Foreword

Summary

Mark Twain made a very simple observation to do with leaders and power in life generally, “keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can somehow become great.” As the Editors of this outstanding and timely volume indicate, leadership and power permeate all aspects of our life, both inside and outside of organizations. From an organizational behavior and behavioral science point of view, we need to better understand the nature of this power and its interdependence with other aspects of organizational life. In terms of the latter, James MacGregor Burns (2003: 240) suggested in his book Transforming Leadership, for example, that “transforming change flows not from the work of the great man who single-handedly makes history but from the collective achievement of a great people.”

Whereas in the 1960s and 1970s the literature was replete with leadership studies, the 1980s and 1990s saw a slight decline in popularity in this subject, as other related subjects took hold (i.e. TQM [total quality management]). But with a different global business scene today involving the emergence of India, China, Russia, and other formerly underdeveloped countries, with differing political traditions and systems in a multimedia age, the issues of leadership, power and “leading with others” has come to “front of stage” once again.