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INTERNATIONAL LEADERSHIP ASSOCIATION'S FOLLOWERSHIP COMMUNITY OF LEARNING where those with curiosity about followership and leader-follower relations can explore these subjects in whatever depth they choose through study groups, relevant news and events, research, shared projects and resource links.

 

Registered users can enter information directly and make collaborative decisions about what this site contains and how it functions. Anyone may browse but those who wish to participate by posting and editing information can sign up for a free, private account with a password. Please note that membership in the International Leadership Association (ILA) is encouraged, but not required, to participate in our learning community. Feel free to contact one of the administrators, Ira Chaleff or Elisabeth Higgins Null to discuss the wiki or to get help in participating. We'd love to receive a line or two about who you are, what you do professionally or academically, and the nature of your interest in followership and leader-follower relations.

 

Learn more about ILA Join ILA.

 

 



TECHNICAL NEWS AND SUGGESTIONS

 

Those of you have have used this wiki before may be suprised at some of the changes in the sidebar. Instead of an outline of various pages, those pages (as well as any you might create) are now stored in  folders.  In some browsers, clicking on a folder will not bring you directly to its content but to an area titled "All Pages." Just click the folder you want again, as it appears on the left-hand side, and you will be able to access whatever pages are stored inside.

 

Press "Edit" (above) to post on this page. You may wish to consult GUIDELINES  for basic information or Elisabeth for further assistance.

 

Recently (2009), we have posted several new folders in the sidebar. One of them deals with works in progress: "Resources: Working Papers" with faculty, graduate, and undergraduate sub-categories. This is a good place to post links  and abstracts to work ready for feedback or  research assistance. A page for responses and suggestions has been attached to each sub-category though each page template also allows space for comments. A second folder is "Leader Perspectives on Followers."  This is a good place to post articles that explore the ways leaders influence followers or that look at leader/follower relations primarily from a leadership perspective. We make this classification while acknowledging that, within our learning community, leader-follower relations are usually regarded as mutually influential.

 

 

RECENT POSTINGS

 

Author Jeanne Gulbranson’s book, Be the Horse or the Jockey: 110 Tips and Techniques for Followers…and Leaders (BookSurge) is an award-winning Finalist in the Career category of the 2009 Next Generation Indie Book Awards®.

 

 

 

The 2009 Next Generation Indie Book Awards® was established to recognize and honor the most exceptional independently published books.  The awards are presented by Independent Book Publishing Professionals Group (IBPPG), an organization that promotes professional standards in independent book publishing.  Members of IBPPG include small and university presses, self-published authors, agents, designers, distributors, printers, and marketing professionals.

 

Be the Horse or the Jockey addresses the often overlooked role of followers and provides both the rationale and inspiration to achieve greatness through the development and refinement of professional followership skills. Using the metaphor of a professional horse race, Gulbranson provides an innovative four-step Followership Process that serves as the framework for the 110 tips and techniques that take the uncertainty out of the next steps for both followers and leaders. Be the Horse or the Jockey has received the attention and endorsement of professionals in the field of leadership and followership development including Ira Chaleff, who has written that “…Gulbranson has the eye of an artist. What others see and pass by, she stops and plumbs for meaning until the light bulb flashes and she has extracted new insight to use in her life and to share in entertaining ways with her readers."

 

 

From: Josh Tarr, International Leadership Association, Coordinator of Conferences and Member Communities

After a quick look at the submissions for the 2009 ILA Conference in Prague, I was struck by the multiple submissions related to the topic of "followership".  I am posting here to thank those of you who submitted proposals, and those of you who continue to make wonderful additions to this Wiki.  The International Leadership Association is proud to support your efforts and advances.  Please continue your great work!

