Leadership Theory: Is it a Dead Science  

David Boje

December, 2000

Work in progress - more to come.

My hypothesis is that leadership theory has expelled the leaders, and created a leadership science that is frozen in non-human reality and synthetic abstractions. Leadership theory is a dead science because it has killed off the leaders. People make history. Leadership theory is not about people anymore; it is not about living within a whole human, animal, and plant universe, with history and social being.  It is now a leadership science that can no longer comprehend leaders changing the living world. It is a leadership science without practical knowledge that has become empty abstractions, reifications, and in the end not practical. Leadership theory ends up being a fantasy, a fetishizing reification, an abstraction, and a romantic fiction.  Theory X, Y, Z, situation, charismatic, transformational, and servant leader theories have become clever abstractions. They are not about people struggling with existence while changing society.

Bureaucratic and post-bureaucratic organization becomes a person, applying democracy or social engineering (another person) and what gets lost is the existence of a person. Leadership theory magically transforms people into an object with dead traits, characters, roles, and variables.  Leaders in leader theory are constituted objects totalized by the situation of collective objects in the relentless move of market and social forces (more objects). Let us return to the concrete man of leadership, not the so-called “great man” that leadership theory sought to kill off, but real people with material existence from the richest to the poorest, from those who change their communities to those who change the world.

Finally, leadership theory in its intoxication with the statistical mean has turned leaders into statistical fetish (Sartre, 1963: 161). A person with one set of scores is a theory X leader, or another statistical mean is a theory Y or Z leader. These tests are an absurdity.  These empirical tests mean very little to the historicity of the individual leader who makes history. What matters is the relationship of men and women among relationships with other people and institutions that constitute our society.

 

References

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1963). Search for a Method. Translated from the French by Hazel E. Barnes. NY: Vintage Books (A Division of Random House).