Who and what are followers and how are they really different from leaders?
Successful leaders and successful followers share the same basic characteristics: visionary, decisive, communicative, energetic, committed, and responsible. Effective followers possess integrity, have a sense of ownership in the organization, demonstrate versatility and flexibility, and take responsibility for their own involvement1 . However, aren’t these same exact things to be said of effective leaders? Are followers simply those who are not leaders? If so, where does the “leader” end and the “follower” begin? Are leaders simply those who are “in charge”? This view simply reduces the concept of leadership to titular authority, which is not really leadership2.
One possible answer is that external expectations for performance, access to resources, and responsibility for outcome delineate leaders from followers3. This view suggests that it is largely position that separates followers from leaders. Most traditional concepts of leadership come primarily from this positional view4, yet this perspective ignores the crucial element of interdependency between leaders and followers. Recent theories such as shared leadership, leadership substitutes, and leaderless teams undercut position as a coherent basis for defining leaders and, by extension, followers. This is an important point for followership, since we are clearly defining followers (role or persons) in light of what we think leaders are.
So the question remains: What distinguishes followers from leaders?
One the one hand, we might fall into the ditch of seeing leaders simply as great heroes. Heroic leadership revolves around the idea there is some trait (personality, charisma, competency, gifting, vision, servanthood, authenticity) that distinguishes the leader from others around them. Or we could fall into the other ditch of positional leadership in which case a leader’s behavior or personal attributes are of no real use in defining leaders or followers.
Another popular answer is influence. Some see that the essence of leadership is influence. Yet, influence is a two-way street. Effective followers, what Kelley calls exemplary followers, influence leaders through providing information, honest feedback, alternate perspectives, and affirmation of direction and motivation. Other writers point out the problematic tendency toward manipulation contained in leveraging influence, leading to the possible conclusion that leaders are simply those able to wield greater power than others around them. Such a survival-of-the-fittest perspective is simply untenable. In reality, leaders are often at the mercy of those they lead. Followers vest leaders with the opportunity, freedom, permission, or context for leading.
If we use behavior to define leaders and followers, then it is logical to suppose followers become leaders at the point at which they exhibit those same behaviors5. In that view, followers are just simply those who can’t lead. This conclusion is neither helpful nor realistic, since followers lead in all kinds of ways it different times. If we take the view that leadership is positional (due to one’s role or office), then leaders are simply the ones in charge. That conclusion doesn’t help us understand what a follower is, either, since the best we can say is that a follower is somebody who isn’t in charge. In this case, we are not talking about what it is that effective followers actually do, so we’re no further ahead in our understanding of what a follower really is.
In truth, the dichotomy between leaders and followers may be rather artificial, and one that is fading away in the face of the complex needs of contemporary organizations6. In today’s complex, challenging world of organizational life, there is a growing trend toward and demand for self-leadership and shared leadership. A richer, more meaningful perspective views leadership as a mutual, interactive process of exchange and reciprocity involving a multiplicity of people. The fluid, interactive, interdependent nature of multiplicity suggests that people move in and out of both leader and followers roles at different times and different contexts7. Paradoxically, these roles might constitute both following andleading at the same time.
Ironically, this complicates rather than clarifies the question. If the essence of an organization is in the interactions of its people, and leadership is sometimes provided by followers, and leaders becomes followers, it may suggests that it is really the followers who are the leaders. It also highlights the need for more consideration being given to understanding leaders and followers in terms of relational roles that are fluid, rather than in terms of the attributes and behaviors of the people that fill them, temporarily or otherwise.
Or perhaps the importance of leaders is exaggerated while the role of non-leaders is minimized when in reality what happens in the organization emerges from the interaction of all involved. This possibility led one writer to conclude that “followership is of such importance that often it is not clear who is leading and who is following.”8
Such new perspectives see leadership as a “reciprocal, recursive influence”9 relationship between multiple people in a group. It is an interactive phenomenon of mutual consent, trust, respect, and a shared sense of collective accomplishment between those called “leaders” and those called “followers”. Leadership can be enacted in various roles—such as legitimate (authority), social, or task—which any or every member of the group could potentially occupy at one point or another. The legitimate, or official, leader is the one usually held publicly accountable for how the group or organization performs. In this definition, followers are those not publicly accountable for performance, but an essential internal part of the process which involves different informal roles of leadership10.
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1 Lundin, S. & Lancaster, L. (1990). Beyond leadership…The importance of followership.The Futurist, May-June, 18-22.
2 Washbush, J. (2005). There is no such thing as leadership, revisited. Management Decision, 43(7/8), 1078.
3 Yukl, C.A. (1998), Leadership in Organisations, 4th ed., Prentice Hall, Englewood, NJ,.
4 Rosenau, J. (2004). Followership and discretion: Assessing the dynamics of modern leadership. Harvard International Review, Fall, 14-17.
5 Lundin & Lancaseter (1990).
6 Pearce, C., & Manz, C. (2005). The new silver bullet of leadership: The importance of self- and shared leadership in knowledge work. Organizational Dynamics, 34(2), 130-140.
7 Stacey, R. (2003). Learning as an activity of interdependent people. The Learning Organization, 10(6).
8 Rosenau.
9 Yukl.
10 Sheard, A.G., Kakabadse, A.P. (2002), Key roles of the leadership landscape, Journal of Managerial Psychology, Vol. 17 No.2, pp.129-44.
