Leadership and the fate of organizations

This article concerns the real-world importance of leader-ship for the success or failure of organizations and social institutions. The authors propose conceptualizing leader-ship and evaluating leaders in terms of the performance of the team or organization for which they are responsible. The authors next offer a taxonomy of the dependent vari-ables used as criteria in leadership studies. A review of research using this taxonomy suggests that the vast empir-ical literature on leadership may tell us more about the success of individual managerial careers than the success of these people in leading groups, teams, and organiza-tions. The authors then summarize the evidence showing that leaders do indeed affect the performance of organiza-tions—for better or for worse—and conclude by describing the mechanisms through which they do so