Changing Leadership Paradigms

Though change is a way of life, in any socio-political setting it is defined by its locus rather than its nature. Reform: when the change agent exists within the existing system Revolution: when the change agent exists outside the existing system. Our study indicates that Change in the post 2005 era is nonlinear and nonNewtonian. There is concurrent collapse of structures and functions. As the forces of competition intensify capital get increasingly centralized and concentrated. Effective leadership is one of the keys to our future success and survival. Scholars have argued, that in its broadest sense, leadership can be defined as the ability to influence others toward the accomplishment of some goal. That is, a leader leads a collaborator or team of collaborators towards some end. When the universe is fuzzy defining leadership becomes both necessary and important. We are beginning to live in the “information age” with the knowledge worker calling the shots. The nature of social change itself has changed with the increasing preponderance of technology. The moot question then arises: Is the leader becoming irrelevant as system takes over? Hence the manager is forced out of the somnambulistic era of the feudalmercantilist-trader mindset and forced by circumstances to adopt the creative-innovativeentrepreneurial mindset. While the system does become important and the leadership becomes critical to incremental change. Such is the dialectic of growth! We argue that man cannot fully comprehend leadership in terms of either traits (as in the 1950s and 60s) or styles (as in the 1970s and 80s) or for that matter in terms of power and politics (as in the 1990s and for the decade thereafter). We need to trace its path of change from absolutist-paternalism to value centered leadership. The paradigm begins to shift. This paper challenges the technocratic industrial engineering based position of persons like Mohanty and Deshmukh and in the process posits a direction in which future management sciences scholarship on leadership will and should be directed.