ABSTRACT
The mid-to late 1970s was a fecund period for leadership studies during which a number of seminal works challenged prevailing assumptions in the field. One such publication, deemed a leadership classic and the subject of a recent symposium in the Leadership Quarterly, was Kerr and Jermier’s highly influential substitutes for leadership article. Kerr and Jermier (1978) proposed a matrix comprising 24 sets of contingent circumstances in which the direct or indirect leadership of an individual might comprise just one of a range of candidate explanations invoked to account for event outcomes and performance in organizations. Following some empirical work of their own Kerr and Jermier concluded that leadership counted on less than half of the posited occasions. Instead, the explanation for what transpired mostly lay with a range of substitute factors: characteristics inherent in the task, the subordinate and the organization. Probably the most significant implication of this substitutes finding is that in a number of instances the scope for the effective exercise of leadership is very likely to be minimal or neutralized by countervailing forces.1