 

 

  

 

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Webinar on September 9, 2009, 9:00 - 10:00 AM EDT

Stefan Sveningsson: "Varieties of Consumption of Leadership – Followership in Practice"

More information:  ILA@ila-net.org or 1.301.405.521 FREE to ILA members! $20 for Non-ILA Members Reservations

Stefan Sveningsson, Associate Professor of Business Administration at the School of Economics and Management, Lund University, Sweden,. tries to investigate how people position themselves as followers in terms of consumption of leadership. This means looking into the varieties of consumption and consumers, some are more active consumers looking for any possibility to consume while other are more restrained and cautious about their consumption. Based on some preliminary findings in a research project investigating followers’ interpretations of the interaction between the follower and the leader the aim is to analyze the significance of this for the leadership processes. By drawing on the idea of consumption the ambition is to show how presumed followers partly create, shape and form as well as undermine, resist and neglect leadership processes

 

 

Audio-Visuals, Podcasts, Webinars

 

Ira Chaleff  has been named National leader of the Month for January/February 2009 by  LeaderNetwork.org. In addition to the insights he shares in a printed interview on this website, one can hear a fuller conversation between its director, Brian McCormick, and Ira Chaleff in a podcast. Although Chaleff is being honored as a leader, much of his interview deals with followership issues. There is an additional, more recent interview with Ira on the Doug Noll Show (2/12/09). For a fuller description of the interview segments and more detailed instructions for accessing them, check out the Audio-Visual folder in our sidebar. One part of Doug Noll  interview has Ira reminiscing about  the world events that gave rise his concept of courageous followership.

 

The Audio-Visual folder also has archived windows media file of a Webinar presentation by Barbara Kellerman on "Followership" given Feb 27, 2008 for the International Leadership Association.

 

 

Annotated List of Articles on Followership for Government Workers

 

GovLeaders.org is a site founded in 2002 by Don Jacobson, a career Foreign Service Officer, and is designed for government workers. It recommends key articles on followership for those working in government positions. The recommendations are annotated and are supplemented by more annotated lists, in a sidebar, of books on leader-follower relations of interest to civil servants.

 

 

INTERESTING BLOGS AND FORUMS DISCUSS FOLLOWERSHIP

Simmons, Bret L.  "Partnership"  P.O.B: Positive Organizational Behavior,  August 26, 2009

Explores the rhetoric and strategies needed by both leaders and followers  to transfrom complaints into more effective behavior and positive solutions. Doing so, argues the author, rests on both leaders and followers regarding themselves as partners dedicated to a common purpose.

 

Pitron. John Dr. "Followership is Leadership: The Leadership-Exemplary Followership Exchange Model," Knol (n.d.)

Leadership is not one-dimensional; leadership is system thinking in multiple dimensions. In terms of systems thinking, the inclusion of organizational performers (followers) in the leadership process complements the notion that leaders are only responsible for about 20% of the work that is completed in an organization (Kelley, 1992). There are different styles of followers and mainly the exemplary follower provides for a self-leadership style from within the follower themselves (Kelley, 1992). The exemplary follower style can be enhanced through Leader-Exemplary Follower Exchanges (LEFX). This paper introduces a model for exploring the cycle of Leadership-Exemplary Followership Exchanges.

 

Hanson, Kevin (aka "Groundhog") "Following Well" (07/24/09)

Hanson is an inner-city pastor interested in servant leadership and other followership styles. He has established this blog to exchange ideas and resources about followership and links to several videos from the blog itself. He lists major books on  followership and leader-follower relations.

 

Nowack, Ken, "Leadership Lessons from Ajax the Seeing Eye Dog #6: The Neurobiology of Followership" (07/12/09)

This blog entry discusses the "neuroliology of followership" in lay terms and ruminates on research showing that "wanting to fit in and follow what others do (the 'everybody’s doing it affect') seems to be hardwired." Reasons that might impel this behavor are explored, with an emphasis on followership as compliant behavior.

 

 

Bradley, Elizabeth H., "Paradox and Strategy in Global Health Leadership," Huffington Post ( 06/29/09) discusses the  inaugural conference held by Yale University's new Global Health Leadership Institute (GHLI) on June 15 - 19, 2009.  Most of proceedings are tangential to  leader/follower relations but she includes comments she made along with Yale Professor  David Berg. Bradley herself directs both the Health Management Program and Global Health Initiatives at the Yale School of Public Health. here are some of the pertinent comments:

 

"Lastly, and perhaps most momentously, there was the paradoxical discussion of leadership and followership by Yale Professor David Berg and Elizabeth Bradley, Professor and Director of the Yale Global Health Initiative. Both depicted leadership as a role rather than a quality, and banished the thought of a checklist of "leadership characteristics" that would ensure success. Instead, Berg suggested that exceptional leaders lead where they are able and follow where they are not. Furthermore, he posited that no trait was necessary in the leader if it were present in the relationship between the person in the leadership role and the people in followership roles. In this way, leadership is all about relationships, with cognitive and emotional "give and take" between leaders and followers - no matter how reluctant or dissonant a follower may be."

