ABSTRACT
As mentioned in Chapters One and Two, steering can denote a leadership’s attempts to make collective decisions and to influence behaviour through a set or system of formal steering and control instruments.According to an instrumental and formal definition, leadership means to plan, decide, coordinate and control according to a set of formal goals and a range of operations leaders want to realize. In public organizations, this means that the people, through democratic elections, give political and administrative leaders a mandate to steer according to a set of formal statutes, laws, rules and forms of organization.The Swedish political scientist Lennart Lundquist states that leadership has not been a central issue in political science and that there has been little linkage between research on democracy and studies of leadership.We
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literature of management, although the more cultural perception seems to dominate. A cultural way of defining leadership is to say, as Philip Selznick does, that it is akin to ‘statesmanship’.This presupposes leeway or discretion within a formal framework for various institutionally based and informal processes to play out. In this view, leading is associated with interpersonal relations and processes – how people are treated within formal systems. Based upon the distinction between steering and leadership presented above, one could say that modern developments in private and public organizations have brought about a certain shift in emphasis, from steering to leadership, from steering of to steering in. In other words, hierarchically based, formal leadership is being rejected in favour of decentralized leadership with a certain degree of freedom and stronger participation from organizational members.
