رهبری آشناپنداری دوباره و دوباره

Much leadership literature neglects its historical-contextual antecedents and as a result over-emphasizes zeitgeist, or tenor of the time's social forces. This neglect impedes leadership research by encouraging academic amnesia and promoting a strong feeling of research déjà vu among many researchers and practitioners. In this article, we develop a leadership historical-contextual superstructure consisting of evolutionary antecedents, paradigmatic antecedents, purpose and definitional antecedents, stakeholder antecedents, levels of analysis and temporal antecedents, and research dissemination antecedents. We use this superstructure to analyze current work in the increasingly important relational leadership research stream to illustrate how the superstructure's use can aid leadership researchers and practitioners in avoiding leadership déjà vu and academic amnesia and help build a more cumulative field.

At first glance, our use of the superstructure might make it appear that there is not zeitgeist, déjà vu, or amnesia in relational leadership developments. The similarities across approaches in Table 1 downplay the real lack of integration and communication across the relational approaches. In actuality, there has been very little such integration or coordination/communication. Neither does this literature show recognition of the various antecedents. As one example, we have characterized the various approaches in terms of levels of analysis and indicated that they cross all levels. This conclusion, however, is based on our assessment of the works used, and not on explicit levels-of-analysis treatments in the works considered. What our illustrative analyses and synthesis do show is how each of the approaches fares in terms of the antecedents. Further, they show how individual strengths and weaknesses in the approaches reveal gaps in knowledge for both the separate approaches and the relational perspective as a whole. This treatment reinforces our opening argument that to know where we are going with leadership research, we must know where we are, and where we have been—we must look backward and forward at the same time.