The General Theory of Leadership: Defining Leadership, Understanding How It Emerges in Individuals, Learning How to Practice It in Organizations

By Mwelwa Mulenga, EdD

Until now there has been no general definition or general theory of leadership. "The General Theory of Leadership: Defining Leadership, Understanding How it Emerges in Individuals, Learning" solves that problem. It develops and presents the general definition and the general theory of leadership to the world of researchers, teachers, and practitioners of leadership. Grounded in general systems theory, both the general definition and general theory are supported by other hypotheses such as structural coupling theory, theory of structural determinism, and Pavlov's work on stimulation and response. The definition and thesis developed in this book are general because they have universal application in the sense wherever there is an organization, these concepts will hold true, just like other general definitions and general theories.

At the heart of the general definition of leadership is the human element. Here the book emphasizes that an individual, in order to be effective in the practice of leadership, must pose a high combination of factors such as knowledge, intelligence, wisdom, and courage. All these must be applied in dealing with threats and opportunities emergent in the organization's environment. These emergent events in the organization's environment function much like Pavlovian bells and stimulate the emergence of leadership in individuals within, and outside, the organization. These concepts of stimulation and emergence are at the core of the general theory. But there can be no emergence of leadership without learning, which in itself requires a certain level of cognitive energy and as well as capacity. Thus, learning for organizational and environmental knowledge acquisition, and intelligent analysis of acquired knowledge to generate understandable information for decisioning, are foundational to the practice of leadership in organizations as open systems.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781737859222

Book preview

PREFACE

The General Theory of Leadership grew out of my frustration at the absence of a robust and well-grounded definition of leadership to use in my doctoral dissertation. I was designing research questions on entrepreneurial leadership and needed a general definition and a general theory of leadership to inform the content and structure of the questions, but I couldn’t find any. I couldn’t define entrepreneurial leadership without a general definition of leadership. But I also couldn’t theorize about entrepreneurial leadership without a general theory of leadership. So, I left out what I had wanted to be a significant part of my dissertation.

This book is thus written to solve the problem of the lack of a general definition of leadership and the lack of a general theory of leadership. And by developing and presenting the general definition and general theory of leadership, the book contributes, in content and quality, to research, teaching, and practice of leadership. The general definition and general theory of leadership developed in this book are, in a mathematical sense, the common denominators of everything leadership.

The first and second parts of the book develop the general definition and elements of leadership so that readers, including those who research, teach, and or practice leadership, can be well grounded in the general definition of leadership before moving forward to the general theory. In fact, the major source of frustration searching for the definition of leadership and theory to use for my dissertation was that the existing definitions were very narrow in that they made sense only in a very specific domain and thus had no utility outside that domain.

A substantial amount of work is invested in breaking down and discussing the structural components of the general definition of leadership. In doing so, the reader is exposed to the richness of the general definition, its grounding, and its potential utility in research, teaching, and practice. The definition is grounded in the psycho-biological complexities of the individuals in the environment and the organization, the complexity of the organization as an open system structurally coupled to its environment from which it sources supplies and outputs its products and services, and in the complexity of the organization’s environment that supplies resources to and absorbs products of the organization. It is important to note here, that the general definition of leadership is general because all of these complexities are generally present in all individuals who practice leadership, in all organizations, and in all environments of organizations.

After developing the general definition, the third part of the book develops and discusses the general theory of leadership. The general theory of leadership addresses what causes leadership to emerge, how it emerges, in whom it emerges, and why it emerges. In essence the theory provides the reader a lens through which to view and understand the mechanics of the emergence of leadership in individuals in a particular organization’s environment. The general theory of leadership posits that because the organization is structurally coupled to its environment of suppliers, processors, and consumers, the perception, expectation, and experience of emergent phenomena in the environment such as threats and opportunities stimulate the emergence of leadership in certain individuals in the organization and across its environment to protect the organization from threats or to take advantage of opportunities.

The general theory of leadership is general in the sense that leadership emergence in individuals is generally stimulated, in Pavlovian fashion, by emergent threats and or opportunities in the environment. These emergent phenomena function much as Pavlovian bells which stimulated salivation in Pavlov’s research subjects.