 

Morris, Bob 'Question #39: What Is Followership?,' "First Friday Book Synopsis," April 20, 2009

In this series, Bob Morris poses a key question and then responds to it with material from one or more of the business books he has reviewed for Amazon and Borders. In this post, Morris specifically mentions Liunda Hopper's essay from The Art of Followership, " “Courageous Followers, Servant-Leaders, and Organizational Transformations" and the "five common barriers to engaging 'disaffected, disgruntled, distrustful employees who appear reticent to make a commitment to and be accountable for work or decisions' she identifies.' "

 

 

Kellerman, Barbara "New Wine in New Bottles: Iran's Lessons on Followership" Washington Post (06/22/09)

Kellerman explores how 21st century leaders are losing power and influence while followers are gaining more in the light of Iran's recent unrest. "[That] story is far larger than this single situation suggests. Underlying Iran's power dynamic is a long-term shift worldwide, one in which leaders of every stripe have less clout than they did before and their followers more. Hard on the heels of the changing culture are the changes in technology. While the one without the other would not have amounted to much, together they are creating a sea change in the human condition."

Nees, Tom "Invisible Leaders" (04/08/09) is a posting on the blog, Leading To Serve that discusses how "some leaders guide from behind the scenes without position or authority" and relates this discussion to the concept of servant leadership and to the often invisible authority of those not in formal positions of power. He mentions Barbara Kellerman's observation that hidden leaderships may often be good followers.

 

Since Be the Horse or the Jockey [see the "Books, Recent" folder in the sidebar] was published,  Jeanne Gulbranson has heard from many colleagues, acquaintances, and people who were trolling the Web and found her site or the book on Amazon.  The topic of followership seems to have  elicited “Why?” questions. and she notes that many people (primarily leaders) are not yet comfortable with the idea that without professional, high-quality followers, nothing much of any value happens.  Because of this, she has started responding to some of  the questions and comments that she has received about followership, leadership and Be the Horse or the Jockey in her  blog.

 

Nees, Tom  "When Followers Refuse to Follow - What Smart Leaders Do Engaging with Bystanders, Participants, Activists and Diehards"  (3/22/09) is a posting in Leading To Serve  that urges leaders to pay attention and learn from engaged followers and does so while discussing Barbara Kellerman's Followership and her classification of follower types.

 

Dolgin, Elie "Follow The Fish Leader," The Scientist.com 

(01/29/09--free sign-in may be needed) summarizes a new study on stickleback fish released in Current Biology (01/29/09). The study, lead by Andrea Manica, University of Cambridge, reveals several personality traits previously thought to be uniquely human and exmines how these play out in leader/follower behavior. According the blog posting, paired leader and follower fish "responded to each other's movements, which led to stronger leaders, more faithful followers, and, ultimately, greater foraging efficiency -- a phenomenon driven by what the authors call 'social feedback.' Manica is quoted as saying, "The behavior you get from the pair is totally different from what you see in individuals, which is the result of this feedback,"  and he surmises that "the fundamental rules that lead to compromise and synchronized activities ought to be there [in humans]." This study is limited to dyads though another study of somewhat larger groups (conducted by Jens Krause at the University of Leeds) is also mentioned.

 

Enos, Warren "Dynamic Followership," California Council of Chapters, Military Officers Association of America (September 30, 2008). In his blog entry, the author asserts that officers are better trained to be leaders than in how to behave as followers and that this has serious consequences for the host organization, which depends on the volunteer activity. He advocates that the membership learn to  behave as  followers and to make the follower role "dynamic, synergistic, and satisfying."

 

Flipskills Consulting of Canada has published a white paper on followership (2008) in .pdf. On its website, it has also compiled a list of readings and links to what it considers some of the best followership resources on the internet. They have recently published the first and second articles of a 3-part series on followership in the journal: Industrial and Commercial Training (see Published Articles for details and a link).

