Considering Leadership Anew

Book excerpt: For years now, leadership studies have emphasized functional social psychology approaches that reduce leadership to a couple of traits, styles, or recipes that supposedly give us the steps to follow when leading. The latter have taught us a lot, but are not enough to cope with the immense challenges of leading in a chaotic, intricate, complex and nonsensical world. This book compiles essays on alternative leadership theory from leading authors who have been defending unorthodox approaches to leadership. As such, it provides students, academics and researchers with options in terms of leadership theory. If mainstream approaches to leadership are not enough, then why do we not look for novel and different ones? Thus, this book is an effort to develop sui generis leadership theory, by exploring leadership from novel lenses from the arts and humanities, sciences, and sociology, as well as other social sciences.