ABSTRACT
The leadership literature, although vast, generally agrees with the common sense assumption shared by Brown’s antagonists and protagonists and rarely admits the existence of the darker, or coercive, tools available for leaders and managers to get things done. This is odd, because, as common sense suggests elsewhere, carrots work well to motivate and persuade, but there is a reason the proverb adds sticks. It also stands in stark contrast to the literature on manage - – consider, for example, Etzioni’s (1965: 651) concept of coercive control:
[t]he use of a gun, a whip, or a lock is physical in the sense that it affects the body; the threat to use physical means is viewed as physical because the effect on the subject is similar to that of the actual use of such means.
