Chapter 2: The Leader is Leadership

The idea of the individual agency of the organizational leader is a received wisdom and held tenaciously by individuals even in the face of disconfirming evidence. The concept of leader agency is an assumption that is rarely questioned in the “leadership industry” (Elliot, 2000). The popular folklore of leadership links organizational success or failure directly to the actions of a powerful leader. In the business arena this assumption is manifested in accounts of the CEO who can turn around the business, in the political sphere we see it in accounts that attribute political change to the influence of a charismatic leader, or conversely the emergence of a failed state to a despotic ruler. Accounts of the powerful leader tend to focus on the perceived personal qualities of the leader (e.g., dedication) or specific behavioral traits that are somehow are thought to influence the wider organization. Generally there is only limited or no attempt to provide an explanatory framework for the linkage between these personal qualities of the leader, changes in organizational behavior across the organization, and aggregated indicators of company performance that are prized in the business media. The explanations of leadership theorists assume “great, perhaps exaggerated, significance to the agency of leaders” (Gronn & Ribbins, 1996, p. 452). Bligh, Kohles, and Pillai (2011, p. 1059) observe that leadership “remains a favored explanatory category for understanding organizational, political, military, religious, economic and social outcomes.” The popularity of the assumption of the agency of the leader continues in the face of substantial and enduring disconfirming argument and evidence from a number of academic sources (Meindl, 1990; O’Reilly et al., 2010). Although leadership is important in organizational performance, the impact of any particular leader, such as the CEO, on company performance has been seen to be consistently overrated.