following question:

Last academic year, for the first time I taught our one-semester course, "Leadership and Supervision," at Teachers College. I am now in the midst of teaching the course for a second time. Although I have been a student of leadership since my dissertation on the subject (testing Fiedler’s theory) a very long time ago, it is only now that I have put together "my course." The best way to learn anything, besides perhaps practicing it, is to be required to teach it to others. So, the following consists of some things I have learned and/or confirmed for myself about leadership:

• It would be difficult to write a definitive statement about the essence of leadership for an encyclopedia since there is no commonly accepted definition. Most of us would probably agree that such terms as persuasion, influence, and reciprocity are key to any definition. In any case, the remaining points make up my rather extensive definition.
• In my opening class, or if I am making a presentation on leadership, I begin with an overhead of an article headline from The New York Times a few years ago, which reads, "New Afghan Leader Lacks Followers." Then I ask the question, "What’s wrong with this picture?" Everyone laughs. They get it. First and foremost, then, leadership is a relationship, an exchange, and a reciprocal process. It does not matter what a person’s self-concept might be; if there is no follower, the person is not a leader.
• Rost (1991) in his criticism of the field, is correct. In addition to not having a consensual definition, and not having an integrative "school" of leadership, we have been studying the wrong things—traits, for example—that is, variables that are peripheral to the actual content of leadership, the proper content being within the relationship. And to make matters worse, recent evidence shows that those of us who are vertically challenged are not likely to be chosen for leadership regardless of how qualified we might be. Being tall (over six feet) is indeed important for selection irrespective of the person’s potential effectiveness (The Economist, 1996). Beliefs that we hold about what a leader is supposed to be or to look like continue to dominate regardless of evidence to the contrary (Hogan, Curphy, & Hogan, 1994). We must move from the periphery to the center, which is the interface of leader-follower.
• But to be a leader, to attract followers, one must have something to offer; it is not merely a relationship. Leadership is in the content of the relationship. Sounding somewhat paradoxical, it is the content of the process. So what is the content? Two things, primarily: (a) ideas, a vision, a story, and (b) values that followers can believe in and accept. Regarding (a), Tichy (1997) emphasizes having a "teachable point of view" while Gardner (1995) stresses the importance of the leader’s story. With respect to (b), O’Toole (1995) is the most articulate and helpful. He argues eloquently that contingency models run counter to effective leadership. Value-based leadership is more likely to result in effectiveness. O’Toole is replete with examples.
• I have preached for a very long time that self-awareness is integral to leadership effectiveness. I’m sure that this belief can be traced back to my 1960s days when I was a T-Group trainer. Recently Church (1997) has provided comforting evidence that suggests that perhaps I have not been for all these years a liar. It seems to me that a key ingredient to successful leadership is the ability (not necessarily a trait) on the part of the leader to diagnose accurately how he or she is affecting and is being affected by followers and then to adjust his or her behavior accordingly. In other words, the astute leader is attuned to the nature of the relationship with followers and makes behavioral adjustments to maintain if not improve that relationship in order to (a) realize the vision, (b) accomplish the mission, and (c) implement goals if not change objectives.
• Leadership is sufficiently different from management to warrant our serious consideration. Leadership is more person-dependent for success, whereas effective management is more dependent on the legitimacy of one’s position in the organization. For developmental purposes, it is important for good management to learn how to do things, (e.g., budgeting, planning, measuring, and appraising performance, etc.). For good leadership it is important to learn how to use one’s personal skills and abilities and how to use one’s values and beliefs to engage others.
• And finally, even though I teach our leadership courses at Teachers College, I am not convinced that I can instruct one about how to be a successful leader. After all, it is so personal and idiosyncratic to the individual. I am teaching "about leadership," not necessarily how to be a good leader. But one can learn leadership and how to be effective at it by paying attention to the points I have attempted to make in this brief encyclopedic entry.

The amount of written material on leadership reflects the importance of the subject in the popular mind. This immense literature falls into two categories. The first, and by far the larger, contains armchair theories of leadership written by business school faculty, retired CEOs, and other people with opinions. The second contains empirical reports from academia. Neither is very helpful, for essentially two reasons: (a) Taking leadership seriously requires taking personality seriously, and the consensus of behaviorist-dominated American culture since the 1960s is that personality doesn’t exist—leadership is a function of larger social forces; (b) the literature is based on the wrong definition. Overwhelmingly, leadership has been defined in terms of who is at the top of large, hierarchical, bureaucratic organizations such as the Army or the phone company. But, as the career of Colin Powell, former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reveals, climbing such hierarchies depends more on political skill than leadership ability.

A consideration of the function of leadership in real human groups suggests that leadership should be defined as the ability to persuade a group to set aside individual preoccupations in order to pursue a common goal, and leadership should be evaluated in terms of how a group performs vis--vis the other groups with which it competes. This view suggests that the essential task of leadership is to build high-performing teams. With these definitions in mind, a review of the empirical literature leads to six conclusions:

1. There is no agreement in the literature concerning the characteristics of effective leaders—primarily because there is almost no research on the characteristics of persons whose groups outperform other, comparable groups; again, most research focuses on who is in charge, rather than how well a team is doing.

2. There is a nicely converging literature on failed leadership, but it is not in the peer-reviewed journals; it was initiated by Jon Bentz in two APA/SIOP talks and is found in conference presentations and technical reports.

3. Managerial derailment is now well understood; it is caused by flawed interpersonal skills that prevent a person from being able to build a team. The DSM-IV, Axis 2 personality disorders provide an initial taxonomy of the key interpersonal flaws, which include the paranoid, narcissistic, and dependent personalities.

