ORGANIZATIONAL LEADERSHIP:
CLASSIC WORKS AND CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES

Mark J. Safferstone, Ph.D.
Associate Dean, University of Mary Washington
College of Graduate and Professional Studies

This bibliographic essay first appeared in the February 2005 issue of
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, 42(6), 959 – 975.

Organizational Leadership: Classic Works and Contemporary Perspectives Introduction

Organizations—those ubiquitous entities that provide an array of products and services in response to consumer wants and needs—are faced with significant and expanding challenges and opportunities in the twenty-first century. Given the ongoing emphasis on organizational governance and accountability, the competitive nature of the global economy, the pervasive impact of technology, the transition to knowledge-based organizations, and the needs of a dynamic workforce, observers may posit that this time in our history calls for an increased emphasis on organizational leadership.

Admittedly, the economic impact of the post-9-11 war on terrorism and the war in Iraq, the collapse of too many notable companies and the indictment of high profile executives for ethics violations, the popularity and consequences of cost containment strategies such as outsourcing and off-shoring, and the continued pervasive emphasis on increasing shareholder value are a few of the major factors contributing to this increased emphasis on organizational leadership. Furthermore, while the private sector continues to capitalize on the competitive factors of cost, quality, speed, and customer service, citizens expect their government—federal, state, and local—to work better and cost less; consequently, they anticipate that elected officials and career professionals will demonstrate exemplary leadership. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, after almost a century of research, noted academicians and knowledgeable practitioners concur that leadership is a critical organizational activity not limited to those individuals holding designated positions or possessing traditional titles; that it is a function of peoples’ behavior—their motives, competencies, and styles—within the context of the situation; that it can be learned and practiced by individuals throughout the organization regardless of position or title; and that it has a documented impact on organizational performance.

The need for leaders and leadership is a perennial subject that traces its beginnings to the Old Testament, ancient China, and sixteenth-century Italy. More recently, however, contemporary authors have identified the need for leadership in modern organizations; the positive impact of effective leadership on organizational performance; leadership models and frameworks; and leadership development strategies. Additionally, several recent studies reveal the public’s lack of confidence in the capabilities of private and public sector leaders; the relationships among organizational leadership, employee retention, and workforce commitment; the need for leadership development; and the impact of the changing business and organizational landscape on leaders’ roles and requisite skills.

Within this context, this bibliographic essay presents a synopsis of the core literature on the topic of organizational leadership by surveying classic and reviewing pertinent contemporary works.

Scope and Organization

Writing this essay has been a daunting task, primarily due to the overwhelming number of books that have been written on the topic, especially within the past twenty years. Additionally, the organizational leadership literature is intertwined with the literature on organizational behavior, organizational theory, organizational change, business strategy, the functional aspects of business, and books written on the topics of military, public sector, and nonprofit leadership. However, after extensive research, consultation with acknowledged authorities and valued colleagues, and thoughtful consideration, the author has limited the essay to just over 100 books that are considered classic works or have substantive contemporary value for serious students, scholars, and practitioners.

The essay begins by examining organizational leadership from a historical perspective. Subsequent sections trace the theoretical evolution of the field; assess the contributions of three esteemed academic authors; present the viewpoints of more than a dozen major thinkers; survey contemporary perspectives; and review pertinent anthologies and reference works. The essay concludes by addressing the topic of leadership development and discussing relevant Web resources.

Organizational Leadership—A Historical Perspective

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, much of what was known about organizational leadership was gleaned from the Old Testament Book of Exodus, where Jethro counsels Moses on organizational structure, strategy execution, and employee selection and training; Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (c. 510 BCE), which draws analogies between Chinese philosophy and military strategy; Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince (sixteenth century), which praises efficiency and admonishes Italian city-state nobles; and Carl von Clausewitz’s On War, the classic Prussian nineteenth-century treatise on military strategy. Given the agrarian economy and the fact that the most prominent eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American organizations were military, the perspectives articulated in these works served well. However, until the beginning of the twentieth century, the concepts, principles, and practices associated with supervision, management, administration, or leadership—terms often used interchangeably—were fundamentally undefined. As work evolved from the independent activities of farmers, craftsmen, and shop owners to the coordinated efforts of people and machines, there was a need to assure the efficient and effective use of land, labor, and capital—the traditional factors of production. Consequently, several early writers applied engineering, or scientific, principles to the management of factory work and workers.

Henri Fayol’s General and Industrial Management, one of the earliest of these works, identified management as a unique discipline, and delineated fourteen general principles that he theorized are universal and can be applied in a variety of organizational settings. Fayol, a French mining engineer, also believed that if management could be defined, it also could be taught, which laid the foundation for management education. At about the same time in the United States, Frederick Winslow Taylor, also an engineer, was concerned about the inefficiencies of industrial work and workers. Based on his analysis of factory work and observations of steel workers’ minimal output and inefficient work practices (business processes in today’s parlance), Taylor calculated the most efficient way—the one best way—to perform every job. Given that managers and workers now knew what was expected, worker efficiency and plant production increased and manufacturing costs decreased. The outcome of his stopwatch-based approach to work and the workplace, well-documented in The Principles of Scientific Management, contributed to the development of management as a science and significantly changed the role and responsibilities of plant supervisors and managers. Parenthetically, the significance of Taylor’s work reemerged in the 1990s with the publication of Michael Hammer and James Champy’s Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution, which advocates that companies radically redesign their business processes to achieve significant gains in performance factors such as cost, quality, speed, and customer service.

While Fayol and Taylor initially articulated the principles and practices of scientific management, others perfected them. Henry Ford’s My Life and Work and Frank Gilbreth’s Motion Study: A Method for Increasing the Efficiency of the Workman provide insights into the men who, through the efficiencies of the assembly line and mass production, increased industrial productivity while depersonalizing the factory floor. The Gilbreth household’s efficiency was portrayed by Clifton Webb and Myrna Loy in the 1950 movie (and again by Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt in the 2003 remake) Cheaper by the Dozen.

Theoretical Evolution of the Field

While Taylor, Ford, and Gilbreth were concerned with the way in which work was performed, in response to the U.S.’s growing economy and need to increase industrial production, several authors began examining the factors and conditions that motivated workers. Following World War I, Elton Mayo, an English biologist who served on Harvard University’s Committee on Industrial Physiology, undertook a research project to better understand why scientific management had failed to fulfill its promises and to determine the factors that affected worker morale and productivity. The purpose of the experiments, conducted at Western Electric’s Cicero, Illinois, Hawthorne plant between 1927 and 1932, was to determine the lighting level that maximized worker productivity while minimizing operating costs. Interestingly, the researchers found that worker productivity increased regardless of lighting level changes. Confounded by the contradictory results, the research team conducted additional experiments; the findings were reported in Elton Mayo’s The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization, which reveals the significance of human and social factors—people’s feelings, perceptions, attitudes, and relationships—in the workplace. At about the same time that Mayo was conducting the Hawthorne experiments, Mary Parker Follett, a lecturer, writer, and social activist who generally is overlooked but was well ahead of her time, examined workplace issues such as the connection between human relations and operational effectiveness, the role of conflict, the tasks of the leader, the need for visionary leadership, and leadership development. Follett’s notable work in the field of organizational leadership, Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett, was published posthumously.

Following WW II, the U.S. enjoyed economic prosperity and almost full employment. In an effort to contribute to improved organizational effectiveness by maximizing employee productivity, the academic community began examining the notion of leadership in conjunction with a number of psychological, sociological, and organizational variables. The researchers for the multidisciplinary Ohio State Leadership Studies (initiated in 1945) hypothesized that leadership was a complex social-psychological-behavioral construct that involved the leader, the follower, and situational factors. Edited by Ralph M. Stogdill and Alvin E. Coons, Leader Behavior: Its Description and Measurement summarizes the outcomes of their pioneering research. The fundamental outcome of this series of studies, reported to cost more than $500,000, was that leadership could be classified into two independent behavioral factors, consideration and initiating structure. Consideration is related to establishing and developing relationships, initiating structure to planning and organizing work tasks. Stogdill and his colleagues characterize the factors as independent because they found that the degree to which a manager employs one set of behaviors, either consideration or initiating structure, does not predict the degree to which a manager will employ the other set.

Beginning in 1947, a series of studies was initiated at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research under a study team led by Rensis Likert, Daniel Katz, and Robert Kahn. The Michigan Studies, based on research conducted at The Prudential Insurance Company and reported by Katz, Nathan Maccoby, and Nancy C. Morse in Productivity, Supervision and Morale in an Office Situation, examined clerical workers’ efficiency and effectiveness. The authors initially concluded that leadership style could be represented on a continuum and that leadership behavior ranged from employee-centered to production-centered. Furthermore, they found that employee-centered or democratic supervisors tended to have higher-producing employee groups, while production-centered or authoritarian supervisors tended to have lower-producing employee groups. Based on a follow-up study conducted at a General Electric Company turbine and generator plant, the researchers found that supervisors who consistently employed either a democratic or an authoritarian approach had more productive subordinates than supervisors employing an inconsistent or mixed supervisory style. As additional studies were conducted, the University of Michigan research team found that no one supervisory style worked best in all situations, and that effective supervisors tailored their style to the nature of the work and their workers.

Rensis Likert’s 1961 New Patterns of Management, written for managers and supervisors and based on almost fifteen years of research, recognizes the complexities of leadership and examines the relationship between leadership and organizational performance. Likert concludes that supervision is a relative process; to be effective, leaders must adapt their behavior to people within the context of the situation (Likert credits Mary Parker Follett). Likert also introduces the notion of the linking-pin construct and counsels that effective supervisors must exercise sufficient influence to affect their superiors’ decision making. Finally, he delineates four model management systems or approaches, two participative and two authoritative, and delineates the impact of each on seven organizational operating attributes.