The fourth part of the book discusses the characteristics and practice of leadership given the general definition and general theory of leadership developed and presented in the book. Characteristics discussed include the fact that leadership is a practice, it is change-centric, it is conditionally transferable and teachable, and it is also an identity that takes centrality among other identities only in the practice of leadership. In other situations, other identities become central in the individual. It is because of this shifting identity centrality that an individual is not always a leader but can assume other identities holding centrality at the time. In discussing the practice of leadership, the book views leadership as a combination of intra-organizational leadership and extra-organizational leadership. Intra-organizational leadership is practiced inside the organization over the receiving, processing, and output systems of the organization as an open system. Extra-organizational leadership is practiced in the external environment of the organization and is focused on suppliers of resources to the organization, consumers of the organization’s products and services, as well as the stakeholders who provide social legitimacy to the organization to operate in their communities. Here the leader deals with the power dynamics between the organization and suppliers’ environments as postulated in resource dependence theory, as well as with competitive dynamics between the organization and the marketplace.

Because of the foundational nature of the general definition and general theory of leadership presented in The General Theory of Leadership, the book could be used as text for foundation classes and seminars in leadership as well as by individuals seeking to have a clear understanding of what leadership is, how it emerges in individuals, and how to practice it in organizations. Thus, the book is presented for public consumption with the hope that it will lead to a real and well-grounded understanding and practice of leadership in organizations, whether those organizations be homes, business enterprises, cities or towns, states or provinces, or nations which require, in this case, presidential leadership.

INTRODUCTION

The last major effort to develop a general theory of leadership began in 2001 and ended in 2003 without success.¹ The General Theory of Leadership succeeds in that effort by developing both the general definition and general theory of leadership. Both the general definition and the general theory will provide a solid foundation for leadership research, teaching, and practice. The development of the general definition and general theory was both interdisciplinary and systemic in approach.

By grounding both the general definition and the general theory in general systems and other theories, The General Theory of Leadership aligns with the appeal by Sorenson, Goethals, and associates that leadership must continue to be challenged to move beyond the leader-follower–shared goal conversation. To embrace the complex and adaptive nature of leadership studies and societal leadership challenges, there is a call for more organic, systemic, and integrative ideas and approaches.²

The absence of a general definition and general theory of leadership has led to a flood of well-intentioned but practically and theoretically limited utility definitions and theories of leadership, most which are focused on the leader-follower relationship as though this alone constitutes leadership. There is much more to leadership, given that the leader, in the course of leadership practice, also deals with actors in other organizations and theaters, none of whom are his or her followers.

The idea that led to the development of the general definition and the general theory emerged out of doctoral research among a small group of entrepreneurs who described their experience becoming entrepreneurs and practicing entrepreneurship in Los Angeles, California. Clearly these entrepreneurs were leading their businesses developed from some emergent idea, but defining this leadership was difficult because all other definitions of leadership, including the most popular, were insufficient or inadequate to capture their experiences.

From the beginning we believed that the general theory of leadership could not be developed without first developing a general definition of leadership. In designing the general definition of leadership, this work first theorized that the human factor, the organizational factor, and the environmental factor had special centrality in the core of leadership emergence and practice.

The organization interacts in a dynamic fashion with the environment through structural coupling as postulated by the structural coupling theory. Since the organization depends on the environment to supply resources and also to consume its products, structural changes in either or both the supplier environment and the consumption environment will trigger the need for structural changes in the organization.

The emergent changes in the environment do not tell the organization what to do but will stimulate leadership emergence and behavior in individuals in the organization to seek to avoid or mitigate the impacts of threats to the organization or to prepare the organization to harvest the benefits of the emergent opportunities. The general theory of leadership is built around this concept of emergence and stimulation based on emergent phenomena in the organization’s environment.

For example, at the time of writing this introduction, the COVID-19 virus, which has killed nearly 620,000 Americans as of August 2021, emerged and circulated based on conditions favorable to its survival and spread, but it does not tell anyone what to do. Individuals must understand its dynamics and deadly impact and seek to create conditions unfavorable to its survival and spread. Vaccines, social distancing, and masking, among others, are actions that deny the virus its capacity to spread through contagion.

General systems theory, specifically open systems theory, framed the development of both the general definition and the general theory. The theory was developed in theoretical biology by Ludwig von Bertalanffy beginning in the late 1920s and was fully developed around 1948. In open systems theory, a system is open if it takes in resources from the environment, processes those resources into finished products, and outputs those finished products into the environment.

Therefore an organization, because it has the same structure and behaves in a similar manner as biological open systems, is an open system since it takes in resources or raw materials from the supplier environment, processes those raw materials into finished products and services, and outputs the finished products and services into the consumer environment for sale to generate revenue so the organization can buy raw materials and repeat over and over in cyclic motion the input-process-output cycle.

All organizations, as individual open systems as well as taken together as a system of organizations, have this input-process-output structure. An organization, for this book, is defined as an aggregation of coordinated actions and activities centered by an emergent idea intended to generate economic or social value for its promoters and to satisfy expectations of stakeholders.