4. These sources suggest that the base rate for flawed leadership in corporate America is above 50%, which means that the majority of employed adults work for someone with seriously diminished leadership skills.

5. When people have to work for flawed managers, they often retaliate in ways that are hard to detect immediately—by slowing down, withholding commitment, providing poor service, or even by theft and sabotage.

6. Finally, although the bosses of bad managers rarely appreciate how their managers alienate their work teams, the team members always know. The key sign that managers are performing poorly is the degree to which their subordinates don’t trust them. Subordinates’ ratings of the degree to which they trust their managers may turn out to be the best single predictor of workgroup effectiveness, and therefore of leadership. And the capacity to inspire trust is a function of personality.

I thought this was a reasonable title for a best selling book on everything you should really know and do about leadership, all throughout the week. Unfortunately, the publishers said that "anything that takes that amount of effort, is simply not worth reading or doing." My response was, " I thought by making it more quantitative, I could attract more managers to read it… You know making the intangible measurable—six sigma and all of that." Still having no outlet for this great piece of "work" which will no doubt end up in every motel drawer once published, let me squeeze into the next several pages what you could have read if the publishers, like great leaders, had been true visionaries.

So, we don’t have a commonly agreed-on definition of leadership. So what? Why is Einstein allowed to call his theory "a theory of relativity," and in the leadership field we have to come up with a single definition of leadership? Would anyone call Einstein a wimp for not taking a stand on his theory? I am only asking for some equity here. And I am not making an attribution when I say, it’s simply not our fault. If you’re going to blame anyone, I would suggest that you write Webster’s staff a letter. According to Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, leadership is "the quality of a leader; the capacity to lead; a group of persons who lead; and the office or position of a leader." Webster’s the wimp! He had a chance to define it, and blew it. And now we have to clean up Webster’s mess. Therefore, I would suggest we simply agree that "leadership" is a discipline, very broad and deep, and define it similar to "psychology" with a lot of different acceptable (and relative) definitions.

Whew! Clearly, leadership is a topic that can generate a great deal of debate in our field. Although the contributors above certainly have strong positions, there are a few key dilemmas, tensions, or themes that seem to cut across all of these "summaries" of the field. First, surprise, surprise, we have a definition problem with the term that raises questions regarding measurement accuracy and consistency in research—and yet, this situation has also provided us with an extremely rich and varied literature on the subject. Second, there are both individual (e.g., personality preferences, self-awareness, specific skills, and behavioral tendencies) and collective elements (e.g., person-to-person and group-to-group comparisons) inherent in any leadership dynamic that need to be examined. Third, going global with leadership research and theory means greater widening of the net but also adding to the confusion. In short, I feel safe in predicting that, as a field, we will continue to be enamored with the notion of leadership and that this will be manifested in the continuation of the following trends: (a) conceptualize, research, and publish in the area of leadership, (b) debate the definition, meaning, and measurement of the construct, and (c) remain psychologically glued to our idiosyncratic and intuitive understanding of leadership in our own world. So, remember this the next time a graduate student asks you about doing some leadership research. The field is full of possibilities!

Thanks to Walt, Warner, Bob, and Bruce for contributing their comments and having fun with this one. As always, thanks also to Janine Waclawski for her contribution to making the questions interesting and to Mary Zippo for making sure my typos don’t make it impossible for people to read the words. Presumably, you know the drill by now, but just in case, send your reactions, suggestions and comments to AllanHC96@aol.com. Or you can send it to me by mail at W. Warner Burke Associates Inc., 201 Wolfs Lane, Pelham, NY, 10803, (914) 738-0080, fax (914) 738-1059.

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Walter W. Tornow is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Creative Leadership. He has a Ph.D. in I/O psychology from the University of Minnesota. He has held executive positions in major organizations with responsibilities for leadership development research and publications, human resource research and planning, advanced product and business development, and organizational consulting services. He has also been active in a number of professional organizations. His publications include journal articles, book chapters, and guest editor of special journal issues: one on service quality, the other on 360-degree feedback. He is co-author with Manuel London and CCL Associates of a forthcoming book on Maximizing the Value of 360-Degree Feedback. TORNOWW@GONZO.CCL.ORG

W. Warner Burke is Professor of Psychology and Education, and Chair, Department of Organization and Leadership at Teachers College, Columbia University where he has been since 1979. He is also Chairman of W. Warner Burke Associates Inc., an organizational consulting firm based in Pelham, NY with clients in a variety of organizations in business-industry, education, government, religious, and medical systems. Dr. Burke earned his Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Texas, Austin. He has been a practicing organization consultant for over 30 years and has published over 90 articles and 13 books on such topics as organization development, leadership, and change management. WWB3@COLUMBIA.EDU

Robert T. Hogan is McFarlin Professor of Psychology at the University of Tulsa, President of Hogan Assessment Systems, the editor of the Handbook of Personality Psychology, and a life-long student of leadership, triggered by his experiences as a junior officer in the Navy. AFERG@WEBZONE.NET

Bruce J. Avolio is a Professor in the School of Management and Center for Leadership Studies at Binghamton University. His current research interests include examining a full range of leadership styles, orientations, and perspectives in many different cultures. Most recently, Dr. Avolio and his colleagues have been actively involved in building a global network of Centers for Leadership Studies, and now have established centers in Israel and South Africa, with two soon-to-be-inaugurated centers in Korea and Australia with several more on the way. LEAD3@BINGHAMTON.EDU