Introduction

Leadership is an elusive concept. It is sometimes used in an institutional sense—for example, “House leadership”—but more often it is used in a personal sense to describe the activities of an individual in some designated position of power—for example, “the leadership of Senator Proxmire.” Yet this does not fully capture what leadership really is: a mutual influence process among leaders and followers. In this process, each participant harbors his or her own complex motives and constructions of reality, and each participant also operates as part of a collective. The result is a complicated and ever-shifting environment in which people work in concert, and sometimes against each other, in an effort to achieve desired goals.