Followership: the theoretical foundation of a contemporary construct.

By the early 1980's, American industry had experienced a crisis that transformed its stable nature. The advent of a global economy; advancing technology; changes in the American labor force; and the ongoing dynamic between business, labor, and government that introduced many contractual obligations into the employment relationship were several of the forces putting pressure on the status quo of the modern corporate system. Applied in an era of reduced resources, these pressures gave birth to the takeover and downsizing trends of the 1980s and 1990s.

As corporate organizational structures flattened, power and responsibility were delegated to a wider range of people, including the traditionally dependent followers. Leaders expected more initiative and risk taking from their followers (Lippitt, 1982). But as these business organizations struggled to reform themselves, leaders found that their followers were ill equipped to take initiative or to collaborate with their superiors (Berg, 1998). Followers saw the challenge but avoided the risk of new responsibilities for which they had no training or support (Lippitt, 1982). When the need arose for a more active follower, the model of the omniscient leader and obedient, passive follower or subordinate was too entrenched to allow those subordinates to embrace a new role of active followership. Instead, the focus was recentered on leadership: developing new leadership skills and even developing those leadership skills in followers. There was no focus on the leader-follower relationship or on the demands placed on each role (Berg, 1998).

The demise of the psychological contract and the organizational pressures resulting from the downsizing trends of the 1980s and 1990s were viewed by some as an opportunity for employees to craft a new psychological contract by taking a partnership role with their leaders (Potter, Rosenbach, & Pittman, 1996). Nonetheless, the image of the "drab powerless masses" that Burns (1978, p. 3) described as followers in the historic leadership literature was slow to change. Berg (1998) reported that participants in his Leadership and Followership workshops conducted in the early 1990s used words like "sheep," "passive," "obedient," "lemming," and "serf" (p. 29) to describe followers, and he attributed these negative associations to the organizational and psychological demeaning of the follower role.

Moving to a View of Active Followers

Although management scholars in the first decades of the 20th century were slow to recognize and discuss followers, theorists in other behavioral science fields were not. In psychoanalysis and psychology, Freud in 1921 and Fromm in 1941 identified a psychological link between leader and followers; Erikson discussed a link between leader and followers in 1975 (Hollander, 1992b). In anthropology, Mead (1949) discussed the importance of examining the psychological relationships between leader, lieutenant, and follower; the effect those psychological relationships had in the lives of the individuals; and cultural and anthropological factors that affected the individuals and their roles.

In sociology, Sanford (1950) observed that "leadership is an intricate relation between leader and followers" (p. 183) and that leaders had to meet their followers' needs to maintain a desirable relationship with them. Homans (1950) discussed the "human group" and posited a connection between a leader and a group by whose norms the leader must live (pp. 425-429). In 1961 Homans was among the early writers to describe a process of exchange between leader and group members in which both parties give and take resources (Bargal & Schmid, 1989). It gave recognition to the group member, or follower, as well as to the leader. Homans's work laid the foundation for social exchange theory, which was antecedent to transactional leadership theory (Hollander & Offermann, 1990) and one of the forebears of active followership theory.

The Early Voices of Active Followership Theory

The theorists who began bridging the concepts of passive subordinates and active followers included those of social psychologist Hollander and his associates. In 1955, Hollander and Webb (1955) argued that leader and follower was not an either/or proposition in which leaders and followers were found at opposite ends of a continuum. They proposed that the qualities associated with leadership and followership were interdependent. They conducted one of the earliest empirical studies about leaders and followers and concluded that nonleaders were not desirable as followers and that qualifies of followership needed to be considered as a component of good leadership. Building on Homans's work about social exchange processes, Hollander and Julian (1969) reviewed then-recent studies and concluded that leadership encompassed a "two-way influence relationship" (p. 390) that contained an "implicit exchange relationship" (p. 395) between leaders and followers over time.

In 1974 Hollander advanced this line of thought when he authored "Processes of Leadership Emergence." In it he framed the central arguments about leaders and followers that arose from the traditional view of follower as subordinate:

It is commonly assumed that a cleavage exists between

those who lead and those who follow, and that being a

follower is not being a leader.... Only some members

of a group have "leadership qualities" ... and stand

out as "leaders" ... Followers are treated essentially

as "nonleaders," which is a relatively passive residual

category. (pp. 20-21)

In his work, Hollander (1974) raised questions and identified topics that became central themes and issues in active followership literature. These included the ideas that leader and follower were roles and processes that should not be confused with the people filling them; that at least some of the time and to some extent, leaders were also followers; and that the behaviors needed to fill a leader's role at a particular time were not limited to leaders alone and that followers could also have those behaviors. Other concepts identified by Hollander that reappeared later in active followership literature included drawing a distinction about the source of a leader's authority and its affect on followers, the two-way influence process between leader and follower, and the role of the situation in the leader--follower relationship.

Other early voices spoke and wrote about leaders and followers but did not affect active followership theory. In these works, the authors urged leaders to focus on followers as a way of improving managers' leadership skills; they did not study followers in and of themselves. Wortman (1982) called these works "leadership studies that incorporate data about followers" (p. 373).

A few researchers did follow in Hollander's footsteps by examining the leader--follower relational component of active followership. Herold (1977) used a laboratory study to demonstrate how each party could influence the other party's behavior in a leader--follower relationship or dyad. He contributed to the growing body of literature that supported the idea that leader effectiveness must look beyond analyzing the effects of leader behavior on subordinates; subordinate effects on leader behavior must also be considered.

Frew (1977) contributed to followership theory by focusing on the importance of followers to a leader's success and by developing the first instrument that measured followership. His contributions were only beginning steps, though, because he examined followers to determine what kinds of leadership styles they preferred in their supervisors. His conclusions focused on making leaders more effective and improving organizational effectiveness by reducing managerial error; followers were not the focus of his conclusions. Additionally, although he studied followers and followership, he did not define the terms.

Steger, Manners, and Zimmerer (1982) advanced followership theory by proposing the first followership model built on two dimensions: followers' desire for self-enhancement and followers' desire for self-protection. Nine followership styles resulted from the followers' high, medium, or low attraction to each of the dimensions. Although they noted that "we are all followers in some way" (p. 22), Steger et al. did not provide definitions of follower or followership, although they did state that a followership theory would offer a taxonomy of subordinates' behavioral reactions to leaders.

Steger et al. (1982) raised two important issues that resurfaced in later decades as key issues in active followership theory: organizational structure and the use of power. In their view, a hierarchical structure was a given, and the only question was how much freedom the organization gave a manager to reward or punish subordinates. Power was not shared with followers; it was a managerial tool. Depending on a follower's style, a manager used direct power, supportive and developmental power, or devious and manipulative power to motivate followers to support organizational change.

Although Steger et al. (1982) took beginning steps in discussing follower behaviors and attributes, they also focused on followers as a means of improving managerial performance. They asserted that as managers moved up through the organizational hierarchy they encountered different types of "followerships" (p. 51) and that management training was needed to help a manager understand different follower styles and how to motivate the followers.