Another study conducted in the late 1950s by Harvard Business School’s Abraham Zaleznik, C. R. Christensen and F. J. Roethlisberger, and reported in The Motivation, Productivity, and Satisfaction of Workers: A Prediction Study, examined leadership and the informal group’s ability to influence productivity. The authors found that a department manager’s ability to motivate manufacturing workers was limited and that the primary motivational reward, being a member of the work group, was provided by the workers themselves. The researchers concluded that the manager’s motives as well as those of individual workers impact productivity. This study also emphasized that power is a distinguishing feature of the manager’s role and that effective managers share power and influence with their subordinates.

Frederick Herzberg, along with colleagues Bernard Mausner and Barbara Bloch Snyderman, conducted a well-designed psychological study based on carefully constructed interviews with 200 engineers and accountants representing eleven Pittsburgh area businesses to examine the functional relationships among job factors, attitudes, and effects. The results of the study were published in The Motivation to Work in 1959. The outcome of their research, referred to as Motivation-Hygiene Theory, stipulates that motivational factors, i.e., elements that contribute to employee happiness and motivation, are substantively different from the hygiene factors, i.e., factors that surround work and contribute to employee satisfaction or dissatisfaction. An extensive 1955 study of incentive compensation schemes by William F. Whyte (not to be confused with William H. Whyte Jr.), Money and Motivation, examines the Five M's of factory life—men, money, machines, morale, and motivation—and contributed to Zaleznik’s and Herzberg’s research. Whyte acknowledged the importance of money, but he instructed managers to demonstrate concern for their employees, and concluded that power—setting goals, managing work, and having input into rewards—is the most important and most misused motivational tool.

Although Victor H. Vroom is better known for Expectancy Theory and his work in the area of managerial decision making, his 1964 book Work and Motivation, which he began writing in the late 1950s, explains individual work behaviors, occupational choice, job satisfaction, and job performance through the lens of individual motivation. In addition to reviewing the psychological factors impacting motivation and performance, Vroom presents an exhaustive review of the literature on the relationships between worker performance and supervision, the work group, job content, wages, and promotional opportunities. He believes that no one comprehensive theory can account for all work-related motivational elements and highlights the significant and positive association among several factors, especially the relationship among the individual’s need for achievement, participation in the decision-making process, and effective job performance.

David McClelland, a Harvard professor who began conducting research in the 1950s, became intrigued with the psychological construct and thematic measurement of human motives and the relationship between human motives and a variety of behavioral phenomena, including leadership styles. His research, reported in Human Motivation and compiled by McClelland and Robert Steel, exhaustively reviews the literature and demonstrates that the need for achievement, affiliation, and power empirically and consistently predict behavior. He posits that effective managers possess a moderate need for achievement, a low need for affiliation, and a high need for power or influence (not to be confused with authoritarianism) and that although motive profiles are stable throughout life, managers can be trained to change their behavior and learn new managerial styles, thereby adapting to the needs of their subordinates and the situation. A classic experiment based on McClelland’s research was conducted at the Harvard Business School in the late 1960s and reported in George H. Litwin and Robert A. Stringer Jr.’s Motivation and Organizational Climate. It clearly demonstrates that managers’ motives and resulting managerial styles affect organizational climate, and that organizational climate predictably impacts organizational performance.

Examining organizational leadership from a more humanistic and philosophical point of view, Abraham Maslow, author of Motivation and Personality, views people from a holistic perspective and delineates a hierarchy of human needs—physiological, safety, belongingness and love, esteem, and self-actualization. Maslow characterizes his schema as a hierarchy of relative prepotency and postulates that human behavior is motivated only by unsatisfied needs. Building on Maslow’s work, Douglas McGregor examines an extensive body of knowledge related to the impact of a manager’s philosophy, and in The Human Side of Enterprise he articulates two fundamental sets of assumptions underlying human nature and behavior—Theory X and Theory

Y. The central motivational principle emerging from assumptions underlying Theory X is that employees need direction and are motivated by lower-level needs; the central motivational principle emerging from the assumptions underlying Theory Y is integration. Based on this two-factor theory, the leader’s role is to create conditions that motivate employees by appealing to their higher-level needs, and in return employees can then achieve their goals by supporting and fulfilling the organization’s mission and objectives. From a summative perspective, by the early 1960s a substantial number of motivation-related research studies had been conducted. In Motivation and Productivity Saul Gellerman reviews many of these studies and succinctly concludes that the central problem of management is the effective use of human resources.

While the previous authors were concerned with manager-employee relationships, individual motivation, managerial style, managers’ assumptions, and productivity, other researchers examined the issue of leadership from a broader organizational perspective. Max Weber’s The Theory of Social and Economic Organization describes the ultimate organization as one with machine-like qualities—efficient, rationale, impersonal—and coined the term bureaucracy, which Weber characterizes as a positive attribute. Based on the revision and expansion of his lecture series presented at Boston’s Lowell Institute in 1937, Chester I. Barnard’s The Functions of the Executive advances the notion of the formal and informal social organization and describes three essential executive functions: to provide a system of communication, to secure essential services from individuals, and to formulate the purposes and objectives of the organization. Alfred P. Sloan Jr., author of My Years with General Motors, was the president of United Motors, which was acquired by William Durant’s General Motors in 1918. Sloan’s organizational study, conducted for Durant while at United Motors, resulted in two significant contributions to the field of organizational leadership that he later implemented at GM. First, he created a group of professional managers who employed fact-based decision making, and second, he created a new organizational model, the multidivisional business that combined centralized, coordinated policy making with decentralized operations.

A thirty-four-year-old Bennington College philosophy, government, and religion professor with a Ph.D. in international law was asked to serve as a consultant to GM. This provided Peter F. Drucker, whose significant contributions are discussed in greater detail in a subsequent section, with the opportunity to observe and analyze the structure, strategy, and systems of the world’s largest and most complex business and launched his career as the premier management thinker. His study, Concept of the Corporation, which was critical of GM, examines the company’s inner workings and characterizes the organization as a complex social system, not just an economic entity. At about the same time that Drucker was studying GM, Herbert A. Simon was conducting public-sector research to better understand, describe, and determine the principles underlying what he referred to as the administrative organization. His 1947 book, Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making in Administrative Organization, which contributed to his receiving the Nobel Prize in economics, notes the novelty of organizational research and attempts to improve leaders’ understanding of the organizational decision-making process.

While Sloan and Barnard were interested in the structural aspects of organizational leadership and the impact of structure on employee performance, several authors examined the social aspects of organizations (later referred to as organizational culture) and their implications for organizational leadership. For example, William H. Whyte Jr.’s classic sociological study The Organization Man popularized the term and made bureaucratic life and bosses topics for suburban dinner table discussions beginning in the 1950s. Whyte’s stereotypical organization man was a middle manager who, forsaking home and family, made a lifelong commitment to a large, impersonal, bureaucratic organization. While critical of the impact of organizations as social institutions, Whyte also was concerned about the dehumanization and loss of individualism that came with organizational life. The impact of these issues aptly was portrayed by Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones in The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, the 1956 movie based on the Sloan Wilson book of the same title. Douglas McGregor’s student, Chris Argyris, analyzed the interaction between people and their organizations beginning in the mid-1950s. His research, reported in Integrating the Individual and the Organization, examines critical organizational leadership issues related to organizational culture and climate, organizational effectiveness and efficiency, organizational design, staffing and job design, managerial controls and rewards, and human resource practices. He also advocates that leadership patterns should be tailored to specific conditions and that organizations should establish decision rules to guide the use of varying leadership styles. Argyris concludes by challenging leaders to grow their organizations beyond the bureaucratic pyramid, to focus on their companies’ values and internal composition, and to enlarge, enrich, and redesign jobs. In the early 1980s, prior to the business community’s wholesale adoption of quality management principles and practices, William G. Ouchi’s Theory Z: How American Businesses Can Meet the Japanese Challenge compared American business practices with Eastern management philosophies and Japanese business culture. He concludes that America’s businesses could become more competitive if leaders recognized that organizations are social organisms, fostered the interchange between work and life, and provided employees with a balance between freedom and integration.

While earlier writers examined the significance of social and psychological constructs (especially motivation), the value of philosophical perspectives, and broader organizational issues, several authors whose works began appearing in the mid-1960s continued conducting substantive research and increasing the academic community’s understanding of the factors related to leadership effectiveness. Their efforts also contributed to the ongoing commercialization of the literature by making it understandable and available to practicing managers. Although the Ohio State Leadership Studies first described leadership behavior as the interaction of two independent factors, consideration and initiating structure, Robert R. Blake and Jane S. Mouton popularized the notion that leadership behavior was two dimensional, could be assessed, and that the results could be plotted on a matrix. Their model results in five stereotypical categories of managerial behavior that are described in their work The Managerial Grid: Key Orientations for Achieving Production through People. Blake and Mouton’s fundamental premise is that the most effective managers maximize concern for people while simultaneously maximizing concern for production. In their 1969 book Management of Organizational Behavior: Utilizing Human Resources, Paul Hersey and Kenneth H. Blanchard stipulated that there is no one best way to influence people; though they acknowledge the importance of situational factors, they maintain that managers should determine their followers’ level of readiness when selecting one of four leadership styles.

Given the perspective that effectiveness and group performance are major organizational concerns, Frederick E. Fiedler, in A Theory of Leadership Effectiveness, reviews the extensive research related to leadership and group performance, much of which he initiated in the early 1950s. He also presents information regarding the development and validation of leadership style assessment tools; relates leadership style scores to personality variables and behavioral attributes; and hypothesizes that there is a relationship between effective leadership styles and various situations. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, he presents an empirically validated framework, his Contingency Model, and concludes that a group’s performance is a function of, i.e., contingent upon, the relationship between the leader’s style and the degree to which the situation allows the leader to influence subordinates. He further stipulates that group performance can be improved by modifying the leader’s style or the group-task situation.

