Julius Nyerere: Leadership Insights for Contemporary Challenges

Abstract

The contemporary literature on leadership is replete with references to contextual factors that shape leadership, and contingency theories of leadership, which analyze how social, environmental and situational factors affect the leadership process. What they all, however, fail to do very well as they contribute to our understanding of leadership is to take into cognizance “the impact of long-term historical forces and influence of cultural values upon leadership” (Wren 1995: 246). Similarly, there are references in the literature to the trait approach to leadership, which examines a leader’s actions and behavior and the role that followers play in shaping a leader. This, of course, entails examining organizational level variables and transactional approaches to leadership in order to arrive at a clear and concise understanding of the leadership process (Chemers 1997). Based on the limitation of the foregoing contributions in the literature, what is needed, as a corrective that informs this chapter’s analysis, are the following: a) acknowledge-ment of the role of “macro contextual factors,” and b) integration into our analysis of leadership formation and process the “longer influences of historical and cultural forces into the broader leadership equation”