Contemporary leaders face the challenge of operating in fast-changing, unpredictable, and unsettled environments where chaotic turbulence, “is the new normality” [italics in original] (Kotler & Caslione, 2009, p. xii). PR leaders confront the same conditions but have had less academic attention and there is little agreement on how to answer the question: what are the best ways to advance PR leadership in this context? In examining this question in the light of the last two decades of literature on leadership and PR we explore two main tendencies in the field that have implications for research, practice and pedagogy .

The first and most striking feature is that much of the writing on leadership has tended to emerge from scholarship where the subject of PR leadership is rarely central and even relatively peripheral to other topics. We suggest, however, that examples of this peripheral focused work have much to add to the PR leadership body of work. The second tendency is a predisposition toward insularity in existing PR research that does seek to specifically address the issue of leadership in public relations. Drawing out the strengths and weaknesses of both tendencies we favor interdisciplinary engagement over isolation and going beyond functional competence to benchmark leadership success in the PR field.