 

Barbara Kellerman, on the faculty of at the Harvard Kennedy School and the author, most recently, of Bad Leadership and Followership, has begun commenting weekly  on followership in a blog, "On Leadership," hosted by the The Washington Post. So far, three blogs have appeared, "Bottom's Up: Why Followers Matter" (01/13/09), "Lessons from Madoff's Minions"  (01/20/2009), and "Hillary Leads -- and Follows -- As She Takes Over at State" (01/27/2009). Future columns will be posted in a folder titled, "Blog Posts: Regular."

 

"Insights About Leaders and Followers from an Evolutionary Perspective" is a short, undated review by Bob Sutton from his blog,  "Work Matters" which reviews the article by M.Van Vugt, R. Hogan,  & R. Kaiser  (2008). "Leadership, followership, and evolution: Some lessons from the past." American Psychologist, 63, 182-196. A full .pdf of this article may be found by clinking on Van Vugt and scrolling down his list of published works.

 

"7 Reasons Leaders Fail" is a blog post by Jeremy Dean that discusses the research appearing in a published article ( (Vugt, Hogan & Kaiser, 2008  "Leadership, followership, and evolution: Some lessons from the past,"  referenced towards the bottom of this page. The blog post's author extracts 7 reasons from the published article showing not only why leaders fail but how unhappy leader/follower relationships are generated.

 

“Drink the Kool-Aid - A Lesson for Followers and Leaders." (11/24/08) and “What Every Leader Needs to Know About Followers (11/17/08) appear in  Tom Nees's blog, Leading To Serve, a component of the "Leading To Serve" learning community he started as a means to advance leadership consulting and coaching in nonprofit and faith-based communities.  "Drink the Kool-Aid" looks at Ira Chaleff's  concept of the courageous follower in the light of a recent PBS documentary on the Jonestown massacre. “What Every Leader Needs to Know About Followers” presents Barbara Kellerman's classification of followers based on their levels of engagement.

 

Followership, Experience and Significance is a blog by Geoffrey J. Grudzinski whose purpose is "to share with its audience the roles that followers can play within any organization, regardless of position, competence, or confidence. Each member of a society has a place within that society and has gifts that can be fitted to the benefit of that polis. We, as individuals within that society, need to learn how to extract these gifts, not only from others, but from ourselves. We find ourselves in a generation where leadership training and development takes a much higher place over followership training and development, when in reality, the leaders have the most training to begin with, helping them get them into the current capacities they carry ... Sure, they need development too, but we all do; we all need to be developed to be better critical thinkers, be more outspoken about this critical thought, and be confident in our positions as to defend them with credibility. This is what can establish a good leader/follower relationship."

 

Ambiguity Advantage, a blog by David John Wilkinson (aka "Plato the Fish") has posted a series on followership. The first entry, "Theoretical theory and practical, pragmatic, practice" (05/14/08) looks at theory and the theoretical from the perspective of "a company owner" interested in staff training.The second entry, "Leaders and followership; the reality" acknowledges that the concept of followership "is starting to make the move from the academic journals and conferences to operational thinking" and that "a number of organisations have seized on the wording and developed their own (often less considered and more manipulative) versions of the term." With that in mind, the author reviews some of the central academic literature. He discusses and compares typologies of followership by Barabara Kellerman (06/24/08), Robert Kelley (06/23/08), Abraham Zaleznik (07/02/08) and Ira Chaleff (07/21/08) and also critiques models of followership (06/20/08). In his discussion of Ira Chaleff's typology, he makes the first public acknowledgement of  "The Followership Exchange," referring to it as "rather useful wiki." Chaleff's response to Wilkinson's discussion, originally posted as a comment, is also posted as a main entry

  (07/22/08)

 

"Are Followers About To Get Their Due?" is an online forum (07/03/08), now closed, authored by James Heskett at Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge. Barbara Kellerman's Followership and the query she addresses, "where good leaders would be without good followers"  serve as the initial talking point. There are 77 comments to Heskett's introductory article and he summarizes their range and breadth.

 

"Are We at the Mercy of Our Emotions When Choosing Our Leaders" is a Conversation Starter [blog] by Annie Mckee, 

Harvard Business Publishing, Sept. 5, 2008.

