ABSTRACT
Can leadership be taught? Can leadership be learned? For many years the answer to both questions was presumed to be yes. In countless business school classrooms and executive development seminars, ‘experts’ delivered lectures and presented examples that were supposed to ‘teach’ learners about the 1940s trait theories of leadership, the 1950s focus on tasks versus relationships. the 1960s identification of contingencies, the 1970s insights about leader-follower interactions, and the 1980s celebration of transformation and vision (Ferris 1998). This teaching paradigm is based on an instructor-centred approach, where an expert draws from an existing body of information to select some predetermined content and transmit it to passive students, whose ‘learning’ of this material is conceptualized in terms of memorization, abstract understanding and behavioural replication. The intellectual roots of this teaching paradigm can be traced back to positivism (an expert transmitting knowledge to a novice) and behaviourism (introduction of new behavioural patterns that are repeated until they become automatic), reflecting a ‘banking’ model of education, where information is deposited by the teacher into the learner, where it is accumulated (Freire 1970).
