ABSTRACT
There are few, if any, hotter topics in management, business and organization theory at the present time than ‘leadership’. I have been struck over the past few months and years when visiting scores of corporate training centres and hotel ‘conference suites’ by the sheer number of workshops being held on this subject. Virtually every sector and all levels of staff appear to be represented and engaged. Everyone, it seems, is being invited to join in. ‘Are you here for the Leadership Workshop?’ receptionists would cheerily and routinely enquire. Leadership in contemporary organizational life has become a pervasive phenomenon. The climate in relation to it certainly seems to have changed significantly when compared with the traditional mode of approach used, for example, by US navy captains with respect to relations with their crews. Standard form, it is reported, was for captains to address their men as ‘you damned rascals’ (Leiner 2001). Nowadays, public and private sector organizations alike are caught up in a frenzy of activity as they seek to demonstrate that they are taking responsible steps to populate the ‘leadership pool’ with a set of competences far wider than the navy’s formerly no-nonsense approach.