 

"Follow You Will You Follow Me" is an entry on the blog, Molly.com (April 21, 2008) that discusses the meaning and usage of "follower" among those who use Twitter, the communications tool for quick text messages. As the blog's author, Molly E. Holzschlag, says:"The simple Twitter interface tells us who is “follower” to our Twitters. You can compare this with who you are “following” and a finely tuned interface will tell you who follows you, leaving all of us confused as to whether leading or following bears more persuasion." Alexandra Zoltai posts a comment containing a brief bbliography of articles on followership. Holzschlag is a well-known Web standards advocate, instructor, author, and Group Lead for the Web Standards Project (WaSP). Among her thirty-plus books is the The Zen of CSS Design, co-authored with Dave Shea.

 

"Simplicity at the Other Side of Complexity," a blog byPrasad Kurian, has an entry that discusses the different roles leaders often assume when they are in a position of followership.

 

 

PAPERS, EXHIBITS, AND PUBLISHED ARTICLES
Mawere, Mutumwa "Africa 2009 – Leader-follower relationship – A required conversation," The Zimbabwe Telegraph (07/27/09)
 
Ira Chaleff says that the author of this article uses "many of the language constructs I use, but has woven them wonderfully into the realities of African society.' He is pleased to see "the subject of followership to be entering the dialogue of national and global political discourse."

 

Berg, David, "Resurrecting the Muse: Followership in Organizations," The Psychodynamics of Leadership (eds. Klein , Gabelnick, Herr). Psychosocial Press: 1998

 

In a field that is seeing increasing numbers of rich contributions to its literature, the article "Resurrecting the Muse: Followership in Organizations" by David N. Berg, Ph. D is, in my opinion, the most important single piece of writing on followership I've read since Barbara Kellerman's book "Followership". Dr. Berg approaches the subject from a pyschodynamic perspective which, while not unique in the literature, is certainly rare. It permits him to draw on a fascinating array of cultural examples to help us formulate new understandings of the deficiency of leader-centric models, and to appreciate on deeper levels the nature of the interdependent bonds that exist in true follower-leader relationships.

The formulation of his thinking is also fresh. He pulls his imagery from participants in a series of workshops he has conducted on followership. In response to his probing, the participants offer a colorful range of models of followership the culture has impressed on their psyches. By exploring the commonalities of these models and artfully categorizing them, Dr. Berg offers a peek into our cultural "collective unconscious" on follower-leader relationships. He offers brilliant analysis of the struggle in mature follower-leader relationships and the great opportunities for mutual fulfillment. And he does all this in a  remarkably accessible style delightfully free of  jargon that the very notion of psychodynamics can evoke. We are indebted to him for expanding the richness of the literature in the field--- Ira Chaleff

 

Kuper, Wendelin "Perspectives on Integrating Leadership and Followership," International Journal of leadership Studies, Vol 2, no. 3, 2009
The paper proposes a framework for the integration of leadership and followership. An integral orientation considers that leadership is constitutively linked with followership and vice versa. Facing the diversity of approaches and theories in both fields, a comprehensive conceptualization is presented that is suited to investigating complex, interrelated processes of leading and following. Based on a holonic understanding, integral perspectives cover the interdependent subjective, intersubjective, and objective dimensions of leaders and followers; respectively, leadership and followership within a developmental perspective. Based on an integral orientation, further processual and relational dimensions are discussed by which mutually interwoven leadership/followership can be understood as an emerging event, embedded within an ongoing, interrelated nexus. Finally, the paper outlines some theoretical and methodological implications and perspectives for future research of an integral leadership and followership.

 

Wee, Elijah Xun Ming, "Dynamic Followership," Pointer: Journal of the Singapore Armed Forces, Vol 34, no.3, 2008.

This article illuminates the active and symbiotic relationship between leaders and followers in a post-industrial, knowledge-based environment where "followers very often possesses knowledge and expertise in greater depth compared to the leader." Organizations in this era often operate with a reduced workforce causing followers to perform tasks previously performed by leaders. Although Elijah  Xun Ming Wee is writing for the military he draws analogies to business. Work exists in increasingly complex environments which he describes as Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA). Under such circumstances, "Rigid control mechanisms (e.g. rules of engagement, Standard Operating Procedures) communicated one way from the leader to the follower "may be less useful than they once were, but communication between followers as well as between leader and followers are more important than ever." The author also underscores the importance of leaders making sure that they and  their followers understand and share a common vision.

