It used to be that the world was expansive enough to be forgiving of the mistakes of humankind: the sea felt endless, the air fresh and there was an abundance of land, forest, animals, food and potable water for everyone, at least in an aggregate sense if not locally. If a problem surfaced in one place, the rest of the world could safely ignore those troubles and get about its own business. Politically, that substantially changed throughout the 20th century. And since then, the world has become more integrated and connected, with the pace of change increasing rapidly, also disrupting business and the environment in ways that might well be irreversible. As a global society and community, we simply cannot continue to attempt solving problems the same ways we have in the past. Everything we do – and how we do it – is that much more important because the impact is now so widespread and systemic. Fundamental assumptions about how things work, or should work, need to be re-examined in light of current realities.One of those assumptions has been the belief, attitude and practice that solutions to these problems were the purview of a few special people called “leaders” without much consideration of the others involved – followers – or of the skills and behaviors that typify followership (Haslam et al., 2024; Tourish, 2014). Such a heroic perspective on leadership has become the dominant leadership paradigm, albeit, there do exist other models in practice such as the traditional structure of the Acholi tribe of Uganda (Ofumbi, 2017). Heroic leadership and the theories descended from it – which includes most standard models put forward since the 1840s – are problematic. As a spate of articles suggest, leadership studies are at an impasse as theories converge (Banks et al., 2018; Eva et al., 2024), foundational ideas face significant challenges (e.g. Alvesson and Einola, 2019; Alvesson and Kärreman, 2016; Lee, 2014), and the extent to which research is able to make causal claims about leadership is called into question (Antonakis et al., 2010).Perhaps the biggest gap in our understanding of leadership is our understanding of followership. There are no leaders without followers (Hurwitz and Hurwitz, 2015). And if there are no leaders without followers, understanding leadership requires understanding followership. The idea that leaders solve problem in isolation from followers makes little sense. Yet the importance of followership, the impact of followership on leadership and differing cultural expectations of followership are rarely considered in terms of team and organizational outcomes.The fact is, followership matters. It matters for healthy democracies. It matters for healthy organizations. It matters for achieving greater equity and harmony in communities. And it matters to people – for their careers, their confidence and their potential. Understanding how, when or why leadership works requires a concomitant understanding of followership. Perhaps leadership is at an impasse is because of the lack of theoretical and practical integration with followership.To begin to remedy the gap between leadership and followership, a group of seven scholars and practitioners came together to create the 1st Global Followership Conference, held at University of Waterloo, in 2019. The conference brought together scholars, students, consultants and practitioners from five continents to explore the relationship between leadership and followership and to give focus to the followership side of the relationship. The emphasis of the 2019 conference was on what it means to follow and how to understand followership as distinct from (but integral to) leadership. The 2nd Global Followership Conference, held at Christopher Newport University in 2022, took the next step, exploring the intersections between followership and other roles, including leadership. The 3rd Global Followership Conference (University of Strathclyde), asked the question: so what?The reach of the third conference was wide, with an intent to provide unique, useful evidence-based and theory-based strategies for enacting followership. Over 170 people from a dozen countries attended the 2023 conference, with more than 50 sessions on topics such as:This special issue of the Journal of Management Development on followership collates a selection of papers from the 3rd Global Followership Conference, including a few additional invited contributions. It continues the conversation from the 3rd Global Followership Conference and builds on publications that came out of earlier conferences, including in New Directions for Student Leadership (Hurwitz and Thompson, 2020) and the Journal of Industrial and Commercial Training (Thompson et al., 2021).
Thompson et al. (Thu,) studied this question.