A new study on the flaws in positive leadership research

Abstract

A new article, “A fatal flaw: Positive leadership style research creates causal illusions,” in The Leadership Quarterly finds that positive leadership approaches such as “authentic, ethical, and servant leadership” can’t be accurately measured, because they “conflate behaviors with subjective evaluations of leaders.” The writers, Thomas Fischer, Joerg Dietz and John Antonakis, claim that previously published positive research is therefore unreliable, and that “positive leadership style research is not only wrong but also practically futile” because it's impossible to separate out “concrete and learnable behaviors.”