Psychology of Leadership

In this book, some of the world's leading scholars come together to describe their thinking and research on the topic of the psychology of leadership. Most of the chapters were originally presented as papers at a research conference held in 2001 at the Kellogg School of Management of Northwestern University. The contributions span traditional social psychological areas, as well as organizational theory; examining leadership as a psychological process and as afforded by organizational constraints and opportunities. The editors' goal was not to focus the chapters on a single approach to the study and conceptualization of leadership but rather to display the diversity of issues that surround the topic. Leadership scholars have identified a host of approaches to the study of leadership. What are the personal characteristics of leaders? What is the nature of the relation between leaders and followers? Why do we perceive some people to be better leaders than others? What are the circumstances that evoke leadership qualities in people? Can leadership be taught? And so on. The contributions to this book examine these important questions and fall into three categories: conceptions of leadership, factors that influence the effectiveness of leadership, and the consequences and effects of leadership on the leader. All in all, the chapters of this volume display part of a broad spectrum of novel and important approaches to the study of the psychology of leadership. We hope that they are equally useful to those who are or would be leaders and to those who study the topic. As recent events have served to remind us, it is too important a topic to be ignored by psychologists.

Presenting a follower-centered perspective on leadership, this book focuses on followers as the direct determinant of leadership effects because it is generally through follower reactions and behaviors that leadership attempts succeed or fail. Therefore, leadership the needs to be articulated with a theory of how followers create meaning from leadership acts and how this meaning helps followers self-regulate in specific contexts. In this book, an attempt is made to develop such a theory, maintaining that the central construct in this process is the self-identity of followers. Due to its broad theoretical focus, this book is relevant to a number of audiences.

Many of the fundamental principles of psychology form the basis for management training. Using Psychology in Management Training aims to give trainers and student trainers a grounding in the ideas and research findings which are most relevant to their work.

Three major areas are explored from a management training perspective and illustrated with case studies:
-- The individual psychological processes of learning, personality and motivation which are at the heart of most management training courses
-- The social psychological processes of group dynamics, leadership and stress which all arise from the interaction of people at work
-- The psychology of the actual training experience including the crucial training skill of communication and what is needed to meet organisational training needs.

Using Psychology in Management Training has a clear and accessible format with a comprehensive glossary of unfamiliar terms and suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter.

Valenty, Feldman, and their contributors challenge the current state of political leadership studies by offering a variety of analytical methods from scholars around the world. While focused on American political leaders, the different approaches and vantage points offer fresh insights of the roles of cultural and political context, including the historical circumstance, environmental factors, and socialization agents that affect and shape American political leadership and performance.

Leadership is motivation and motivation is leadership, say the authors of this important and unique study. The two elements are inseparable, but until now no one has actually conceptualized motivation in a useful way to demonstrate and analyze the connection between it and leadership. The key for leaders is dealing with the emotions that underlie and activate motivation. Maddock and Fulton provide a highly successful, proven, and replicable approach not only to motivate people, but also to train them to lead others. The authors develop an 11 level structure of human motivation that defines and describes motivation in simple, graphic, all-inclusive language. They then show how leaders can use this motivational hierarchy to solve complex problems in the workplace.

This new edition of Contemporary Issues in Leadership speaks directly to the central points of change: leadership vs. management; leadership and followership; and especially, the diversity of leadership styles and pathways.

This illuminating study critiques the concept of leadership as understood in the last 75 years and looks to the twenty-first century for a reconstructed understanding of leadership in the postindustrial era. More similarities in past decades were found than had been thought; the thread throughout Rost's book is that leadership was conceived of as "good management." He develops a new definition and paradigm for leadership in this volume that distinguishes leadership from management in fundamental ways. The ethics of leadership from a postindustrial perspective completes the paradigm. The book concludes with suggestions that can be immediately utilized in helping to transform our understanding of leadership.