 What Is Leadership? Can It Be Learnt?Steve Kempster
Chapter 2 in How Managers Have Learnt to Lead, 2009, pp 27-52 from Palgrave Macmillan Abstract: Abstract Warren Bennis has wonderfully captured the essence of leadership as being ‘like beauty, it’s hard to define but you know it when you see it’ (1989: 1). Our ability to judge what is beautiful is learnt through our lives but we struggle to understand how such personal judgment is acquired. The complexity of the phenomenon of leadership and the obscurity of the sources from whence it is learnt tend to lean our orientation to suggesting the people who are born to lead. This chapter will outline the case for the argument that leadership is a socially constructed process and, as such, it is learnt through our social interactions. Leadership appears not to have certainty of definition but is ever present in daily usage and is understood, constructed and practiced in an idiosyncratic way. In this sense, leadership practice is learnt, but importantly, not necessarily in a conscious manner. The inability of scholars to agree on a universal definition is testimony to this socially constructed and learnt process. Keywords: Transformational Leadership; Leader Behaviour; Implicit Theory; Charismatic Leadership; Leadership Theory (search for similar items in EconPapers) There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-23474-1_2 Ordering information: This item can be ordered from Access Statistics for this chapter More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan |
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