Abstract
The current article deconstructs Kellerman’s The End of Leadership via postmodernity, epistemology, and worldviews. Despite perceptively synthesizing and diagnosing a host of issues and assumptions that plague the leadership industry, Kellerman’s argument is flawed in two substantial, overlapping ways. First, the argument is decidedly grounded in modernity, despite the obvious evidences of a postmodern critique. Second, although the impact of technology and culture are likely correctly identified as significant, analysis explicating why these altered views about leaders facilitated a redistribution of power is unattended to. Therefore, the current work argues that The End of Leadership compellingly diagnoses the condition of the leadership industry via an incomplete lens. Therefore, three counterthemes are offered to compliment and nuance Kellerman’s argument: first, an understanding that technologies alter epistemologies; second, an analysis of the assumptions tethered to the epistemologies of modernity; and third, that individual and collective worldviews have changed as a consequence of the epistemological shift of postmodernity.
Highlights
Academics rarely agree and often struggle to find unanimity on issues within their own disciplines, and yet, scholars of organizational leadership and practitioners of leadership development generally agree that leadership studies and leader development are facing a crisis (Issa & Pick, 2010; Kellerman, 2012; Walsh, Meyer, & Schoonhoven, 2006)
Kellerman (2012) should be commended for the extensive scope The End of Leadership attempts to encapsulate into a call for the leadership industry to change with the changing times
Technology and cultural shifts have played a role in the transfer of power from leaders to followers, but this occurred in conjunction with disillusionment and global awareness, which deeply affected and affects individual and collective worldviews via epistemology
Summary
Academics rarely agree and often struggle to find unanimity on issues within their own disciplines, and yet, scholars of organizational leadership and practitioners of leadership development generally agree that leadership studies and leader development are facing a crisis (Issa & Pick, 2010; Kellerman, 2012; Walsh, Meyer, & Schoonhoven, 2006). Postmodernity further challenged these assumptions via another epistemological shift brought about by vast changes in communication, including telephones, transistor radios, television, satellite communication, and the Internet; a reorientation of individuals away from individualism and the insularity of the nation-state to the interconnectedness of a global community; advances in travel, most notably the jet aircraft and the ever-increasing accessibility of air travel; and a further reconceptualization of authority, based in no small part to the failed promises of modernity (French & Ehrman, 2016).
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