مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

 مجله اسکاندیناویایی مدیریت – Scandinavian Journal of Management

‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’ echoes Marcellus famous words to Horatio in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. Could the same be said about the state of current leadership studies? Despite the impressive number of empirical studies during the last three decades some scholars seem all put positive about the progress in terms of useful insights (Andriessen & Drenth, 1984; Perrow, 1979; Rost, 1991; Yukl, 1989), and some even claim that ‘we know little if anything more about leadership’ (Barker, 1997). More recently, Grint (2010, p. 1) noted that ‘[a]s I read more material, I realized that all my previous “truths” were built on very dubious foundations, so my understanding decreased as my knowledge increased’.

One important reason behind all the frustration and confusion is that the signifier ‘leadership’ tends to refer to a variety of various and often contradictory things as pointed out by Kets de Vries (1994): ‘When we plunge into the literature on leadership, we quickly become lost in a labyrinth: endless definitions, countless articles and never-ending polemics . . . it seems that more has been studied about less and less, to end up ironically with researchers studying everything about nothing’ (p. 73)

In addition, a clear definition of leadership is often lacking in many writings on the topic (Rost,1991). If a definition is included, it is usually rather vague and all embracing (Blom & Alvesson, 2015). This makes of course the relationship between a leadership study and what it is supposed to relate to (empirically) rather uncertain and arbitrary. The many views that exist in parallel lead to ‘tribeism’ within the fragmented field. This of course makes it hard for a leadership scholar from one tradition to evaluate and comment on the scientific value of a study within another tradition—both claiming to study ‘leadership’. As a result, fragmentation (of the unproductive sort), ‘boxed-in research’ (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2014) and scholarly confusion prevail.