Fact and Fantasy about Leadership

Micha Popper, Professor, Department of Psychology,University of Haifa, Israel

'The author provides a thoughtfully explored, wide-ranging description of the literature, and concludes that followership deserves more attention than it has in the past. In focusing on followers as the chief producers of the phenomenon, the book is one of the few attempts to deviate from the common model of explaining leadership with reference to the leader's characteristics and action. This creative and challenging book will be important to social psychologists, sociologists, managers, and political scientists.'--D. Sydiaha, Choice'Firmly grounded in psychological knowledge, based on detailed historical case studies, highly readable, and offering a multitude of examples from many leadership spheres, Popper's book offers a fresh and important perspective from which to understand the phenomenon of leadership. It is one of the very few attempts to deviate from the extant paradigm of explaining leadership with reference to the leader's characteristics and actions and focus instead on the followers as the chief producers of the phenomenon. This perspective challenges some of the basic assumptions on which current practices of leader selection and training are based.--Boas Shamir, Hebrew University, Israel

• Contents: Introduction 1. Another Book About Leadership? 2. Leadership as a Psychological Phenomenon 3. Fictionalization of Leadership 4. The Big Picture Conclusion References Index