A relatively unknown Canadian, University of New Brunswick professor William J. Reddin, conducted an exhaustive review of the leadership research and theorizes that effective managers are those who learn to manage their own behavior within the context of social systems; his 1970 Managerial Effectiveness provides such a framework. While Reddin’s theoretical framework builds on Fiedler’s contributions and is similar to the Blake and Mouton and the Hersey and Blanchard frameworks, Reddin states that managerial effectiveness is a function of the style that is most appropriate to the situation and identifies five situational variables: the organizational culture, how the work gets done, superior, coworkers, and subordinates. He analyzes each situational element and provides examples that help managers understand themselves and improve their performance.

Finally, perhaps one of the most definitive works examining managerial behavior is Richard E. Boyatzis’s The Competent Manager: A Model for Effective Performance, which is based on a study of more than 2,000 managers who held forty-one different management jobs in twelve organizations. Boyatzis presents a three-factor model—individual competencies, job demands, and the organizational environment—and maintains that effective performance occurs when there is consistency or fit among all three elements. Employing a systematic and statistically rigorous research methodology, the author identifies five clusters of leadership behaviors consisting of nineteen competencies—the characteristics or abilities that enable an individual to demonstrate appropriate specific actions or behaviors that are directly related to successful managerial performance. Boyatzis concludes by detailing the elements of a generic management model, linking the competency clusters to traditional management functions (e.g., planning, organizing, controlling), and delineating the implications of his research for the design and implementation of an integrated human resource system.

The Gurus: Peter Drucker, Warren Bennis, and John Kotter

Admittedly, numerous writers have contributed to the development of leadership thought and practice, but three individuals in particular—Peter F. Drucker, Warren G. Bennis, and John

P. Kotter—have made seminal contributions to the field of organizational leadership.

Perhaps the world’s most recognized authority on the subject of organizational leadership is Peter F. Drucker, a prolific author, professor, and management consultant, who in 1950 was appointed to the New York University faculty as professor of management and (reportedly according to Drucker himself) was the first person to hold this academic title and teach the subject of management. Drucker’s contributions include many books on management, some spanning the fields of economics, politics, and society; two works of fiction; an autobiography; and numerous articles in the profession’s most respected journals, the most recent one appearing in June 2004. Drucker’s 1954 book, The Practice of Management, clearly articulates fundamental management principles and establishes the manager’s role—to set objectives, organize, motivate and communicate, measure, and develop people. Drucker maintains that the manager’s most important function and contribution is educational, i.e., to give others vision and the ability to perform. He also argues convincingly that the primary purpose of a business is not to make a profit but to create a customer. While Drucker characterizes Managing for Results: Economic Tasks and Risk-Taking Decisions as the first book on business strategy, it was written in the mid-1960s as a companion to The Practice of Management and offers a pragmatic perspective for practicing managers. Managing for Results presents an organized view of the economic tasks confronting business leaders and provides the reader with applicable analytical tools and relevant financial management and decision-making resources. Drucker concludes that top managers’ roles have become more demanding because leading, directing, and motivating knowledge workers has been added to their responsibilities. In The Effective Executive, Drucker instructs organizational leaders to accomplish the right things and maintains that effectiveness can be learned. He counsels executives to plan and manage their time, understand their skills and capabilities, appropriately design jobs, staff positions and promote people accordingly, prioritize job tasks and exercise self-control, and make effective decisions. Drucker’s The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society is considered a social treatise, but it also paints a clear picture of the future, addressing how technology, the knowledge economy, and knowledge workers will impact the fundamental nature of work and the workplace, and drawing implications for organizations and their leaders. Drucker’s encyclopedic 1974 work Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices recounts the historical development of management as a profession, identifies the role of management, discusses the significance of governance and the tasks of top managers, addresses issues related to organizational strategy and structure, and concludes by emphasizing that managers must know the tools, tasks, and responsibilities of their profession. The most recent Drucker book, Management Challenges for the 21st Century, like many of his previous works, provides a futuristic perspective for managers and challenges readers to take action. After revisiting fundamental management principles and summarizing pertinent global demographic and political trends, Drucker addresses the importance of being a change leader, the significance of the new information revolution, and the need to improve knowledge worker productivity; he concludes by discussing the demands that organizational life and the manager’s role imposes on the individual. Parenthetically, Jack Beatty’s biography The World According to Peter Drucker offers interesting anecdotes and insights into this great thinker’s intellectual perspective.

Like Peter Drucker, Warren G. Bennis has dedicated his life to observing and writing about leadership. Author of more than twenty-five books and innumerable articles, Bennis served on the faculties of MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Harvard and Boston universities, was president of the University of Cincinnati, and is the founding chair of the University of Southern California’s Leadership Institute. Bennis and Burt Nanus’s Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge examines business challenges of the 1980s and identifies the compelling need for organizational leadership. The authors define the significant difference between management and leadership—managers do things right and leaders do the right thing— making the distinction one of efficiency versus effectiveness. Based on ninety interviews they conducted (sixty with corporate chief executive officers and thirty with outstanding public sector leaders), Bennis and Nanus posit that four themes or strategies are the foundation of leadership: attention through vision, meaning through communication, trust through positioning, and the deployment of self. The authors argue that leadership education is more important than management education, dispel leadership myths, and advocate that to improve effectiveness, leaders should adopt a transformative rather than a transactional leadership style.

In Why Leaders Can’t Lead: The Unconscious Conspiracy Continues, written in the late 1980s (an update to his 1976 work The Unconscious Conspiracy: Why Leaders Can’t Lead), Bennis views the business issues of the 1980s as an outgrowth of the social and political issues of the 1960s and analyzes the challenges faced by leaders as they attempt to understand an increasingly complex society and implement substantive organizational change. In On Becoming a Leader, Bennis recaps the social and business context of the 1980s and claims that our major institutions suffer from a significant absence of leaders and leadership. Based on in-depth interviews conducted with almost thirty well-known and respected individuals drawn from an array of business and business-related entities, Bennis maintains that effective leaders possess three key attributes: a sense of purpose or guiding vision; passion and the ability to communicate that passion to others; and integrity, which comprises self-knowledge, candor, and maturity. He explains the substantive differences between leadership and management, maintaining that while managers surrender to the social and organizational context leaders master it; and provides leaders with the necessary personal characteristics designed to predicate future individual and organizational success. Bennis’s most recent work, Geeks and Geezers: How Era, Value, and Defining Moments Shape Leaders, coauthored with Robert J. Thomas, is based on the authors’ conversations with eighteen individuals under the age of thirty-five and twenty-five individuals over the age of seventy. They identify transformational life experiences—crucibles—and present a leadership model that accounts for these defining moments, the era in which the leader matured, and individual factors. These elements, according to the authors, contribute to four cross-generational leadership competencies: adaptive capacity, engaging others by creating shared meaning, voice, and integrity. Finally, Bennis and Thomas theorize that their leadership model also is a model of adult learning and development and that learning to lead is the key to becoming a leader.

Harvard Business School Professor John P. Kotter’s contributions to the organizational leadership literature during the past thirty years continue to be timely and significant. Employing an in-depth interview-based research process, Kotter analyzed the careers of fifteen senior managers representing nine different corporations located throughout the U.S. In his 1982 book The General Managers, he attributes the success of these individuals to a variety of motivational, interpersonal, and cognitive factors. Kotter’s work also highlights the importance of these individuals’ situation-specific specialized skills, confirms that their successes are an outcome of personal characteristics developed throughout their lives, notes the substantial discrepancy between their performance and the literature’s stereotypical characterization of a professional manager, and validates their ability to intuitively understand and manage complexity. Despite individual styles, all participants used roughly the same approach: they set agendas by establishing goals and plans, developed networks of collaborative relationships, and executed their agendas by leveraging those networks. Additionally, Kotter delineates behavioral patterns consistently used by these individuals and concludes with an extensive list of implications for selecting, developing, and consequently improving managers’ performance.

Kotter’s The Leadership Factor, published in 1988, discusses the increasingly competitive business landscape, the need for organizational leadership, and the consequences of leadership as a critical competitive factor. Using a field-based approach, Kotter studied data from 900 senior executives representing 100 businesses and conducted in-depth interviews with 150 top managers. Based on this research, he concludes that no single program or practice creates above average organizational leadership capacity. Kotter, however, hypothesizes that five best practices—sophisticated recruiting, an attractive work environment, challenging opportunities, early identification strategies, and planned development—when combined, build and maintain better than average organizational leadership capacity. Kotter’s 1990 A Force for Change: How Leadership Differs from Management, the result of a multifaceted field-based research program involving 200 senior executives representing twelve successful corporations, addresses and answers a perennial question: what is the difference between management and leadership? While these terms have been used somewhat interchangeably, Kotter’s research led to a theoretically sound yet practical distinction. Kotter maintains that management and leadership are complementary organizational processes and that sound management and effective leadership are needed in today’s complex, dynamic, and unpredictable business environment. Kotter concludes that management functions (e.g., planning and budgeting, problem solving) produce predictability and order, while leadership (e.g., establishing direction, aligning people, and motivating and inspiring) results in dramatic and adaptive change.