 

Anders, George, "Management Leaders Turn New Attention To Followers." Theory and Practice, Wall Street Journal. December 24, 2007; Page B3 There is a WSJ forum related to this article that discusses the question: "Who's more crucial to a company's success, top management or lower-level employees.
Baker, Susan D. "Followership: the theoretical foundation of a contemporary construct." Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies,14, no.1:50-60 August, 2007 This article explores the theoretical foundations of followership in the years preceding the seminal work of Robert Kelley in 1988. A version may be accessed free (with brief registration) at the following link: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-33343234_ITM

 

 

Bennis, Warren "Followership,"  National Association of Litho Clubs, 2008

"Perhaps the ultimate irony is that the follower willing to speak out shows precisely the kind of initiative that leadership is made of."

 

Bluedorn, Allen C. and Kimberly S. Jaussi "Leaders, followers, and time," The Leadership Quarterly

Volume 19, Issue 6, December 2008 (free access to ILA members)

 In order to consider leadership from a temporal perspective, we examine extant leadership research that refers to temporal variables in its theorizing and/or empirical testing. We consider rhythmic patterns manifested in leader and follower behavior and employ entrainment, polychronicity, pace/speed, punctuality, and temporal depth as categorization concepts for the analysis. Further, we propose general theoretical statements about temporal dimensions and their prospective roles in relationships and processes related to leadership.

 

Clements, Christine and John B. Washbush, "The Two Faces of Leadership: Considering the Dark Side of Leader-Follower Dynamics,"  Journal of Workplace Learning: Employee Counseling Today, vol. 11, no. 5 (1999)

Leaders are not always benevolent; their intents not always benign.  Followers are not necessarily passive and devoid of responsibility.  History has taught us these lessons enough times - why then is popularmanagement literature so full of inspirational transformational models of leadership?

 

Chaleff, Ira "Bullies' Hidden Danger: End the Spiral of Cruelty Through Intervention of Bystanders,: End the Spiral of Cruelty Through Intervention of Bystanders,"Baltimore Sun. February 14, 2008

 

Cummins, Richard Stories of migrant farm workers at a servant-led orchard, Dissertation, Gonzaga University, 2008

Writings about servant-leadership so far have focused primarily on the leader, and scholars in the field of leadership studies have paid relatively little attention to the potential revolutionary impact that servant-leadership has on followers if fully practiced. To gain a better understanding of followers in a servant-led institution, this study gathered stories from the workers in a servant-led organization and analyzed them through the lens of Greenleaf's "best test" (2002). A chapter section that reviews models of followership is presented here.

 

Gilbert, Jillian and Sergio Matviuk "The Symbiotic Nature of the Leader-Follower relationship and Its Impact on Organizational Effectiveness,"  Academic Leadership: The Online Journal, Vol. 6, #4, 2008

 

 Grillo, Michael "The Social Psychology of Leadership and Followership in Symbolic Politics Theory: An Experimental Approach to Studying Why Individuals Follow Nationalist Elites," Paper presented at the annual

meeting of the ISA's 49th Annual Convention "Bridging Mational Divides," San Francisco, CA. (Mar. 26, 2008) .pdf

 

This paper asks what are the factors that prompt individuals to support the initiatives of chauvinistic nationalist leaders? I argue that both the ethnic conflict and nationalist literatures have not given sufficient attention to the individual level factors that would prompt ordinary people to follow nationalist leaders and eventually engage in violence for the sake of their group. But rather, the majority of the research from both the rationalist and ideational traditions have deduced the factors that drive individual and mass behavior from theoretical assumptions and evidence the centers only on the actions and rhetoric of elites. Thus, while scholars have adequately addressed how elites can mobilize mass populations, they have given little attention as to why elites are able to do to so. To address these empirical and theoretical gaps, I develop an approach that builds upon symbolic politics theory and insights from social psychology. I contend that hostile myths and symbols evoke an array of negative emotions that facilitates more rigid thinking and an openness to taking risks, and that individuals support elites who offer an outlet for these emotions because it fulfills basic psychological needs such as having a positive individual and collective sense self-esteem and a feeling of control over the current situation and the future. I test both my modified symbolic politics approach and its rational choice competitor with a laboratory experiment that utilizes 200 undergraduate subjects.

