The interactions among your associations

Contemporary scholars recognize that focusing on leaders, characteristics, followers, behaviors, situations, or other variables as separate factors can provide a limited perspective of a complex phenomenon. Instead, understanding leadership may require exploring the interaction among leaders, followers, and situations (Hughes, Ginnett, & Curphy, 2005; Fiedler, 1964).

Historical, classical, and contemporary perspectives tend to focus on a leader who overcomes circumstances versus a leader defined by circumstance. In comparison, neurological psychology sees leadership as neither circumstance nor adaptation but as a symbiotic relationship among leaders and followers (Reicher, Platow, & Haslam, 2007). Through this relationship perspective, researchers shift their attention away from leadership as a top-down process to see a mutual interaction that influences leaders and followers. Emerging discoveries in systems theory, chaos theory, and quantum physics illuminate how the traditional and contemporary leadership models may be insufficient for portraying leadership in the complex and dynamic social systems of the 21st century (Wheatley, 2006).

Rather than attempting to understand leadership by isolating parts and identifying cause-and-effect, the new sciences offer a holistic perspective that attempts to understand leadership by seeing the associations within networks. Building blocks of leadership fade, and the unseen associations among different factors become the fundamental ingredient of leadership effectiveness. From this perspective, the concept of leadership becomes fully democratized, with a leader being any individual who influences others to change the world (Wheatley, 2006). This means that understanding leadership is no longer limited to analyzing the contributions of great people or the impact of infamous leaders, but is expanding to explore the influential role that followers have on one another and on leaders.

Hughes, Ginned, and Curah (2005) take this democratization of leadership to the point of platitude by proposing that “every one of us has to be a leader [to] make a difference” (p. 14). Wheatley takes this further by defining a leader as “anyone who wants to help… create change in their world” (Wheatley, 2006, p. 196). Wheatly then promotes training programs to teach individuals how to be activists for political causes.