خلاصة:
Leadership Studies is a new interdisciplinary field of Organization Studies that is growing at a steady rate all over the world. Leadership studies are seen as a branch of Management and Organization Sciences despite its philosophical roots that can be traced back to Plato’s philosophical writings such as Laws, Politics, or The Republic. Starting from Burns’ seminal book, Leadership (1978), and subsequent discussions with American business ethics pioneer Joanne Ciulla, a fundamental methodological question emerged: whether Leadership studies are a normative or a descriptive field of study.
ملخص الجهاز:
Trait theories have started debates on some "philosophical-like questions" about leadership, such as whether leaders are made or born, which is related to leadership characteristics (Marturano, 2014; Kets de Vries & Engellau, 2014; Avolio, 2005; Jackson & Parry, 2008: 16; Riggio, 2009), and about the nature of charisma (Weber, 2015; Conger & Kanungo, 1998; Adair-Toteff, 2005; Marturano & Arsenault, 2008), starting what eventually became highly disputed concerns on the very nature of Leadership.
Contingency theories were a fundamental tool for understanding leadership behaviors, while, at the same time, its methodological approach was scrutinized, including (1) its limited leadership conceptualization and insufficient empirical support for its models, (2) its failure to distinguish between the behavior of managers and leaders’ behaviors, (3) over-simplification of the options available to leaders and the situations leaders might face (Bolman & Deal, 1991).
Finally, LMX theory focuses at increasing organizational success through the creation of leaders and subordinates mutual positive relations (Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995).
LMX theory is indeed a descriptive (rather than normative) leadership theory centered on explaining the way in which people relate to and interact with each other rather than on prescribing how to form high quality LMX relationships (Gerstner & Day, 1997).
Very similarly, almost every major contribution to leadership studies, "still move quickly from analyzing what leadership is to asserting a model of how it gets done, and thence to prescriptions for what leaders should do, and all too often these kinds of studies start at the end, with value laden notions of what ought to be the case" (Gosling & Marturano, 2008).