Regulatory Compliance Journal – the journal of the Australasian Compliance Institute, 1(1), in press.

This is one of my earliest journal articles, and remains my most cited and probably most influential. As the title suggests, this article represents the proposition that the grounded theory method is a valid and profitable direction for leadership research to take. I should specify at this point that I am talking mainly about organisational leadership, rather than leadership research from the disciplines of history or political science or anthropology and the like. Such a proposition would not normally sound overly ambitious, except that organisational leadership research has been dominated by quantitative methods for many years. Quantitative methods have dominated to the extent that organisational leadership was almost invariably researched using questionnaires. That scenario is now changing. Discovering qualitative research I wrote this article as part of my PhD research in the mid-1990s. Let me go back a step to put this point into context. My introduction to academic research was to do my Master of Business degree by research. The topic was leadership. Within that degree I learned about research methodology. In that endeavour I was trained by a psychometrician and an econometrician. Consequently, to my mind research methodology was heavil