ABSTRACT
There are many dierent views and denitions of leadership (Barker 1997; Palmer and Hardy 2000). Often there is no denition or even hint of what is meant by leadership – the signier appears to indicate what CEOs, other senior or even low-level managers (loosely referred to as ‘leaders’) do. This indicates that the subject matter – if we can see leadership as a specic phenomena or theme for study and not a signier covering up a wide set of dierent phenomena falsely unied by the label – is elusive, complex and vague. This is broadly acknowledged, but hardly taken seriously, by most of the researchers in the area(s), typically addressing leadership as if it were a thing. It is too often assumed that instruments for measurement – typically a questionnaire, sometimes an interview – can cut through ambiguity and capture leadership. Research on leadership has been strongly dominated by positivistic/neo-positivistic assumptions, together with an emphasis on rules and procedures for the securing of objectivity in research practice and results (Antonakis et al. 2004b; Mumford et al. 2009; Kroeck et al. 2004). The research ideal is that, through careful measurement and research programs, theories will be veried and reliable knowledge established. The belief is in accumulation. Good new studies add positively to earlier ones. Thousands of studies have been conducted on leadership. But how well do these manage to throw light on the subject matter?
