Leadership: The Key Concepts (Routledge Key Guides)

Description

This book's title is somewhat misleading: a better one would be "Leadership Studies: The Key Concepts". The book is an alphabetically-arranged list of 50 or so entries by various authors, edited by the director and a research fellow from the Centre for Leadership Studies at University of Exeter. You're more likely to learn the key points of academic approaches to the study of leadership (though even this is not guaranteed) than of leadership itself. For example, the entry on "Measurement" doesn't talk about the uses of measurment in leading people or organizations, but rather the statistical and other formal criteria a measurement scale must meet to follow the guidlines of the American Psychological Association. Many entries presuppose familiarity with the academic literature. E.g., you're expected to know the four levels (of what?) described in Kirkpatrick's 1994 paper, which have "been around for years" (obviously, since the book is published in 2008) (@102). No less cryptically, you're expected to know "the Ohio State and University of Michigan studies" that relate to theories of leadership style, even without any direct citation to those studies (@92). The most intelligible pieces for a businessperson are those in which the entry's author defends his or her previously-published interpretation of the subject, e.g. J. Rost's entry on "Infulence," in which he distinguishes power, authority and influence (according to his view, anyway). But such entries are rare. If you're interested in leadership from a practical point of view, save your money.