 

Haslam, S. Alexander and Michael J. Platow "The Link between Leadership and Followership: How Affirming Social Identity Translates Vision into Action," Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 27, No. 11, 1469-1479 (2001)

Two experiments test the hypothesis that support for leaders is enhanced when their decisions affirm a distinct social identity that is shared with followers. In Experiment 1, participants showed less support for a leader who favored ingroup members who were relatively sympathetic to an outgroup position than for one who favored ingroup members who opposed an outgroup position. This finding was replicated in Experiment 2, which also showed that this pattern extended to support for the leader’s novel plans. Although participants indicated that they supported a leader who behaved evenhandedly toward all ingroup members as much as one whose behavior was identity-affirming, they were unwilling to back up the evenhanded leader with written comments and arguments. These data suggest that leaders’ capacity to engender active followership is contingent on their ability to promote collective interests associated with a shared ingroup identity.

 

Hrivnak, George A and Tjai M. Nielsen "Leader-Follower Extraversion Congruence and Follower Perceptions of Transformational Leadership: A Test Using Response Surface Modeling ," George Washington University August 1, 2008 (working paper available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1294008)

Using polynomial regression and response surface modeling in a lagged field study, we examine relationships among leader and follower extraversion fit and follower ratings of transformational leadership.  This paper builds on prior research investigating the influence that leader and follower personality factors have on follower perceptions of leadership.

Data from a sample of 117 Naval Midshipmen dyads suggest that leader-follower extraversion congruence at Time 1 was positively related to higher follower ratings of transformational leadership at Time 2. The implications of these findings are discussed with respect to perceptions and attributions of leadership, the potential role that extraversion congruence may play in the development of leader-follower relationships, and the role of personality across different fit contexts.

 

Kellerman, Barbara "What Every Leader Needs to Know About Followers," Harvard Business Review. December I, 2007

Mäkelä, Liisa

 

, "Working women positioning themselves in the leader-follower relationship as a result of pregnancy," Gender in Management: An International Journal, vol. 24, 2009

 

The purpose of this paper is to identify how pregnant women position themselves in the relationship with their immediate leader as a result of their pregnancy. Secondly, this study explores what kind of discourses pregnant followers' produce and use when they represent the reasons why the relationship with their leader developed the way it did during their pregnancy.

 

Mäkelä, Liisa, Pregnancy and leader-follower dyadic relationships: a research agenda, Equal Opportunities International

(Barmarick Publications), Vol. 24, 2005, pp; 50-72

Women are, in increasing numbers, participating in the labour market and are an important part of an organisation’s human resource pool. Nevertheless, women still face inappropriate treatment at work. One cause of this is family-related issues. In particular, pregnancy and  child birth present special challenges for working women. Discrimination towards pregnant women is commonplace in work settings. Problems are often related to individual work  relationships, for example, the one between the pregnant follower and her manager. It is important to understand problems that impact on women in working life that can disturb their job satisfaction, their performance and willingness to give their best for the organisation. Therefore, for the benefit of both employer and employee, existing practices in leader follower relationships during pregnancy are worth studying in more depth. In leadership studies, the Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) theory is focused on dyadic leader-follower relationships and is thus used here to understand this phenomenon. In the present article, the literature on pregnancy and work as well as on LMX is re viewed. On the basis of these reviews, a future research agenda is offered. The author's list of publications indicates that she has presented several papers, since this published article, that deal with the same topic.

