Followership: the theoretical foundation of a contemporary construct.

This article presents the theoretical foundation of followership. The words follower and followership are increasingly used in discussions of leadership and organizations, and many think that the field of followership began in 1988 with Kelley's "In Praise of Followers." Followership research began in 1955, and literature in the social sciences discussed followers and followership for decades prior. By examining why leadership rather than followership is emphasized; discussing antecedents, early theory, and research about followership; and identifying common themes found in the literature, this article provides the foundation that has been missing in contemporary discussion of the followership construct.

Keywords: followership; leadership; leader role; follower role; relational nature of leader-follower; organizational behavior; management; authentic leadership

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Almost 30 years ago, Kelley's article, "In Praise of Followers, was published in Harvard Business Review (1988). It received wide attention in both academic and popular presses for its seemingly novel proposal that followers had an active role to play in organizational success: Success was not solely dependent on dynamic leaders. The idea that followers could be more than passive subordinates was echoed in the next decade by Chaleff's (1995) work about courageous followers.

These two publications by Kelley (1988) and Chaleff (1995) became the primary works on which subsequent discussions of followership were based. A small but growing body of work about followership developed into a field of its own, asserting that leadership could no longer be studied in isolation or with only a small nod to followers. Citing Kelley and Chaleff, theorists proposed behaviors, styles, and characteristics of effective followers and posited interdependency in the leader--follower relationship.

As theorists and selected researchers moved forward in their discussion of followership, few looked back across the decades preceding Kelley's (1988) work. The purpose of this article is to provide a theoretical foundation for the field of followership and to examine the roots from which it developed in the United States in the 20th century management literature. By discussing why management theorists focused on leaders rather than followers, identifying the early voices of followership theory, describing followership's antecedents, and identifying the common themes found in the literature, this article acknowledges the origins of followership theory and begins to set the foundation missing in contemporary discussions of the followership construct. It also acknowledges the limited followership-centric literature in the 21st century and identifies contemporary exploration of a common followership theme by leadership theorists. It concludes by proposing further areas for research in followership.

It is important to note that the body of followership literature, distinct from what is traditionally viewed as leadership literature, is small. A search of 26 electronic databases produced approximately 480 unique citations for the period 1928 through September 2004 (Baker, 2006); approximately 50 more have been added through December 2006. About half of the citations were relevant to the field of management, and the great majority of the citations were written by American authors and about American organizations. The citations included opinion pieces as well as articles published in popular and trade magazines and academic and scholarly journals. In general, followership theory developed in the latter half of the 20th century. With limited exception, the few dissertations and articles written about followership in the first few years of the 21st century have explored facets of followership theory posited in earlier decades.

The number of leadership citations in comparable publications dwarfs the body of followership literature. Why has there been so much emphasis on leadership and so little on followership? The next part of the article examines this question.

Why Is the Focus on Leaders Rather Than Followers?

From leadership theories as early as Great Man down to the 1970s, the common view of leadership was that leaders actively led and subordinates, later called followers, passively and obediently followed. As Follett (1996) observed in 1933, her contemporaries thought that one was "either a leader or nothing of much importance" (p. 170). Why were followers ignored as the spotlight shone so brightly on leaders?

In the early days of civilization, there were no leadership theories--only leaders and their followers. Early leaders were Great Men who functioned in a preindustrial and prebureaucratic period (Daft, 1999). The leadership talents and skills that set the Great Men apart from other humans were assumed to be inborn; natural abilities were thought to be inherited, not acquired (Galton, 1900). Those who did not inherit these abilities had no chance to acquire them. The Great Men had their followers, troops, or devotees who followed in their footsteps, obeyed their directives, and faithfully mimicked their actions.

Heroic Leaders

In a similar fashion, Bums (1978) saw leadership literature as dealing with historically heroic or demonic figures, where fame was equated with importance. The followers of the heroic leaders were the "drab powerless masses" (p. 3). This was the predominant idea about leaders and followers as the United States of America transformed from a rural, agricultural economy into an urban, industrial one in the latter part of the 19th century. The business enterprises that arose then followed the model of Great Man leadership. Follett (1960) described the business leader of that era as a "masterful man carrying all before him by the sheer force of his personality" (p. 310). She painted a stark picture of the leader-follower dynamic:

Can you not remember the picture ... of the man in

the swivel chair? A trembling subordinate enters,

states his problem; snap goes the decision from the

chair. This man disappears only for another to enter.

