Conceptions of Leadership

In the spring of 1999, two of this book’s editors, Kramer and I, met for lunch at the Sheraton Hotel in Chicago. Kramer was on the faculty of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and I was on the faculty of the Kellogg School at Northwestern University. One of the topics that we talked about during lunch was the shift in emphasis in both business schools away from cooperation, trust, communication, coordination, and the like, to the related but distinct topic of leadership. Kramer and I were social psychologists and knew that the topic of leadership had been an important theme in some of the earliest research on group processes. However, as social psychology experienced an infatuation with the “cognitive” revolution in psychology, the topic of leadership shrank into obscurity. By the turn of the millennium, though, there were some new ways of thinking about leadership that had not been introduced to the business school environment. Why not, we thought, have a conference and invite some of social psychology’s most creative innovators to a conference to discuss these new approaches to leadership and then publish a book based on the talks? The conference was held in August of 2000 at the Kellogg School of Management, and the book based on this conference, The Psychology of Leadership, was published in 2005. Two of the creative innovators who were invited to the conference and who wrote chapters for the book are the other two editors of the current book, Allison and Goethals.

Social identities matter in the leadership process. Renowned American politician Shirley Chisholm observed this first hand. She notes, “I was the first American citizen to be elected to Congress in spite of the double drawbacks of being female and having skin darkened by melanin. When you put it that way, it sounds like a foolish reason for fame. In a just and free society it would be foolish. That I am a national figure because I was the first person in 192 years to be at once a congressman, black and a woman proves, I think, that our society is not yet either just or free.” Members of society’s nondominant social groups, such as women and minorities, experience greater difficulty in reaching elite leadership positions than dominant group members (Eagly & Carli, 2007). Taking a quick glimpse across the top influence wielding bodies in the United States we can see a disproportionate prevalence of white males in top leadership positions. For example, although white males account for only 34 percent of the electorate (US Census, 2012), 67 percent of the seats are occupied by white men in the 2013 US congress. However, women, who account for 52 percent of the electorate (US Census, 2012), hold only 18.3 percent of the congressional seats and women of color hold a mere 4.5 percent (Center for American Women and Politics, 2013). The numbers are not much different in the top echelons of the business world. For example, leadership on the boards of the Fortune 500 companies is dominated by white men; white men hold 95.5 percent of board chair positions with minority men (3.9%), white women (2.0%), and minority women (.6%) significantly underrepresented in these positions (Alliance for Board Diversity, 2011).