 

Lim, Jason "Uncomfortable 'Followership,'"  The Korea Times (04/16/07)

The moral argument by Jason Lim in this Korean Times article is a compelling example of the potential difference courageous followership can make in transforming the world. Kim studied with Barbara Kellerman at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. In addition to her own work, Followership, Kellerman uses elements of my book "The Courageous Follower: Standing Up To and For Our Leaders" in her class on followership. I am pleased to inform Jason and others that the book has been published in Korea by Sigma Press, Inc. In the article Lim calls for other Asian countries to also pay more attention to what is good followership, so I will also refer to the Chinese translation of The Courageous Follower by Successmart in Taipei and a forthcoming Japanese translation by Diamond Press in Tokyo. As the title changes to make linguistic and cultural sense in other languages, a search by author may be most productive— Ira Chaleff

 

McCrimmon, Mitch "Can You Follow a Dead Leader?" (ezine article, n.d. )

 

Mertler, Craig A.; Steyer, Sheri; Petersen, George J. "Teachers' Perceptions of the Leadership/Followership Dialectic," Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwestern Educational Research Association (Chicago, IL, October 15-18, 1997)

Study examined whether 67 California and Ohio elementary and secondary school teachers understood the role and importance of followership in influencing school leadership. Teachers provided demographic data and completed the Teacher Sentiment Inventory, which assessed the extent to which their specific actions and characteristics reflected their understanding of followership. They ranked statements associated with particular actions or beliefs concerning the relationship between the teacher and the principal. Results indicated that teachers fell into one of three styles of followership: exemplary followers (with high levels of active engagement and independent thinking), pragmatist followers (who perform required tasks well but seldom venture beyond them), or conformist followers (with high active engagement but low independent thinking). None of the teachers were classified as alienated (independent thinking only) or passive (neither independent thinking nor actively engaged) followers. Both men and women scored high on independent thinking in their work. Female teachers reported higher levels of active engagement in the role of follower than did male teachers.

 

PALVEN, PETER "Social Sounds," website.n.d. Solomon Asch's famous experiments on conformity are a crucial element of understanding follower behavior and followership development. Social Sounds," a Swedish sound art installation, explores  the topic of conformity in social groups - both animal and human, and focuses on concepts of entrainment, conformity, and obedience. This article serves as the "framework" to larger exhibits, not documented here. In it, Palven explains, "Social Sounds is a metaphor for social behavior... how people conform to surrounding trends to fit in to an adjacent pattern, or similarly how frogs synchronize their singing to each other." 

 

Van Vugt, M., Hogan, R., & Kaiser, R. (2008). "Leadership, followership, and evolution: Some lessons from the past." American Psychologist, 63, 182-196. A full .pdf of this article may be found by clinking on Van Vugt and scrolling down his list of published works.

 

___________ "Social Technology and the Biology of Leadership,"  TechExecSociety, September 9, 2008

 

 "In the introduction to "The Art of Followership" Warren Bennis tells us that 'Generously supported researchers are even now using functional magnetic resonance imaging to explore how leaders and followers think. The best of that work will be a worthy addition to the insights offered by this volume.' This article is a useful example of what he meant. The only flaw I see in this stimulating article is that the authors describe only the neurological effects flowing from the leader to his or her followers. I'd venture that future experiements will show the flow from followers to leaders playing an equally dynamic role. Of course, such findings may further beg the question "who is leading and who is following?" But certainly within formal leader-follower constructs it is useful to study and acknowledge the two-way influences"-- Ira Chaleff

  

 

BOOK REVIEWS

The International leadership Journal is a new online journal in .pdf format. The current (March 2009) issue

 

is downloadable carries Craig Johnson's "Followership: How Followers Are Creating Change & Changing Leaders; and ,"The Art of Followership: How Great Followers Create Great Leaders & Organizations, " a review of Barbara Kellerman's Followership and  Ronald E. Riggio,  Ira Chaleff, Jean Lipman-Blumen's Art of Followership.

 

Here are some reviews of books related to Followership that appeared the April 2008 issue of T+D, a publication of the American Society for Training and Development:

 

Ketter, Paula "Art of Followership: How Great Followers Create Great Leaders and Organizations, The". T + D. Apr 2008.

 

Leigh, Pam "FOLLOWERS TAKE THE LEAD Followership: How Followers Are Creating Change and Changing Leaders" By Barbara Kellerman, (Harvard Business School Press, 336 pp.) T + D. Apr 2008.

 

Nancherla, Aparna "Do the Right Thing: How Dedicated Employees Create Loyal Customers and Large Profits". T + D. Apr 2008

 

 

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