The Thought Leaders

In addition to Drucker, Bennis, and Kotter, at least a dozen other writers have significantly influenced the development of organizational leadership thought and practice during the past thirty years. In the early 1970s, Henry Mintzberg demonstrated the discernable difference between the ways in which the academic literature characterizes managerial work and the day-to-day reality of the manager’s job. His research, reported in The Nature of Managerial Work, revealed that managers think about work and complete innumerable tasks at an unrelenting pace, preferring the more active elements of their work; engage in activities that are characterized by brevity, variety, and fragmentation; tend to prefer oral rather than written communication (this was written before e-mail); and actively communicate with superiors, subordinates, and colleagues inside as well as outside their organizations.

Although it presents the historical evolution of the modern, vertically integrated company, Alfred Chandler’s The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business also addresses the emergence of professional managers and the managerial hierarchy whose role is to coordinate and control corporate investments in the company’s functional business divisions. Taking a substantially broader view, James MacGregor Burns’s seminal work Leadership examines the topic from the historical, political, psychological, and social perspectives. Burns is credited with identifying two distinct types of leadership: transactional leadership, where leaders approach followers in anticipation of a quid pro quo; and transforming leadership, which is more complex and compelling because leaders employing this approach recognize and capitalize on the needs or demands of their followers. Alvin Toffler’s 1980 sociological work The Third Wave affirms many of the predictions anticipated by Drucker’s The Age of Discontinuity, published eleven years earlier. Toffler provided readers with a futuristic yet highly accurate worldview founded on the notion of the information-based economy, drawing economic, business, and organizational leadership implications. Robert K. Greenleaf’s influential Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness, a philosophical treatise on leadership, power, and authority, asserts that the individual who is a servant first gains a deeper understanding of others’ needs, and consequently is more perceptive, compassionate, and understanding, and ultimately a more effective leader.

Richard Tanner Pascale and Anthony G. Athos’s The Art of Japanese Management: Applications for American Executives, published prior to United States industry’s affirmation and adoption of quality management principles and practices, details the differences between Japanese and American management practices and outlines the ways in which American businesses can regain a competitive edge. The authors also present the McKinsey 7-S model, which was popularized in Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman’s 1982 In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best Run Companies. Although Excellence is better thought of as a book on commonsense strategy rather than on organizational leadership, Peters and Waterman lucidly present fundamental elements linked to business success and in doing so literally created the niche market for business books.

At about the same time that In Search of Excellence was gaining in popularity, W. Edwards Deming, who revolutionized Japan’s industrial quality and productivity starting in 1950, published Out of the Crisis. This work challenged American management practices that contributed to the country’s loss of competitiveness and resulting economic downturn. Deming’s 14 Points for Management, the need to understand statistical process control (or variation), and his perspective on the purpose of leadership—to help people do a better job with less effort and consequently improve quality, increase output, and enhance pride of workmanship—are just three of his significant contributions to the field of organizational leadership.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a sociologist and Harvard Business School professor whose works first appeared in the late 1970s, has examined the relationships between an organization’s willingness to invest in its employees and its success. She compared the twenty-five-year financial performance of what she characterized as progressive and nonprogressive companies, and reported her findings in The Change Masters: Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the American Corporation. Her study revealed that progressive businesses, those known for their creative human resource practices, had significantly higher long-term profitability and financial growth than their nonprogressive peers. Kanter also noted that firms employing integrative thinking, an approach that welcomes change and views circumstances and situations holistically, are more innovative and successful. Kanter challenges organizational leaders to adopt progressive talent management practices, encourage entrepreneurial behavior, and implement employee involvement strategies that facilitate responsive and effective change. Four years later, Marvin R. Weisbord authored Productive Workplaces: Organizing and Managing for Dignity, Meaning, and Community. Based on his extensive organization and team development experiences employing sociotechnical systems design, Weisbord theorizes that the world is changing much too rapidly, that work and the workplace provide people with a sense of community, and that McGregor’s Theory X-Theory Y is not only a set of assumptions about people but also describes everyone’s inner struggle. The author reviews the contributions of several significant management theorists representing the human relations school of thought and proposes a participatory leadership model that is future focused and based on systems thinking. Weisbord’s work affirms Kanter’s conclusions by demonstrating the positive and practical impact of employee involvement and quality of work life initiatives.

Peter M. Senge identifies several factors contributing to the emergence of learning organizations and maintains that successful companies are those that capitalize on employees’ commitment and capacity to learn. Senge’s The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization identifies five elements that individually and collectively contribute to the development of a learning organization: systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, building a shared vision, and team learning. He also identifies factors that adversely affect organization learning. Eschewing the stereotypical image of a leader, Senge advocates that learning organization leaders should be designers, stewards, and teachers, individuals who can increase people’s ability to learn and assume responsibility for increasing organizational capacity. Edgar H. Schein, one of the founders of the field of organizational psychology, authored Organizational Culture and Leadership. Schein, whose work aligns with the perspectives voiced by Kanter, Weisbord, and Senge, maintains that the leader’s role is to shape the company’s culture—its beliefs, values, and assumptions—and that the creation, evolution, and management of culture define leadership and consequently influence the company’s effectiveness, competitiveness, and success.

James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner’s 1987 The Leadership Challenge is based on more than 1,300 surveys, almost fifty in-depth interviews, and a follow-up study conducted with 3,000 managers and supervisors. The authors present a populist perspective on leadership, i.e., that leadership is more a function of behavior and relationships than of title or position; that leadership skills and abilities (e.g., challenging the process, inspiring a shared vision, enabling others to act, modeling the way) can be assessed and improved; and that everyone in an organization has the capacity to exhibit leadership skills and abilities, thereby contributing to the organization’s success. In On Leadership, John Gardner describes key distinctions between leadership and management, debunks the myth of an idealized leader type, and delineates essential leadership tasks. He maintains that the leader-follower relationship is of significant importance, discusses issues of power and ethics, and emphasizes that leadership development is a critical and a lifelong process. John J. Gabarro’s The Dynamics of Taking Charge examines the managerial transitions of seventeen executives and managers, some successful and some not, and analyzes the factors that contribute to successful transitions. He identifies the five stages that a manager experiences when transitioning into new responsibilities and the impact of the manager’s style, experiences, and situational factors on the individual’s success. Gabarro concludes that while other factors are important, it is the quality of the manager’s interpersonal relationships with superiors, peers, and subordinates that predictably contributes to a successful managerial transition.

Lee G. Bolman and Terrence E. Deal’s Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership (an expansion of their 1984 book Modern Approaches to Understanding and Managing Organizations) provides a four-frame model—structural, human resource, political, and symbolic—through which leaders can examine their organizations. They also distinguish the differences between leadership and management, criticize the media’s portrayal of heroic leadership, offer an egalitarian view of the leader’s responsibilities, draw analogies between each frame and the resulting approach used by the leader, and discuss how each approach contributes to effective or ineffective leadership. They conclude that although each approach has value, exemplary leaders need to adopt a holistic perspective by employing all four frames.

Finally, while many authors instruct leaders to develop and communicate a compelling organizational vision, Burt Nanus’s Visionary Leadership: Creating a Compelling Sense of Direction for Your Organization provides practicing and aspiring leaders with a step-by-step approach. Nanus reviews pertinent leadership roles and discusses the importance of having a vision and setting direction, presents an audit methodology to evaluate a business’s current approach, and presents guidelines for developing a vision. He concludes with a discussion of the leader’s role as an organizational change agent and describes the specific steps leaders must take to translate their organization’s vision into reality.

Contemporary Perspectives

While the research and writing of the gurus and thought leaders enhanced the foundational literature, another dozen or so authors, some of whose works were previously discussed, provide readers with timely and contemporary perspectives related to the topic of organizational leadership.

Ethical business behavior and corporate governance and accountability will continue to be topics of critical import to organizational leaders, and two books written almost a decade apart address this issue. James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner’s 1993 Credibility: How Leaders Gain and Lose It, and Why People Demand It, based on ten years of research, reports the attributes of admired leaders and draws implications for the reciprocal relationship between leaders and followers. The authors identify four leadership characteristics that followers consistently expect from their leaders and that contribute to leaders’ credibility and success: being honest, forward-looking, inspiring, and competent. More recently, Joseph L. Badaracco Jr.’s 2002 book, Leading Quietly: An Unorthodox Guide to Doing the Right Thing, the outcome of a four-year study, dispels the myth that today’s most effective leaders are charismatic, larger-than-life individuals whose high-profile risk-taking results in significant organizational achievement and personal rewards. Instead, the author maintains that effective leadership and subsequent organizational success is attributable to the day-to-day decisions and contributions made by numerous individuals, leaders as well as those on the front lines. Badaracco introduces the concept of quiet leadership through examples of four fundamental guiding principles that reflect the complexity, uncertainty, and challenges of today’s business environment. Finally, the author demonstrates that quiet leaders positively impact the people around them through strength of character and personal humility.

Thomas Petzinger Jr.’s The New Pioneers: The Men and Women Who Are Transforming the Workplace and the Marketplace posits that successful organizational leaders along with committed and entrepreneurial individual contributors are successfully adapting small and medium size businesses to the wants and needs of their constituents. Based on historical and anecdotal data as well as extensive case studies, the author reviews the development of the modern business enterprise, the impact of the new economy, the changing nature of the economic relationship between company and customer, and the positive outcomes when companies adopt a customer-centric focus. He also examines the adaptive nature of what he characterizes as pioneering companies, the learning orientation of these organizations, and how they succeed by their leaders’ instilling a sense of shared purpose and values. Petzinger concludes by reexamining the issues of money and motivation, the need to integrate work and family life, and the broader social roles and responsibilities of business enterprises within our economic order.

