Leadership Research and the Oldest Crime

Abstract

In management and leadership scholarships, organisations are often regarded as entities established as vehicles for the owners so that the owners can achieve their goals. Arguably, the purpose of managerial leadership research is to provide managers with knowledge which benefits organisations. The purpose of this article is to assess whether current managerial leadership research is relevant and helpful to managers or not. Five studies (March & Sutton, 1997;Collins, 2001;Richard et al., 2009;Hiller et al., 2011;Andersen, 2013), which contain data from a total of 2,479 articles, have revealed that the relationship between formal leadership (management) and organisational effectiveness is seldom studied. When effectiveness is addressed it is rarely defined and almost never measured. It is, indeed, no surprise that six studies (Burack, 1979;Ghoshal, 2005;Brownlie et al., 2008) have shown that managers regard leadership research both irrelevant and useless.