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Understanding leadership is never easy but in a time of global recession and unsettling political and social upheavals, exercising powerful and successful leadership is more difficult than ever before. The conditions that account for successful leadership are ambiguous and indeterminate, so our concepts of leadership ultimately waver and redefine themselves. Consider the likes of Bernard Bass and Ralph Stogdill, who for over 40 years have grappled with the meaning and concept of leadership. Almost 20 years ago, Stogdill (1974) observed that "there are almost as many definitions of leadership as there are persons who have attempted to define the concept". Since then, Bass (1990) has continued his study of leadership, adding over 4,000 new entries to the leadership research base over a 16-year period.
Leaders have existed for as long as mankind has been civilized. Egyptian hieroglyphics around 5,000 years ago differentiated among leaders, leadership, and followers. For almost as long, Taoism has emphasized leadership qualities in terms of guiding and nurturing followers (Messing, 1989). World literature thrives on the machinations and exploits of leaders. Think of Homer's Iliad, Machiavelli's The Prince, and Shakespeare's leaders (male and female) in Macbeth, Hamlet, Richard III, and King Lear. More recently, we have various texts that apparently teach us how to become "good" leaders (e.g. Bennis, 1989; Kotter, 1990a; Kouzes and Posner, 1990; Manz and Sims, 1989; Yukl, 1989a).
The complexity of leadership makes its analysis the more beguiling and informative. However, leadership research from an Australian perspective has been fairly limited. Most studies in fact have concentrated on Australian management rather than leadership. Nonetheless, most studies indicate that leadership is as much constrained by market forces as it is capable of driving them, whether these studies are Australian, English or American in origin (e.g. Clark and McCabe, 1970; Deeley, 1992; De Vries, 1990; McConkey, 1989; Zaleznik, 1990). This study was undertaken to get a more comprehensive picture of business leadership in an Australian context and its place in a world undergoing massive structural and social changes. It may be that our findings are indicative of leadership trends in other developed countries, if past leadership research is a reliable yardstick. For example, Clarke and McCabe (1970) and Barry and Dowling (1984) showed that the leadership beliefs and personality...