Using Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management and Whyte’s The Organization Man as starting points, Sumantra Ghoshal and Christopher A. Bartlett’s The Individualized Corporation: A Fundamentally New Approach to Management, the outcome of a six-year research effort, traces the development of the modern corporation and demonstrates that managers today struggle to be successful in a dynamic and unpredictable business environment. They present a new organizational paradigm—the individualized corporation—that is built on three core capabilities: inspiring individual creativity and initiative, leveraging organizational learning, and continuous organizational renew. The authors maintain that a corporation is not only an economic entity but also one of the most important institutions of modern society, and as such must create value for its constituents. Ghoshal and Bartlett conclude by noting changes in the social, psychological, and moral employment contracts and challenge top management to go beyond their traditional role (i.e., focusing solely on the aspects of strategy, structure, and systems) and address the more salient organizational elements of purpose, processes, and people.

Jim Collins’s Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap—and Others Don’t (written as a sequel to a book he cowrote with Jerry I. Porras, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies) examines the critical factors that distinguish good from truly great companies. Based on extensive research, Collins develops and presents a three-factor model on which organizational success is predicated: disciplined people, disciplined thought, and disciplined action. He also addresses an additional notion—the flywheel—the overarching factor that catapults a company from being just good to truly great. He concludes by comparing and analyzing the concepts in Built to Last with those presented in Good to Great. Although Good to Great could be characterized as a strategy book, Collins emphasizes that exemplary leaders, those who are passionate and persuasive yet humble, are the dynamic force underlying truly great companies.

Daniel Goleman’s Working with Emotional Intelligence demonstrates that the characteristics which previously contributed to successful organizational leadership— intelligence, academic achievement, and business acumen—are less important than the factors underlying emotional intelligence—self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. Written as a follow-up to the author’s Emotional Intelligence, this volume builds the business case for soft skills, reviews the significance of social motives and their impact on our perceptions and behavior, and highlights the importance of interpersonal skills, especially empathy, influence, and leadership. Goleman criticizes traditional high-cost, low-yield leadership development programs and advances a new learning model based on theoretically sound yet practical principles. He presents evidence that top performing companies, like top performing individuals, possess emotional intelligence and concludes by commenting on the relationships among emotional intelligence, knowledge work and workers, virtual organizations, and the education of the workforce of the future. Building on his research, Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee present significant current research and best practices related to neurophysiology, cognitive functioning, learning theory, leadership competencies, and executive development in Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence. Their book, based on work conducted at Harvard and MIT over the last forty years, presents an organizational imperative: the need for leaders who demonstrate the traditional managerial competencies associated with exemplary performance but who also possess emotional intelligence—self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. Through their research, the authors identify the critical links between emotional intelligence and leadership style, leadership development best practices, and effective organizational performance. They conclude by examining the challenges organizational leaders face in their efforts to enhance individual, team, and organizational performance and address initiating and sustaining substantive organizational change.

Like several preceding authors, Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman dispel many of the myths associated with leadership and management. They compiled data from twenty-eight Gallup Organization studies, aggregated the data at the business unit level, and then compared business unit results to four key outcome measures: customer satisfaction, profitability, productivity, and employee turnover. First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently presents the outcome of their sophisticated analysis, which is based on interviews with 80,000 managers representing 400 companies and one million employees. Citing the significance of human capital, the authors link key employee elements to critical business outcomes: performance expectations, resource availability, the need for recognition, achievement opportunities, feeling valued, and having voiced opinions heard. They conclude that there are significant differences between leaders and managers; that exemplary managers possess a variety of motivational, direction-setting, and relationship-building styles; and that the relationship employees have with their immediate boss is the most pervasive factor contributing to outstanding performance. Additionally, they describe managers as catalysts, and as such, they must do four things very well: select people for talent, set expectations by defining the right outcomes, motivate people by focusing on strengths, and develop people by helping them find where they best fit.

While most authors cited address the topic of organizational leadership through the eyes of frontline, middle, and upper managers, three authors examine the topic from the executive suite. Analyzing Gallup Organization data gleaned from almost 600 interviews conducted with business, not-for-profit, and academic notables and assessing their companies’ financial performance, Thomas J. Neff and James M. Citrin report their findings and identify America’s top business executives in Lessons from the Top: The Search for America’s Best Business Leaders. Acknowledging the dynamic definition of leadership and that different leaders and leadership styles are appropriate for different situations, the authors present detailed profiles of the U.S.’s fifty most significant corporate executives. The authors conclude that organizational success is attributable to exemplary leadership and found that despite differences, these top fifty leaders succeed by subscribing to six core principles: living with integrity and leading by example, developing a winning strategy or big idea, building a great management team, inspiring employees to achieve greatness, creating a flexible, responsive organization, and tying it together with reinforcing management and compensation systems. Based on these principles, Neff and Citrin offer a substantive list of lessons learned and ten common traits or attributes all fifty executives exhibit.

Given the prominent media profiles of many Fortune 500 chief executive officers, Harvard Business School professor Rakesh Khurana offers a theoretically substantive yet practically significant treatise on the secretive and elusive practice of recruiting and selecting chief executive officers in Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs. Based on his study of the hiring and firing of CEOs at more than 850 of America’s largest companies and supplemented by extensive interviews, Khurana’s book examines the structural characteristics of and the interaction between the CEO labor market and its cultural context. He also describes the attributes and behaviors of three primary labor market actors—buyers, sellers, and intermediaries—and how these actors differ from agents found in more conventional marketplaces. Throughout the book, Khurana references pertinent economic, sociological, and business theories and concludes by delineating the implications of the external CEO search and succession process for corporations and American society in general. Michael Useem’s The Leadership Moment chronicles the experiences of nine heroic individuals who faced defining, and potentially disastrous, moments. Citing the events and outcomes of significant scientific, historical, military, political, and business events, as well as drawing on his experiences as a world-class mountain climber, the author focuses on each executive’s ability to incent others to act when faced with exceptionally difficult circumstances and decisions. Useem concludes with thumbnail sketches of the nine individuals; counsels that the single most valuable lesson learned is the importance of having a clear vision coupled with the willingness to act; and distills leadership principles drawn from the nine biographical accounts.

There is a recognized impact and relationship among gender, race, and leadership, and two noteworthy, research-based publications address these issues. Based on the research and personal journeys of two Center for Creative Leadership researchers, Marian Ruderman and Patricia Ohlott’s Standing at the Crossroads: Next Steps for High-Achieving Women examines the ways in which female leaders prioritize and integrate new roles, responsibilities, and opportunities. Their study of more than sixty high-achieving, female, mid- and senior managers with substantial responsibilities and salaries, delineates five key themes—the need to act authentically, make connections, control one’s destiny, achieve wholeness, and gain self-clarity—and demonstrates each theme’s significance for women leaders. The authors also maintain that the shift in the gender composition of the managerial and executive workforce between 1983 and 1999 is notable and warrants significant organizational attention and action. Leading in Black and White: Working across the Racial Divide in Corporate America, by Ancella Livers and Keith Caver, two Center for Creative Leadership program managers, is based on their experiences with more than 1,000 African American professionals. This book dispels the assumption, or myth, of similarity, and details six major areas that African American managers experience in very different ways than their white professional colleagues: identity, responsibility, race and gender, networking, mentoring, and political savvy. Throughout the book, the authors provide pertinent statistics and bulleted recommendations and conclude with chapters that provide developmental strategies for African American professionals and their white colleagues. They also offer an organizational road map as well as an appendix that contains an informal assessment tool designed to help readers gain a better understanding of their organization’s political culture and climate.

Considering the ongoing, dynamic impact of the Internet and technology on how we work, communicate, learn, play, and consume, Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s 2001 Evolve! Succeeding in the Digital Culture of Tomorrow provides an in-depth examination of leadership, organizational effectiveness, and change in Internet-driven organizations. Her major premise— that the elements of competitiveness, commitment, and community have contributed to dot-com ventures’ successes—provides a perspective based on print and online survey responses from 785 organizations, 300 interviews, and 24 case studies. She defines three types of organizations—dot.coms, dot.com enablers, and wannadots; outlines the circumstances each type of organization faces in today’s business environment; and reminds us that these are recurring challenges. Kanter concludes by examining key personal competencies needed by e-business leaders—tuning into the environment, exhibiting kaleidoscope thinking, articulating an inspiring vision, building a coalition, nurturing a working team, persisting through difficulties, and spreading recognition and credit—and maintains that these are relevant competencies for leaders of all types of organizations.

Anthologies and Reference Works

Within the extensive literature on the topic, numerous works have been produced consisting of readings and essays that provide a foundational and current perspective, synthesize the field’s history, and summarize the seminal literature and research.

The Leader’s Companion: Insights on Leadership through the Ages, edited by J. Thomas Wren, presents 13 topics and 64 selections, each briefly introduced by Wren, that draw on an array of writers and resources. Wren’s three fold purpose in presenting these works is to demonstrate that leadership is a timeless concept and fundamental to organizational and individual existence; that it is everyone’s responsibility and not just the calling of a select few; and that conceptually and operationally understanding leadership is important. The recent thirty-one-chapter Business Leadership: A Jossey-Bass Reader reviews the elements of leadership and leadership styles, examines the process of becoming a leader, discusses the notion of character development, presents the importance of having a vision, and addresses the issue of strategy execution. Well-known academics and practitioners contributed to this work, and more than half the selections represent new or renewed thinking on organizational leadership. James Kouzes’s preface sets the tone by reinforcing the concept that leadership is relationship-based, can be learned, hinges on personal credibility, and is future focused.

