The possibilities of leadership: revisiting J.C. Rost’s leadership writings

Abstract

In the 90s, J.C. Rost highlighted the possibilities for leadership to become inclusive, participative, and socially responsible. He explicitly questioned the leadership paradigm of the previous two centuries encouraging a new paradigm for the twenty-first century. His contribution to leadership studies was recognized through the International Leadership Association’s lifetime achievement award in 2008. However, his work has largely been overlooked within management and organization studies and today’s dominant leadership paradigm remains largely unchanged from that of the previous century. In this paper, the major elements of Rost’s approach; influence relationships, real intended change, and mutual purpose and their implications for developing good leadership are revisited and explained. Rost was unable to shift the dominant leadership paradigm which he encountered, but he was able to highlight the possibilities of what leadership could become. Conclusions are drawn with regards to the enduring separation between leaders and followers, the vested interests of stakeholders in leadership and the influence of a mythical leadership narrative.

Keywords:

• Rost
• leadership
• leadership development
• mutual purpose

Acknowledgement

I thank the reviewers and participants at the 7th Annual Developing Leadership Capacities Conference held at Henley Business School for feedback on an earlier version of this paper. I thank the Editors for initiating this Special Issue and for their patient and insightful encouragement in developing this unusual paper. I am exclusively responsible for all views expressed here, particularly my personal reflections upon leading at Brighton, which in no way are intended to reflect or criticise an institutional view.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In this paper, references are made to the 1993 paperback edition of Rost’s classic, first published in 1991.