This groundbreaking volume provides the first sweeping view of followers in relation to their leaders, deliberately departing from the leader-centric approach that dominates our thinking about leadership and management. Barbara Kellerman argues that, over time, followers have played increasingly vital roles. For two key reasons, this trend is now accelerating. Followers are becoming more important, and leaders less. Through gripping stories about...
Kellerman makes the claim that followers are important, every bit as important as leaders (xviii). She defines followers as "subordinates who have less power, authority, and influence than do their superiors and who therefore usually, but not invariably, fall into line" (xix). Followership "implies a relationship (rank), between subordinates and superiors, and a response (behavior), of the former to the latter" (xx). Kellerman...
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In recent years, especially in the business world, relationships between "leaders" and "followers" have changed significantly. Throughout most of human history, leaders at the highest level (e.g. tribal chiefs, war lords, monarchs, and tyrants) were almost always those who seized or inherited positions of authority. Business leaders were owners. Over time, the concept of self-determination evolved to a point when political...
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Barbara Kellerman's "Bad Leadership" is a fabulous prologue to readers of "Followership". Read them sequentially. The former is better written and better organized. Each has value as you assemble your management armamentarium. Although followership and leadership may be coincidental, one is either a follower or a leader. Neither is really culturally superior, but each is different. Of course, followers may transmogrify...
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