Leadership: Classical, Contemporary, and Critical Approaches, edited by Keith Grint, opens with an intellectually stimulating introduction that acquaints the reader with a conceptual framework for understanding the seventeen selections that follow. Grint’s selections include works by Plato, Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Barnard, Stodgill, and Fieldler, as well as selections contributed by more recent authors who skillfully address the topics of modern, mythical, and alternative leadership. Grint includes a substantive reference list and many well-documented selections. Leading Organizations: Perspectives for a New Era, containing fifty-three selections and edited by Gill Robinson Hickman, is based on a conceptual framework that focuses on leaders’ roles and responsibilities within the context of contemporary organizations. Robinson’s introduction presents a holistic perspective for analyzing and understanding leadership and theorizes that today’s organizations can improve through leaders’ value and ethics-based actions. Many of the readings in this volume are drawn from established works written by recognized authors. The concluding selection, written by Robinson and five colleagues, addresses the purpose of leadership; reviews four prominent trends; examines the principles underlying shared, collaborative, and reciprocal leadership; and concludes with a brief treatise on the need for a collective, rather than a positional, model of leadership.

Editors Frances Hesselbein, Marshall Goldsmith, and Richard Beckhard assembled an auspicious group of colleagues to produce The Leader of the Future: New Visions, Strategies, and Practices for the Next Era. This four-part work opens with a compelling commentary by Peter F. Drucker and follows with thirty-one original articles that address the issues associated with leading the organization of the future, leaders and leadership in action, and learning to lead; the work concludes with commentaries written by practicing executives. More recently, Warren Bennis, Gretchen M. Spreitzer, and Thomas G. Cummings edited a thought-provoking anthology on the critical issues facing today’s private and public sector leaders. The Future of Leadership: Today’s Top Leadership Thinkers Speak to Tomorrow’s Leaders is the result of a May 2000 conference celebrating the career and life of Warren Bennis. This volume addresses the social and economic context of leadership, identifies the demands that will be placed on organizations and leaders in the future, delineates the factors that will contribute to continued leadership effectiveness, and describes the lessons that can be learned from young leaders. The last part addresses anticipated leadership challenges and closes with Bennis’s professional autobiography. Each chapter, written by contributors who are among the world’s most respected and recognized business writers, is substantively documented, and a biographical sketch of each contributor is appended. In The Many Facets of Leadership Marshall Goldsmith et al. present a fresh approach to the topic of organizational leadership by assembling contributions from more than forty authors who have served on the faculty of Institute of Management Studies. Notable for its original and futuristic perspective, this thirty-three-chapter anthology addresses such topics as intellectual capital, creativity, chaos theory, the networked economy, entrepreneurial leadership, crisis management, innovation, and the adaptive enterprise.

Three compilations could serve as valuable resources for upper-level undergraduate, graduate, and executive MBA courses on leadership and management, and for leadership training programs. Leadership: Understanding the Dynamics of Power and Influence in Organizations, edited by Robert B. Vecchio, contains foundational and contemporary readings written by recognized thought leaders. The work’s thirty-three selections are organized into six topical areas: introduction and overview, power and influence, dysfunctional aspects, models, alternative views, and emerging issues. Peter G. Northhouse’s Leadership: Theory and Practice provides a survey of the field by defining and describing leadership, summarizing the prominent approaches and theories, and addressing four timely topics. Each chapter contains a substantive overview and includes several cases, a relevant assessment instrument, and a list of references. Also practical and summative in nature is Gary A. Yukl’s Leadership in Organizations. This perennial favorite provides a comprehensive survey of the theory and research on organizational leadership and addresses the practical aspects of reciprocal influence, power, participation and delegation, and decision making.

Two works provide a long-term perspective on the topic of organizational leadership, one chronologically, the other by examining the contributions of the people who built and refined the American business enterprise. Stuart Crainer’s The Management Century: A Critical Review of 20th Century Thought and Practice provides a decade-by-decade synopsis of the people and ideas that contributed to the development of management practices and leadership concepts. Crainer’s engaging narrative style provides a historical perspective on the topic intertwined with current business, organizational, and leadership practices. Each chapter concludes with a time line that delineates historically significant business events, relevant statistics, and interesting business trivia. Daniel A. Wren and Ronald G. Greenwood’s Management Innovators: The People and Ideas That Have Shaped Modern Business contributes to the organizational leadership literature by first describing how fourteen Industrial Revolution inventors, entrepreneurs, and financiers created the modern American business enterprise, then presenting sixteen classic and contemporary thought leaders whose evolutionary ideas changed the way we think about work, workers, and the roles and responsibilities of organizational leaders.

Finally, two comprehensive reference works on the topic of organizational leadership merit consideration. One tracing its beginnings to a mid-1940s grant from the U. S. Office of Naval Research and Ohio State University is Bernard M. Bass’s Bass & Stogdill’s Handbook of Leadership: Theory, Research, and Managerial Applications. Originally authored by Ralph M. Stogdill, and now in its third edition, this volume is considered the authoritative source for serious students and academics interested in studying leadership theories, concepts, traits, attributes, styles, and situational elements as well as learning about the knowledge, values, technical skills, and intellectual competencies of organizational leaders. This latest edition includes a dedicated discussion of charismatic and inspirational leadership, reviews the significance of transformational leadership, and addresses the leadership opportunities and challenges associated with gender, ethnic, and global diversity. The Handbook also contains a glossary and cites more than 5,000 references. The recently published four-volume Encyclopedia of Leadership, edited by George R. Goethals, Georgia J. Sorenson, and James MacGregor Burns, is a major contribution, containing critical leadership concepts and terminology, biographical information about historical and current leaders, speeches, religious works, an extensive bibliography, and a directory of leadership programs. This encyclopedia provide an overview of the leadership-related topics of power, governance, and situational factors; addresses aspects of personality and group roles as well as leadership and follower styles; and provides general information on traditional leadership subjects including administration, supervision, management, communication, decision making, and motivation. Another noteworthy contribution of this work is its examination of leadership from historical, conceptual, and applied perspectives.

Leadership Development

Although the instruction that Moses received from his father-in-law, Jethro, could be considered one of the first recorded instances of leadership development, it was Henri Fayol’s contention that since the process of management could be defined and analyzed, it also could be taught. Several years prior to the publication of Fayol’s General and Industrial Management, Dartmouth College’s Amos Tuck School of Business, the world’s first graduate school of management, awarded its first degree in 1901. The Harvard Business School was founded in 1908, initiated the Harvard MBA program in 1910, and in 1945 enrolled a group of executives and recently returning WW II veterans in the institution’s first executive education program, the Advanced Management Program. (Interestingly, Harvard Business School claims to have invented the MBA degree and executive education.) Today, corporate America spends almost $20 billion annually to train its leaders and how-to books on the subject abound. Additionally, an examination of the leadership literature reveals that prolific authors have identified the need for improving various leadership skills and abilities, have proposed a variety of models and strategies, and theorize that causal and correlational relationships exist between improved leadership skills and an array of individual and organizational dependent variables.

In response to the business issues and challenges identified by a number of authors beginning in the 1980s, several books appeared on the topic of leadership development. Morgan

W. McCall, Michael M. Lombardo, and Ann M. Morrison’s The Lessons of Experience: How Successful Executives Develop on the Job provides estimates of annual corporate training expenditures and the costs associated with management failures, and reviews factors contributing to improved leadership capabilities. Although classroom-related learning approaches are valuable, the authors maintain that leadership is a practitioners’ art learned through on-the-job successes and failures. Their book is based on four interview-based studies involving six major corporations and almost 200 successful executives. From more than 600 events and 1,500 lessons they distilled five developmental themes and delineate the critical ways in which executive skills and capabilities improve as a result of challenging, work-related experiences. They conclude by presenting an executive development model, a list of factors that contribute to leader derailment, and a series of recommendations for helping individuals learn from their successes and failures. Morgan W. McCall Jr.’s 1998 High Flyers: Developing the Next Generation of Leaders builds on his earlier work by exploring the organizational context of leadership development and integrating executive development, human resource systems, and organizational strategy. He challenges popular assumptions underlying leadership training and development and counsels that a systematic, business strategy-anchored, developmental perspective designed to help capable people succeed outweighs the more traditional perspective that employs a survival-of-the-fittest mentality. McCall concludes by building the business case for strategic executive development, proposing a talent improvement model, providing developmental templates and tools, and detailing factors that contribute to and hinder improved leadership performance.

Linda A. Hill’s Becoming a Manager: How New Managers Master the Challenges of Leadership is written for aspiring managers or those responsible for developing new managers. Based on field research conducted with nineteen Fortune 500 financial and information technology sales managers during their first year as managers, the author traces their transition from being specialists and individual contributors to becoming generalists and network builders who accomplish goals and objectives through others. Hill describes how individuals mastered four tasks—learning what it means to be a manager, developing interpersonal judgment, gaining self-knowledge, and coping with stress and emotion—and were transformed professionally and personally in the process. The author concludes by addressing the implications for new managers’ superiors, corporate trainers, and functional and human resource executives, and counsels business schools to modify their curriculum by increasing the emphasis on the conceptual and practical aspects of interpersonal relationships.

Pointing out the negative connotations characteristically associated with the terms management development and executive education, Albert A. Vicere and Robert M. Fulmer’s Leadership by Design presents the notion of strategic leadership development, a customized approach designed to improve the capabilities of high-potential managers; it links classroom experiences to the work environment, uses internal training resources, and capitalizes on external partnerships. The authors delineate assumptions underlying their model and posit that leadership development not only improves individual capabilities but also is a mechanism to communicate and implement a company’s strategic intent. They identify the best practices employed by six well-recognized organizations and conclude by addressing the future of the field and key elements of strategic leadership development.