And so it goes. The massive brain in the swivel chair

all day communicates to his followers his special

knowledge. (p. 311)

That view' continued into the 1970s when Hollander (1974) described the then-current view of followers as "nonleaders ... an essentially passive residual category" (p. 23).

Idealized Leader Overshadows Followers

Hollander (1974) argued that the primary role filled by an organizational leader was that of executive or manager who directed the activities of others. Other leader roles such as change agent, adjudicator, and problem solver were overshadowed by the director's role. He further observed that leaders were thought to "hold" a position of authority, which led to thinking of the position as a fixed, static role. The fixed leader role was idealized, and its idealization led to making a sharp and distinct difference between leader and followers. With this distinction in mind, the fixed position of leader was honored, and the role that it contained received less attention. Hollander suggested that were people to view the leader position as less fixed and more fluid, they would have a better understanding of the leader's roles and would think more about leader--follower relations rather than only about leaders.

Vanderslice (1988) similarly saw a problem in operationalizing leadership "in individualistic, static, and exclusive positional roles" (p. 683). She observed that people thought of planning, decision making, and task responsibility as the province of those who filled the leader roles and wondered if these functions could be achieved without "invoking role-defined static power differentials" (p. 683). Meindl, Ehrlich, and Dukerich (1985) believed that their culture held a view of a heroic, romanticized leader to whom was attributed all glory or all failure. Their concept of idealized leader overshadowed the follower.

Social Change Affects Followers

Social change in the United States and elsewhere also shaped people's views of followers. Although in the early 1930s Follett discussed the interdependence of leaders and followers, the active role of followers, the situational authority of those closest to the task or problem at hand, and the win-win nature of constructive conflict, her views were lost in the milieu surrounding World War II. The world at that time embraced hierarchical, authoritarian structures that were built on a win-lose proposition that had but one purpose: to conquer an enemy. Lived in epic proportions, leadership was embodied in Great Men such as Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and Hitler.

The organizations that prospered in America during and after World War II were mostly vertical organizational hierarchies (Useem, 1996). These postwar American corporations helped foster the "golden age" of prosperity within the United States (Smith & Dyer, 1996, p. 51), and the economy they led was admired and envied by "most of the rest of the world" (Kaysen, 1996, p. 3). As America achieved economic dominance in this era, corporations promised lifelong job security to employees in exchange for their loyalty, obedience, and hard work. Nothing more was asked of followers, and there was no need to examine the leader-follower relationship while economic conditions were stable. The leader's actions, not those of the followers, were instrumental to the company's success (Berg, 1998).

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.

To reduce the complexity of leadership contingency theory, Zierdan (1980) proposed that the contingency model should focus on subordinates rather than a manager. In his model, a manager established performance and emotional objectives for his subordinates as well as ways to measure the objectives. The manager in this model needed to be aware of subordinates' attitudes and feelings and use that information to make informed decisions in the contingency framework. Tjosvold, Andrews, and Jones (1983) conducted an empirical study about causal links between leaders and subordinates, focusing on leaders' cooperative and competitive behaviors. The study suggested that to improve their own success, to improve subordinates' reactions to their leadership, to increase subordinates' satisfaction, and to build morale leaders should emphasize common goals held by leader and subordinates, help subordinates achieve their goals, encourage subordinate learning and development, exchange information and resources, and share the rewards of their combined efforts.

Theoretical Antecedents to Active Followership

The theorists and researchers described above were influenced by theorists in other disciplines. Recognition of followers and development of active followership literature had its roots in social exchange, attribution, and small group theories that grew out of the disciplines of sociology and psychology. The theories and observations found therein were eventually woven into the fabric of organizational behavior and followership literature.

Social exchange theories. Exchange theories posited that social interaction was a form of exchange in which a group member contributed to the group at a cost to himself or herself and received benefits from the group at a cost to the group. The exchange continued as long as members found it mutually beneficial (Bass, 1990). Homans's (1950, 1974) work was among the foundation blocks of the theory. His work was followed by that of Hollander (1974) and Hollander and Julian (1969), who noted that "an entire interpersonal system" (Hollander & Julian, 1969, p. 393) must be included in the evaluation of a leader's effectiveness. They developed theories about the implicit nature of the social exchange processes and applied them to leaders and followers. In their view of the leader--follower transaction, leaders provided benefits such as direction, and followers responded with increased esteem for and responsiveness to the leader. Recognition of this transaction led to transactional theories of leadership, which generally focused on a follower's perceptions and expectations of a leader.

Transactional leadership was named and popularized by historian Bums (1978). In this leaders