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Full Leadership Development: Building the Vital Forces in Organizations, by Bruce J. Avolio. (1999). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 234 pp.
This book mixes scholarly reporting, a treatise on developing leadership potential (this is not a how-to manual, but suggestions and admonitions are scattered throughout), and the author's personal statements about leaders, followers, and the leadership process. Bruce J. Avolio is a professor and director of the Center for Leadership at SUNY-Binghamton and a colleague of Bernie Bass. Not surprisingly, Full Leadership Development is written in the vein of transformational leadership a la Burns and Bass (Bass, 1985; Burns, 1978).
Avolio states that "no leader leads without followers" (p. 3). This succinct sentence captures his approach to the subject matter, which is that leadership is a process, a systemic relationship. To grasp what leadership is about, one must understand that the process involves the interaction of three primary ingredients: the leader, the follower, and the context. Avolio is on solid ground here, and he cites numerous studies throughout the book to support this idea. Also, quite appropriately, he points out that to know a leader, it is best to talk to followers and particularly the leader's second in command. To measure leadership effectiveness the focus should be less on what the leader does and more on what the followers do.
Most of the book is about leaders, managers, and administrators in organizational settings, but Avolio makes the point at the outset that the most important leaders in our society are parents, followed by teachers; then come group and organizational leaders. He uses teacher examples quite effectively. In Chapter Three the case of Stacey, a second-grade teacher, illustrates beautifully how strong yet delicate leadership can occur in the classroom. Parenting, the most important teacher role (Avolio dedicated this book to his mother), he treats too lightly, only in passing. Avolio mentions his mother, and in the last chapter he mentions his wife's leadership role as a mother to their three children. He writes lovingly about these two important leaders in his life but offers nothing more about parents as leaders.
Avolio's goal is to engage readers in the process of leadership development-- he as leader-teacher and readers as followers-learners-while at the same time "writing about the...