After citing a number of studies substantiating the current dearth of leadership talent, Dave Ulrich, Jack Zenger, and Norm Smallwood contend in Results-Based Leadership that effective leadership is a function of individual attributes, (i.e., setting direction, mobilizing individual commitment, engendering organizational capability, demonstrating personal character) and achieving results. While they present a comprehensive, research-based model of leadership attributes, the authors believe that attributes are valuable only when they contribute directly to achieving business goals. They present a balanced outcomes model, provide a comprehensive assessment toolkit, and conclude by offering practical developmental recommendations for becoming a results-oriented leader. Supplementing the research described in Results-Based Leadership, John H. Zenger and Joseph Folkman report their research based on 200,000 multi-rater evaluations of 25,000 leaders. Their book The Extraordinary Leader: Turning Good Managers into Great Leaders presents a conceptual framework centered on a leader’s character complemented by personal capabilities, a focus on results, interpersonal skills, and the ability to lead organizational change. Despite difficulties encountered when trying to describe and analyze leadership, Zenger and Folkman present twenty practical insights that emerge from their research and simplify the mystery and complexity shrouding this topic of recurring importance. The authors conclude by discussing the value of the interpersonal skills/technical competence relationship, presenting a substantive leadership development case study highlighting the U.S. Marine Corps’ approach, and delineating recommendations for individuals and organizations seeking leadership capacity improvements.

Although annual expenditures on corporate training and development are significant, Robert M. Fulmer and Marshall Goldsmith justify their costs, maintaining that learning is a source of sustainable competitive advantage. They report on their research in The Leadership Investment: How the World’s Best Organizations Gain Strategic Advantage through Leadership Development. Working with a consortium of thirty-five businesses, the authors identify and profile six diverse best practice organizations and describe how each business has tailored its leadership development initiatives to its strategic initiatives and organizational culture. Additionally, Fulmer and Goldsmith discuss lessons that surface from their in-depth case studies, examine the corporate university trend, summarize the capabilities of several prominent academic institutions and world-class consultancies, and present a five-step process that emphasizes the relationship between leadership development and corporate strategy.

Two of the organizations cited by Fulmer and Goldsmith, Linkage Inc. and the Center for Creative Leadership, publish extensive leadership development resources. Linkage Inc.’s Best Practices in Leadership Development Handbook, edited by David Giber, Louis Carter, and Marshall Goldsmith, presents key leadership development trends and findings in the areas of competitive and strategic business challenges, leadership competencies, leadership training, critical success factors, and evaluation methods. The authors conclude that as the business environment changes and the organizational context becomes more complex, so will leadership development programs. Case studies of exemplary companies and programs provide practical leadership development tools and resources for analyzing needs, building a business case, determining competencies, identifying the audience, designing and implementing a program, and evaluating program effectiveness. Mary K. Schwartz and Kinsey G. Gimbel, two Center for Creative Leadership librarians, compiled the eighth edition of an indispensable work, Leadership Resources: A Guide to Training and Development Tools. This exhaustive work provides an annotated bibliography of more than 1,000 books and journal articles; a descriptive listing of almost 50 journals for the scholar and practitioner; a list of almost 100 leadership development assessment instruments and 150 simulations and experiential activities; a comprehensive vendor directory; an annotated bibliography of more than 100 commercially available training videos, documentaries, and relevant feature films; a list of video distributors; a list of Web sites; and a comprehensive guide to organizations and conferences that focus on or specialize in leadership development.

Relevant Web Resources

Given the dynamic nature of the World Wide Web, robust search engines, and Web tools, it is worth noting a selection of tenured, functional, and substantive Web sites. Several content rich sites sponsored and managed by academic institutions contribute to the continued intellectual discussion of organizational leadership; notable among these are the Harvard Business School, particularly its Leadership Initiative section, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Center for Leadership and Change Management, and the University of Richmond’s Jepson School of Leadership Studies.

Although there are numerous journals and professional magazines that address organizational leadership, the Harvard Business Review, the recently redesigned MIT Sloan Management Review, the Strategy and Leadership, and the Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies sites provide, in addition to journal holdings, pertinent publications and academic resources.

The Web sites of several professional organizations whose mission or focus is clearly related to organizational leadership are also of interest. The Center for Creative Leadership site contains substantive resources available from the premier nonacademic leadership development institution. Other sites in this category include the Academy of Management Online, American Management Association, the University of Maryland’s Academy of Leadership, and the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations.

Finally, there are several additional sites that readers and researchers interested in this topic may find interesting and valuable. Specifically, the Drucker Archives and the Leader to Leader Institute sites provide resources and information based on the life and work of Peter F. Drucker. The Thinkers 50 site presents the results of annual surveys ranking notable business thinkers, and the Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge features numerous online resources addressing the specific topic of organizational leadership and the general subject of business history.

Closing Thoughts

Reviewing the intellectual contributions to the field of organizational leadership provides a historical, conceptual, and thematic perspective. For example, beginning in the early 1900s, many authors identified, discussed, and analyzed critical business issues and the consequences of these issues for leaders and their organizations. It appears that there have always been, and always will be, critical business issues. However, the more significant issue is how leaders respond to the dynamic and unpredictable environment and assure their organizations’ continued competitiveness. Additionally, while early writers did not clearly distinguish management from leadership, numerous authors have addressed and clarified this issue and advocate that both elements are necessary and contribute to organizational success.

The literature also reveals an evolutionary body of research that provides leaders with sound conceptual frameworks and practical operational principles to guide their actions. While early authors were concerned with improving efficiency of work and effectiveness of workers, recent writers have concentrated on the leader’s competencies and capabilities, and perhaps more importantly, the complex, reciprocal, interpersonal relationship that develops between leader and follower within the organizational context. Additionally, leadership development is implicit to becoming and improving as a leader. Given large organizations’ societal responsibilities and political and economic impact, there is an increasing emphasis on leaders’ social, ethical, and moral responsibilities.

Finally, although there are examples of heroic, larger-than-life leaders, most organizations survive and thrive due to the commitment, capabilities, and compassion of everyday people: individuals who have a clear vision of the future, set direction, and obtain results; who consciously and positively motivate, influence, and develop others; who build long-lasting relationships and establish collaborative networks; whose ethical behavior and value systems result in doing things right and doing the right things; and who integrate intellect, empathy, and action. These traits have been, and will continue to be, the essence of organizational leadership.

Acknowledgements

Admittedly, this bibliographic essay was more of an undertaking than initially imagined and could not have been accomplished without the love, patience, and support of my wife, Sharon. A number of valued professional colleagues, and several of the authors whose works are cited, provided important insights, perspectives, and recommendations, and their counsel also is sincerely appreciated. Finally, I would like to extend my sincere thanks to Francine Graf, my Choice editor, for her professional guidance and support.

Organizational Leadership: Classic & Contemporary Perspectives
Works Cited

Argyris, Chris. Integrating the Individual and the Organization. Wiley, 1964 (CH, Jun’64).

Badaracco, Joseph L. Leading Quietly: An Unorthodox Guide to Doing the Right Thing.
Harvard Business School Press, 2002 (CH, Jul’02).
Barnard, Chester Irving. The Functions of the Executive. Harvard, 1938.
Bass, Bernard M. Bass & Stogdill’s Handbook of Leadership: Theory, Research, and

Managerial Applications. 3rd ed. Free Press, 1990.
Beatty, Jack. The World According to Peter Drucker. Free Press, 1998.
Bennis, Warren. On Becoming a Leader. Addison-Wesley, 1989.
____. The Unconscious Conspiracy: Why Leaders Can’t Lead. AMACOM, 1976.
____. Why Leaders Can’t Lead. The Unconscious Conspiracy Continues. Jossey-Bass, 1989

(CH, Nov’89).

Bennis, Warren, and Burt Nanus. Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge. Harper & Row,
1985.
Bennis, Warren G., and Robert J. Thomas. Geeks & Geezers: How Era, Values, and Defining

Moments Shape Leaders. Harvard Business School Press, 2002 (CH, Feb’03).

Blake, Robert Rogers, and Jane Srygley Mouton. The Managerial Grid: Key Orientations for
Achieving Production through People. Gulf Publishing, 1964 (CH, Dec’64).
Bolman, Lee G., and Terrence E. Deal. Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and

Leadership. 2nd ed. Jossey-Bass, 1997 (1st ed. reviewed CH, Sep’91).

Boyatzis, Richard E. The Competent Manager: A Model for Effective Performance. Wiley,
1982.
Buckingham, Marcus, and Curt Coffman. First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest

Managers Do Differently. Simon & Schuster, 1999.
Burns, James MacGregor. Leadership. Harper & Row, 1978.

Business Leadership: A Jossey-Bass Reader, introd. by James M. Kouzes. Jossey-Bass, 2003.

Chandler, Alfred Dupont, Jr. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American
Business. Belknap, 1977.
Collins, James C., and Jerry I. Porras. Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies.

Harper Business, 1994.

Collins, Jim. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap--and Others Don’t. Harper Business, 2001 (CH, Mar’02). Crainer, Stuart. The Management Century: A Critical Review of 20th Century Thought and

Practice. Jossey-Bass, 2000 (CH, Nov’00).
Deming, W. Edwards. Out of the Crisis. MIT, Center for Advanced Engineering Study, 1986.
Drucker, Peter F. The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society. Harper &

Row, 1969 (CH, Nov’69).
____. Concept of the Corporation. John Day, 1946.
____. The Effective Executive. Harper & Row, 1967 (CH, Jul’67).
____. Management Challenges for the 21st Century. Harper Business, 1999 (CH, Feb’00).
____. Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices. Harper & Row, 1974.
____. Managing for Results: Economic Tasks and Risk-Taking Decisions. Harper & Row, 1964

(CH, Oct’64).
____. The Practice of Management. Harper, 1954.
Encyclopedia of Leadership, ed. by George R. Goethals, Georgia Jones Sorenson, and James

MacGregor Burns. 4v. Sage Publications, CA, 2004.

