ABSTRACT
In what is arguably the most comprehensive published review of the leadership literature, Bass (1990) noted that leadership "is one of the world's oldest preoccupations" with its origins in history that, from a early time, "has been the study of leaders-what they did and why they did it" (p. 3). From the vantage point of radical behaviorism and the related science called behavior analysis (Baum, 1994), what leaders do is no more nor less than what any other person does. Like every other normal person, leaders engage in a lifelong stream of interactions, or exchanges, that typically occur within an apparently seamless sequence of environmental stimuli comprising physical and social environments. They react to some stimuli with respondent behavior and they take action upon others via operant behavior, including verbal operant behavior (Chapter 2, this volume). This stream constitutes a life process with demarcation of its progress readily identified by a beginning and an end, birth and death. Behavior scientists seek to partition this stream with the aim of finding answers to questions such as: "Why do people do what they do within their life streams, and if they are likely to do something again, under what conditions and when will this happen?" Answers to questions of this sort suggest why leader behavior attracts so much attention and why the life stream must be partitioned to understand how events that occur within it evoke episodes of leader behavior and maintain frequencies of these episodes.
