Our Approach to Leadership in this Course

In this course, we will study both the science and practice of leadership. We will focus most on the theoretical and empirical perspectives from the field of psychology. But, from time to time will be bringing in ideas from business and management as well as other fields such as sociology, biology, and anthropology.

How does this differ from other potential approaches to leadership? There are a lot of books written on the topic of leadership that approach the topic from one leader’s personal experience. While those maxims and snapshots can be valuable, particularly when business enters a new age (such as the current advances in artificial intelligence) and little research is available, individual cases do not present a reliable picture. And, reliability is necessary for validity.

Certain questions can never be verified as the maxims (unlike theories) are not truly testable. For instance, was it that Bill Gates was a great leader to make Microsoft one of the largest and most profitable corporations in history? Or was it that the timing was right that people were ready for personal computers? Or was it that he had a fantastic work force? All of these explanations have been given as possibilities for the success of Microsoft, but we often attribute the success to Bill Gates because of the personal leadership maxim that he espouses, not to mention that it is much easier to focus on a single individual rather than look at every single factor. But what happens when those maxims are applied to another organization? Very rarely do they actually improve the organization. More often than not, they have no effect at all, and in some cases they actually have a negative effect because the ideas do not fit the organizational culture.

As a result, we will largely avoid leadership maxims and focus instead on psychological theories. Psychological theories are designed to not only explain phenomena, but also allow the scientific collection of data to support or potentially falsify the theory. A psychologist studying leadership may use a leader’s maxim as a starting point to creating a theory, but it is simply that; early idea generation, not the whole story.