The Trouble with Leadership: Theories of Good and Troubled Leadership and their Ethical Implications

This chapter analyses two contemporary theories of leadership (transformational and transactional leadership and ‘new’ leadership), identifies their weaknesses and contrasts them with three psychological approaches to leadership (personal attributes, psychopathic leadership and ethical leadership). The conclusions from this study were that if leadership is to be understood such studies should be guided by a model of leadership that captures something of its complexity. At the very least, it should include the relationships, drawn from studies of these theories, between followers’ needs, group processes, context and leaders’ psychological attributes.