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Leadership matters, greatly (Dorfman et al., 2012). Leadership also matters when managing a team, organization or country (Antonakis and House, 2014). Actions from leaders, good and bad, have the potential of impacting our daily lives (Eberly et al., 2013). However, even with today’s vast body of leadership theories, there is still a need to modify or update these theories to become more applicable to meeting the challenges that come with today’s globalization and complex environment (e.g. competition, political volatility, economic turbulence and technological changes; Antonakis and House, 2014).
For example, Antonakis and House (2014) identified Bass’s (1985) full-range transformational leadership theory as being formalized and tested in a variety of disciplines. However, as leaders must be responsible for implementing solutions to complex social issues, rather than just address organizational issues, Antonakis and House (2014) called for a new type of leadership to be considered, instrumental leadership. Upon further inspection of the full-range leadership theory, Antonakis and House (2014) identified four critical leadership functions that had not been considered: strategic structuring and planning, providing direction and resources, monitoring external environment and monitoring performance and feedback. These deficits, among others, support recent calls from researchers to modify the full-range theory to include “aspects of work facilitation and strategic leadership, as well as transactional and transformational leadership” (Antonakis and House, 2014, p. 748).
Other calls have been made to abandon transformational leadership (van Knippenberg and Sitkin, 2013), while others call for a focus on the team level of analysis when viewing the relationship between the leader and followers as “a collective” (House, 1999). Leadership impacts not only the individual follower but also teams/groups, departments and whole organizations (Hiller et al., 2011). Research efforts and new or modified leadership theories must be positioned in a multilevel, or hierarchical level, framework (Hiller et al., 2011; Dionne et al., 2014). Also, additional efforts have been made to expand leadership to being more of a networked construct in which leadership emerges as a network of leaders using a shared or distributed model of leadership (White et al., 2016).
These examples highlight a primary question regarding leadership research. As a mature field, there remain questions that researchers are trying to uncover. Antonakis et al. (2012) identified...