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Introduction
The study of leadership isn't nearly as exact as, say, the study of chemistry. For one thing, the social world isn't nearly as orderly as the physical world, nor is it as susceptible to rules. For another, people, unlike solids, fluids, or gases, are anything but uniform and anything but predictable. Having been a teacher and a student all of my adult life, I am as leery as anyone of the idea of leaping to conclusions, or making more of evidence than is demonstrably true. So I have been forced, again and again, to qualify my answers. People wanted to know The Truth, and I was giving them opinions. To an extent, leadership is like beauty: it's hard to define, but you know it when you see it (Warren [4] Bennis, 1989, p. 1).
Despite decades of disappointing theory and research on leadership - how many ways are there to insult Trait Theory, belabor the inadequacies of the Behavioral Style approaches, or attack the limitations of Fiedler's 8-point LPC scale anyway? - many scholars and business practitioners are still attracted to the "beauty" of leadership ([4] Bennis, 1989) or what [18] Meindl et al. (1985) refer to as the "romance" of leadership. Our own favorite observation is that of leadership guru James MacGregor [7] Burns (1978), who notes that "Leadership is one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth." Now, 30 years after Burns' comment (and after 30 years of additional theory and research on leadership), we are not much closer to understanding the true nature of the phenomenon (see [28] Yukl, 1981; [3] Bass, 1990). We concur with the statement in a past review of leadership research that "we do know a good deal more about leadership today than we did 40 years ago, but without doubt, we still have a lot to learn" ([11] Fiedler, 1996, p. 242). The question now is how best to proceed with such learning of leadership.
The purpose of this paper is to examine why leadership theory and research are so fragmented and incomplete. We first address the nature of theory and theory development in order to establish common ground on the attributes of "good" theories. We then trace the search for knowledge in...