Defining Leadership: Can We See the Forest for the Trees?

Abstract

The leadership forest of literature is growing and tangled. Teachers and students, like most scholars, tend to identify with a particular leadership theory or definition, often at the expense of excluding other good ideas. Joseph Rost and Ronald Heifetz have written recent books which forward important new ideas about leadership. This paper examines the leadership definitions forwarded by these two scholars as well as the definition offered by James MacGregor Burns, in order to identify their commonalties instead of emphasizing their differences. Exploration of these common ideas uncovers an important new path to explore in the leadership forest: applied civics.