Fayol, Henri. General and Industrial Management, tr. by Constance Storrs. London: Pitman,
1949 (orig. French edition, 1916).
Fiedler, Fred E. A Theory of Leadership Effectiveness. McGraw-Hill, 1967.
Follett, Mary Parker. Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett,

ed. by Elliot M. Fox and L. Urwick. 1st ed. Harper, 1941; 2nd ed. Hippocrene Books, 1982.

Ford, Henry. My Life and Work, by Henry Ford with Samuel Crowther. Heinemann, 1923. Fulmer, Robert M., and Marshall Goldsmith. The Leadership Investment: How the World’s Best

Organizations Gain Strategic Advantage through Leadership Development. AMACOM, 2001
(CH, Mar’01).
The Future of Leadership: Today’s Top Leadership Thinkers Speak to Tomorrow’s Leaders, ed.

by Warren G. Bennis, Gretchen M. Spreitzer, and Thomas G. Cummings. Jossey-Bass, 2001

(CH, Oct’01).
Gabarro, John J. The Dynamics of Taking Charge. Harvard Business School Press, 1987
(Nov’87).

Gardner, John W. On Leadership. Free Press, 1990 (CH, Jul’90).
Gellerman, Saul W. Motivation and Productivity. AMACOM, 1963.
Ghoshal, Sumantra, and Christopher A. Bartlett The Individualized Corporation: A

Fundamentally New Approach to Management. Harper Business, 1997 (CH, Apr’98).

Gilbreth, Frank B. Motion Study: A Method for Increasing the Efficiency of the Workman,
introd. by Robert Thurston Kent. Van Nostrand, 1911.
Goleman, Daniel. Working with Emotional Intelligence. Bantam Books, 1998.
____. Emotional Intelligence. Bantum Books, 1995.
Goleman, Daniel, Richard E. Boyatzis, and Annie McKee. Primal Leadership: Realizing the

Power of Emotional Intelligence. Harvard Business School Press, 2002 (CH, Sep’02).

Greenleaf, Robert K. Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness. Paulist Press, 1977. Hammer, Michael, and James Champy. Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for

Business Revolution. Harper Business, 1993.

Hersey, Paul, and Kenneth H. Blanchard. Management of Organizational Behavior: Utilizing
Human Resources. Prentice Hall, 1969.
Herzberg, Frederick, Bernard Mausner, and Barbara Bloch Snyderman. The Motivation to Work.

2nd ed. Wiley, 1959.

Hill, Linda A. Becoming a Manager: How New Managers Master the Challenges of Leadership.

2nd ed. Harvard Business School, 2003.
Kanter, Rosabeth Moss. The Change Masters: Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the
American Corporation. Simon & Schuster, 1983 (CH, Feb’84).

____. Evolve! Succeeding in the Digital Culture of Tomorrow. Harvard Business School Press,

2001.
Katz, Daniel, Nathan Maccoby, and Nancy C. Morse. Productivity, Supervision and Morale in
an Office Situation. Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, 1950.

Khurana, Rakesh. Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic

CEOs. Princeton, 2002 (CH, Feb’03).
Kotter, John P. A Force for Change: How Leadership Differs from Management. Free Press,
1990.

____. The General Managers. Free Press, 1982 (CH, Nov’82).
____. The Leadership Factor. Free Press, 1988 (CH, May’88).
Kouzes, James M., and Barry Z. Posner. Credibility: How Leaders Gain and Lose It, Why

People Demand It. Jossey-Bass, 1993.
____. The Leadership Challenge. 1st ed., 1987; 3rd ed. Jossey-Bass, 2002 (CH, Jan’03).
Leader Behavior: Its Description and Measurement, ed. by Ralph Melvin Stogdill and Alvin E.

Coons. Bureau of Business Research, College of Commerce Administration, Ohio State, 1957.
The Leader of the Future: New Visions, Strategies, and Practices for the Next Era, ed. by

Frances Hesselbein, Marshall Goldsmith, and Richard Beckhard. Jossey-Bass, 1996 (CH,
Oct’96).
The Leader’s Companion: Insights on Leadership through the Ages, ed. by J. Thomas Wren.

Free Press, 1995.

Leadership: Classical, Contemporary, and Critical Approaches, ed. by Keith Grint. Oxford,
1997.
Leadership: Understanding the Dynamics of Power and Influence in Organizations, ed. by

Robert P. Vecchio. Notre Dame, 1997.

Leadership Resources: A Guide to Training and Development Tools, ed. by Mary K. Schwartz and Kinsey G. Gimbel. 8th ed. Center for Creative Leadership, 2000.

Leading Organizations: Perspectives for a New Era, ed. by Gill Robinson Hickman. Sage Publications, CA 1998 (CH, May’99).

Likert, Rensis. New Patterns of Management. McGraw-Hill, 1961.

Linkage Inc.’s Best Practices in Leadership Development Handbook: Case Studies, Instruments, Training, ed. by David J. Giber, Louis Carter, and Marshall Goldsmith. Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer, 2000.

Litwin, George H., and Robert A. Stringer, Jr. Motivation and Organizational Climate.
Division of Research, Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard, 1968 (CH, Jun’69).

Livers, Ancella B., and Keith A. Caver. Leading in Black and White: Working across the Racial Divide in Corporate America. Jossey-Bass, 2003.

The Many Facets of Leadership, by Marshall Goldsmith et al. Financial Times/Prentice Hall, 2003.

Maslow, Abraham H. Motivation and Personality. Harper, 1954.

Mayo, Elton. The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization. Macmillan, 1933.

McCall, Morgan W. High Flyers: Developing the Next Generation of Leaders. Harvard
Business School Press, 1998.

McCall, Morgan W., Michael M. Lombardo, and Ann M. Morrison. The Lessons of Experience:
How Successful Executives Develop on the Job. Lexington Books, 1988.

McClelland, David C., and Robert S. Steele, comp. Human Motivation: A Book of Readings.
General Learning Press, 1973.

McGregor, Douglas. The Human Side of Enterprise. McGraw-Hill, 1960.

Mintzberg, Henry. The Nature of Managerial Work. Harper & Row, 1973 (CH, Apr’74).

Nanus, Burt. Visionary Leadership. Creating a Compelling Sense of Direction for Your
Organization. 1st. ed. Jossey-Bass, 1992.
Neff, Thomas J., and James M. Citrin. Lessons from the Top: The Search for America’s Best
Business Leaders, by Thomas J. Neff and James M. Citrin with Paul B. Brown.
Currency/Doubleday, 1999.

Northhouse, Peter G. Leadership: Theory and Practice. 2nd ed. Sage Publications, CA, 2000.

Ouchi, William G. Theory Z: How American Businesses Can Meet the Japanese Challenge.
Addison-Wesley, 1981.
Pascale, Richard Tanner, and Anthony G. Athos. The Art of Japanese Management:

Applications for American Executives. Simon & Schuster, 1981.

Peters, Thomas J., and Robert H. Waterman. In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s
Best-Run Companies. Harper & Row, 1982 (CH, May’83).
Petzinger, Thomas Jr. The New Pioneers: The Men and Women Who Are Transforming the

Workplace and Marketplace. Simon & Schuster, 1999 (CH, Jun’00).
Reddin, William J. Managerial Effectiveness. McGraw-Hill, 1970.
Ruderman, Marian N., and Patricia J. Ohlott Standing at the Crossroads: Next Steps for High-

Achieving Women. Jossey-Bass, 2002.

Schein, Edgar H. Organizational Culture and Leadership. 1st ed. Jossey-Bass, 1985; 2nd ed.,
Jossey-Bass, 1992 (CH, Nov’85).
Senge, Peter M. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization.

Doubleday/Currency, 1990.

Simon, Herbert Alexander. Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making Processes in
Administrative Organization. Macmillan, 1947.
Sloan, Alfred P. My Years with General Motors, ed. by John McDonald with Catharine Stevens.

Doubleday, 1963.
Taylor, Frederick Winslow. The Principles of Scientific Management. Harper, 1911.
Tichy, Noel M., and Mary Anne Devanna. The Transformational Leader. Wiley, 1986.
Toffler, Alvin. The Third Wave. W. Morrow, 1980.
Ulrich, Dave, Jack Zenger, and Norm Smallwood. Results-Based Leadership. Harvard

Business, 1999 (CH, Nov’99).
Useem, Michael. The Leadership Moment: Nine True Stories of Triumph and Disaster and Their
Lessons for Us All. Times Business, 1998.

Vicere, Albert A., and Robert M. Fulmer. Leadership by Design. Harvard Business School, 1998.

Vroom, Victor Harold. Work and Motivation. Wiley, 1964 (CH, May’65).
Weber, Max. The Theory of Social and Economic Organizatio, ed. and introd. by Talcott
Parsons; tr. by A.M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons. Free Press, 1947 (German edition, 1925).

Weisbord, Marvin Ross. Productive Workplaces: Organizing and Managing for Dignity,

Meaning, and Community. Jossey-Bass, 1987.
Whyte, William Foote [et al]. Money and Motivation: An Analysis of Incentives in Industry.
Harper, 1955.

Whyte, William Hollingsworth. The Organization Man. Simon & Schuster, 1956.
Wilson, Sloan. The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit. Cassell, 1956.
Wren, Daniel A., and Ronald G. Greenwood. Management Innovators: The People and Ideas

That Have Shaped Modern Business. Oxford, 1998 (CH, Oct‘98).
Yukl, Gary A. Leadership in Organizations. Prentice-Hall, 1981 (CH, Oct’81).
Zaleznik, Abraham, C.R. Christensen, and F.J. Roethlisberger with George C. Homans. The

Motivation, Productivity, and Satisfaction of Workers: A Prediction Study. Harvard, Division of

Research, Graduate School of Business Administration, 1958.
Zenger, John H., and Joe Folkman. The Extraordinary Leader: Turning Good Managers into
Great Leaders. McGraw Hill, 2002.