Leadership: Leaders, Followers, Environments

What is leadership?

Let's now return to necessary definitions. Leadership is a team sport. It includes a leader, followers, and a playing field with its game rules—the situational or environmental contexts. These three elements interact in dynamic and complicated ways to generate organizational outcomes.¹³ While a leader is a leader is a leader (i.e., there are many similarities among leaders across cultures and industries), certain combinations of follower characteristics and environmental conditions can result in a variety of outcomes.

The notion of leadership as a process among leaders and followers within organizational or national settings and traditions suggests a definition. Somewhat surprisingly, most leadership definitions, unlike most leadership studies, are comprehensive and consistent with dynamic leadership processes between leaders and followers. They speak about leaders and followers moving toward goals and objectives within organizational structures. For example, Burns defines leadership broadly in terms of mobilizing “institutional, political, psychological, and other resources so as to arouse, engage, and satisfy the motives of followers.”¹⁴ Others refer to leadership as the “ability of an individual to influence, motivate, and enable others to contribute toward the effectiveness and success of the organization …”¹⁵ Many other definitions describe leadership as a process of influence by one person over others to achieve certain goals and outcomes within groups ...