ABSTRACT

It is of little wonder then that Churchill – and leaders of similar ilk such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. – should have been the

subject of so many research inquiries into leadership. If we can identify the distinguishing characteristics which set leaders of this stature apart, it was reasoned, then we can look for these factors when selecting future leaders. These endeavours were not nearly so straightforward in practice, however. On the contrary, the quest to reach an understanding of leadership – on its nature and essence, its style and meaning, its exercise and practice – has come to resemble the pursuit of the Holy Grail. The source of the difficulty, as Warren Bennis (cited in Syrett and Hogg, 1992) puts it, lies in the fact that ‘leadership is an endless subject and endlessly interesting because you can never get your conceptual arms fully around it . . . I always feel like a lepidopterist chasing a butterfly.’ And as is often the case in such pursuits, opinion on the subject has moved full circle. Thus where leadership was once perceived as the preserve of the few who were born to the role it is now widely regarded as an attribute that can be acquired – or learned – and therefore open to all (Bolden et al., 2008).