Stephen Billing’s Blog

Can we rely on the findings of leadership research? If there were no such thing as leadership, would we know?

The assumptions, methodological preferences and ideological commitments permeating many leadership studies are often not acknowledged by the researchers. This means that their findings are likely to lead us into false conclusions unless we consider what these underlying assumptions might be.

One such assumption is that such a thing as leadership exists. Many studies ask respondents to choose between multi-choice items on a questionnaire, all of which are based on the assumption that leadership is a thing and that the researcher has been able to work out all the possible choices that the respondent might make. The very act of collating these responses then creates the phenomenon of leadership that is reported on in these studies. This suggests that any leadership studies should be taken with a grain of salt, or at least that you should check their research method before accepting the results. Alvesson and Sveningsson (Article is subscription only, unfortunately) point out that it is possible there is a real phenomenon behind the discussion about leadership, but it is also possible that there is not. Much of the leadership research would report on findings about leadership because of the assumptions of the researchers, even if the phenomenon known as leadership does not actually exist.

Alvesson and Sveningsson point out that there is a lot of leadership literature around, but that there is also a lot of discontent with that literature. For example, back in 1979, Sashkin and Garland say that the study of leadership has failed to produce generally accepted, practically useful and widely applied scientific knowledge. Ten years later, Yukl concludes that leadership theories are beset with conceptual weaknesses and lack strong support when studied in practice. The results of many studies are contradictory and inconclusive.

The scientific approach to studying leadership, which promises the accumulation of knowledge through the development and verification of hypotheses has not delivered universally accepted theory that can guide leadership action, unlike, say, the law of gravity which is universally applied and has been such an important underpinning of many developments in Newtonian physics. In fact, practitioners mostly view academic research on leadership as abstract, non-practical and of little relevance. Imagine if gravity were so diffuse that people said "I wish you would come up with a more practical theory of gravity." And yet much leadership theory has been developed with the intention of trying to find immutable laws of leadership that apply just as much as the laws of gravity.

Not very successful, it seems. More to come in future posts.