ABSTRACT
One of the most common definitions of leadership is the ability to influence others. This chapter examines leadership as power and shared leadership. Attribution theories of leadership pay a lot of attention to the social construction of leadership. The chapter explores leadership based on world cultures, diversity leadership, and leadership and gender. It also explores complexity, strategic, and social change leadership, which emphasize fundamentally different outlooks on the environment. Shared leadership is based on the normative assumptions that various types of distributed leadership exist and are useful, and that a major role of traditional or vertical leadership is to enhance the capability and motivation to engage in distributed leadership. The strength of the world culture approach is that it recognizes real differences and seeks to explain them in as neutral, unbiased, and nonjudgmental a fashion as possible.
