MUST MANAGERS BE LEADERS?

Management and leadership are strongly linked concept, both in the literature of management and in the popular imagination. A manager is by definition a person in charge: the boss. A leader is also the boss; and even more to the point, our deep-rooted mental notions of what being in charge ought to mean are bound up with exercising the qualities of leadership. In a typical formulation, "the thing that leaders do that managers don't is articulate an inspiring vision and guide the formulation of a strategy for its pursuit" (Allio 23). If we are managers ourselves, we would wish to articulate a vision and guide a formulation of strategy for attaining it. If we are subordinates, we hope for a manager who can do these things.

The following essay examines leadership and management in terms of the underlying attitudes they draw on, and how these have been expressed in the management literature. First, let us consider the origin and root meaning of the word "leadership." It derives from "leader," which in its most basic sense means literally to lead: to go first. The image evoked is of a group of people traveling along a path; the leader is the one who goes first, with the others following. The strong implication is that the leader is the person most familiar with the path, or at any rate who is most familiar with paths of this sort - the one who knows the way, or knows best how to determine the right way

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venture, struggle, and especially warfare. Readers are invited to see themselves as Machiavelli, or the Chinese military sage Sun Tsu. The Machiavelli evoked is not the political philosopher himself (no one writes management books based on Aristotle or Locke), but the brilliant and ruthless Renaissance princes he was advising. "Strategic planning" - with its military overtones - has itself become a buzzword, though the value of complex strategic planning in private industry has been called into question (Llewellyn and Tappin 960). The academic literature on management should be less subject to this tendency, since it is written primarily for other scholars rather than directly for managers. Even scholars of management, however, expect or hope that their ideas will eventually filter out into the popular management press and be taken up by actual managers. Thus they, too, may not be altogether free of the impulse to heroize management by portraying it in the language of leadership. In practice, however, the early literature of management theory, at least in English, was entirely free of appeals to leadership, and of romanticization of the management process in general. English-language management theory began with the work
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Approximate Word count = 2345
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)