Pope Francis has highlighted the important global crises regarding the plight of refugees, the victims of war, the consequences of poverty, and the impact of climate change. He…
Abstract
Pope Francis has highlighted the important global crises regarding the plight of refugees, the victims of war, the consequences of poverty, and the impact of climate change. He has done this while the Catholic Church is undergoing a serious internal crisis related to the ongoing revelations of clerical sexual abuse and a divided, unaccountable leadership. In calling for increased activity for peace, reconciliation, and justice among the Church’s members, Francis is offering to share leadership with followers of the Church in a revolutionary and inclusive way. Ira Chalaff’s concept of courageous followership: assuming responsibility while also serving others, challenging leadership while also participating in transformation, and taking moral action while also speaking directly to the hierarchy, points to a way that members of the Church can constructively apply the call from Pope Francis to the lives of their local communities with an eye to making a global impact. The Church will not be able to follow the pope’s call to external leadership on the inclusion of refugees and the restraint of disastrous climate change unless it is also able to reform its internal relationships and restore confidence in a leadership badly damaged by the clerical sex abuse crisis.
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The roots of racial injustice in the United States precede its formation as a nation and continue to send up shoots that bear toxic fruit. Leadership and followership are…
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The roots of racial injustice in the United States precede its formation as a nation and continue to send up shoots that bear toxic fruit. Leadership and followership are intrinsic both to the continuation of this condition and to its resolution. The brutality of 250 years of legalized enslavement resulted in generations of children forcefully fathered by white enslavers and their black “property” and disowned by the masters and their white families and communities. The current popularity of genealogy has ripped off the social masks of denial and documented significant numbers of “white” and “black” families who clearly share the same ancestry. This has presented a new challenge and opportunity for truth-telling, reconciliation, healing, and repairing the social injustice engendered by structural racism. This chapter explores the work of a group committed to this process. Through this lens, it examines the work required of all members of societies in which there are structurally advantaged and disadvantaged groups. The requirement is to step beyond the roles of perpetrator, victim, or passive bystander, into the roles of courageous follower and inclusive leader, in mutual service to personal and societal transformation.
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Ted A. Thomas and LTC Paul Berg
The U.S. Army has been fighting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for over 10 years and in the process produced a new military doctrine called mission command. Mission command…
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The U.S. Army has been fighting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for over 10 years and in the process produced a new military doctrine called mission command. Mission command doctrine was conceived from a wartime environment to allow followers in the field to act according to the dictates of the situation on the ground, giving them maximum discretion. The concept of mission command fits nicely into followership research and theory. For a military widely dispersed both by geography and mission, this concept represents an effective way to empower followers and encourage them to take initiative and accept prudent risk. Mission command doctrine expects officers and exemplary followers to be courageous. It requires them to act on their own, be wise in assuming risk, be actively engaged in executing the commander’s intent, and find multiple ways and options to accomplish the mission. Since mission command is a philosophy born of our recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the question remains of how this philosophy will fare in an inter-war period of forced reductions, downsizing, and substantial budget reductions.
This paper briefly reviews the historical limitations of research on leadership in an effort to avoid these same pitfalls in the study of followers and followership. In…
Abstract
This paper briefly reviews the historical limitations of research on leadership in an effort to avoid these same pitfalls in the study of followers and followership. In particular, research on leadership has been overly leader-centric, and research on followership should avoid simply “reversing the lens” and focusing exclusively on followers. Specific issues addressed include discussion of the appropriate term to identify followers and the intertwined nature of leaders and followers in the co-production of leadership. Finally, suggestions are made for guiding future research on followership.
H. Eric Schockman, Vanessa Alexandra Hernández Soto and Aldo Boitano de Moras