This book identifies three groups of complexities that are based on the tripartite factors at the core of leadership practice and that have impact on the input-process-output structure of the organization as an open system. These are named the human complexity, the organizational complexity, and the environmental complexity. These three are complexities because they could only be understood as wholes since they could not be broken down into lower units in order to be understood. For example, if you wanted to understand how a car operates, you could break it down into its individual parts, understand how each part operates, and then put all the parts back together. You cannot do that with humans or the environment.

Having considered the open system architecture of the organization and the human, organizational, and environmental complexities, The General Theory of Leadership defines leadership as:

The practice of using knowledge, intelligence, wisdom, and courage in applying power and authority to generate influence over human, organizational, and environmental complexities for the benefit of the organization and stockholders and to meet expectations of stakeholders.

It follows then that a leader is an individual who practices leadership as defined above.

It is difficult for an individual to lead an organization if he or she has no knowledge, intelligence, wisdom, or courage to apply power and authority in order to generate influence in the organization. It is rather obvious now that organizations need leadership that is endowed and informed by these elements of leadership in order to deal with the complex issues that emerge in the organization’s environment.

Having developed the general definition of leadership, the general theory was sketched out and boiled down to several aspects including that leadership practice is emergent, that there must be a stimulation of significance to cause it to emerge, that many individuals in the same organization can be stimulated but that many choose, based on various reasons, not to respond, that people in other organizations can also be stimulated by the same stimulant, that correct interpretation and understanding of the stimulant is critical for accurate response, and that the stimulants are mostly significant threats or opportunities for the organization.

In addition, the individual’s sensory apparatus is important for the capture of the stimulant signal, for the transmission of the signal to the brain for processing so it can be interpreted and understood, and for action to commence the practice of leadership. The work of Ivan Pavlov³ on conditioned reflexes is informative here. In consideration of the open system structure of the organization, the complexities pertaining to humans, the organization, and the environment, and also taking into consideration the general definition of leadership, the general theory of leadership was distilled to the following:

Through structural coupling of the organization and the environment, leadership in an individual emerges as a response to stimulation by a significant emergent leadership need generated by the dynamic interaction of the human, organizational, and environmental complexities of the organization.

The leadership reflexes are important because they make individuals identify emergent leadership needs using their sensory apparatus and psychological capacities, such as cognition, intelligence, and wisdom, and respond to these threats or opportunities for the survival of the organization.

In Pavlovian experiments, the animal organisms have inherent reflexes; in organizations, these reflexes are built into people in and outside the organization. It is these people who are stimulated by the environment in many different ways and who respond to emergent leadership needs for the organization. If people in an organization, or specifically leaders in an organization, do not get stimulated by and respond to environmental phenomena advantageous or harmful to the organization but instead behave much like Pavlov’s decerebrate dogs,⁴ which could not respond to food and bell signals because of a break in their reflex connections, the organization will certainly die.

While the content here is largely theoretical, it nevertheless has utility across a broad spectrum of leadership practice, including political and nonpolitical organizational leadership. Mayoral, gubernatorial, and presidential leadership, though different in magnitude, is about bringing about change that benefits the electorate so that in turn the electorate can reelect the leader.

For example, the movement of money through a city shows that a city is an open system. Capital projects that bring about change in a city must be funded by revenue coming into the city treasury and the city council appropriating funds for the projects, and then those funds going out of the city treasury to pay private contractors for the intended projects. Mayoral leadership is helped by ensuring revenue comes into treasury so the hundreds of projects going on at the same time can continue to be funded. But generating revenue is hard and requires knowledge, intelligence, wisdom, courage, authority, power, and influence, all aspects of the general definition of leadership.

The example of mayoral leadership over a city’s revenue and projects can be applied to other organizations such as school systems, jail or prison systems, hospital systems, and many others. The leadership of a school focuses on turning first-graders as inputs into twelfth-grade college-ready young men and women as outputs. They in turn become inputs into colleges and universities and are outputs into the job market or into graduate programs.

Prison leadership focuses on incoming newly sentenced individuals from courthouses as inputs. The jail or prison systems process or rehabilitate these individuals and ready them for reentry into society as outputs after their sentences are served or commuted.

The hospital system, likewise, takes sick people as inputs. The doctors and medical staff work to heal these individuals and output them back into the community. Those who die are outputs to funeral homes from hospitals but are inputs for the funeral homes. The bodies are processed by the funeral homes and then output into the graves or cremated. In all these examples, leadership is focused on the input-process-output structure of the organization, ensuring that the suppliers keep sending raw materials as inputs, that the processing and value addition is done, and that the outputted products and services are accepted in the output environment.

Both the general definition and the general theory also have practical implications for nonpolitical leadership