It has been claimed that in 1896 in the USA, the Library of Congress had no book on leadership, but within one person's lifetime, eighty-five years later, over 5,000 entries on leadership were noted by Bass in the early 1980s. This explosion of interest has included an enormous diversity of activity by people known as leaders. Fiedler and Garcia have listed as examples of leadership Henry V's victory at Agincourt against overwhelming odds; Washington, who defeated better-equipped English forces; and Iacocca, who produced the dramatic turnaround of the Chrysler Corporation. They then went on to show the macabre side of leadership by including Hitler. Looking at more recent events, one could add successful business tycoons like Robert Maxwell in the UK, Alan Bond in Australia, and Ivan Bosky in the USA, who all allegedly defrauded millions of people who had fallen under their leadership spell.

With such a wide range of examples to illustrate a phenomenon described in a single word, one has to ask whether the leadership concept has practical utility for understanding organizational behaviour. The answer is a qualified 'yes'. The qualification implies that some usefulness can be extracted from the available evidence, but great care has to be taken not to overstate the explanatory thrust of a term which has given rise to thousands of different definitions and a variety of post hoc explanations covering both good and evil.

The literature can be divided into two main streams: universalist approaches and situational approaches. The former include great person theories, personality theories, psychoanalytic theories, charismatic, transformational and transactional theories, organizational economics, grid theory and popular descriptive theories. Situational approaches are, in general, of more recent origin and are based on the assumption that different styles of behaviour, including leadership, are appropriate for contrasting varieties of real-life situations. These approaches are sometimes called contingency theories because they attempt to specify the effect of contingent situations on different behavioural responses. Psychologically orientated theories tend to concentrate on intra-organizational contingencies, like the nature of the task, while sociological theories tend to stress the effect of factors external to the organization, like turbulence of the environment.

The contrast between generalistic and contingency approaches is important and the thrust of evidence in support of the latter lends itself to a more realistic prescriptive approach to leadership. At the same time it must be recognized that there is often a degree of overlap between the two schemata.

Frank Heller