Anders Örtenblad (editor) - Debating Bad Leadership: Reasons and Remedies

This series will take a refreshing and creative approach to business management research, consisting of a number of edited collections that showcase a current academic debate. Each title will examine one specific topic and shall include a number of chapters from authors around the world, presenting their differing points of view on the question in hand. The intention of this series is to take stock of controversial and complicated topics of debate within business and management, and to clearly present the variety of positions within it.

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Years ago, I wrote a short essay titled, Hitlers Ghost: A Manifesto (Kellerman 2000). I had two objectives. The first was to draw attention to the fact that though what I came to call the leadership industry was maturing, for some reason it was becoming lopsided. Both in theory and practice it focused nearly entirely on good leaders , while ignoring nearly entirely bad leaders. But, as the title of the essay suggested, this seemed to me to make no sense. All well and good to try to teach how to lead wisely and well, but not all well and good to pretend that leading wisely and well is run of the mill. That leading badly was not common practice and not, therefore, an issue that the leadership industry was obliged to deal with. As anyone living in other than a cave knows all too well, bad leadership is, it happens, everywhere. It slithers insidiously into the corridors of power, wherever they might be.

My second objective, as the phrase a manifesto clearly implied, was to try to turn this ship around. To try to get scholars and practitioners as well as teachers and students interested in bad leadership for the obvious reason it is so profoundly important. It is important because it is ubiquitous. And it is important because it is dangerousif not dangerous to our physical health, then to our psychological health. Bully bosses , for example. It is difficult if not even impossible for a subordinate to be happy in the workplace if his or her superior is in some way bad, as in, say, woefully inefficient, or miserably temperamental, or cruelly callous, or blatantly corrupt.

Alas, I cannot claim much success regarding either one of my two original objectives. The leadership industry remains largely divorced from the real worldcontinuing generally to focus on the bright side while continuing generally to ignore the dark side . And, in keeping with this imbalance of attention has been an imbalance in production. Overwhelmingly what is taughtwith, I might add, dubious resultsis how to be a good leader . And, overwhelmingly, what is researched is good leadership not bad. As if good leadership is the norm, as if bad leadership is an aberration, as infrequent and unimportant. And as if, for that matter, good followershipwas not essential to dispensing with bad leadership.

It gives me great pleasure, then, to provide for Anders rtenblads edited collection on bad leadership this Foreword. He and his contributors are to be congratulated for turning their attention to a corner of the leadership literature that, while being of the utmost importance, remains still sorely neglected.

It behooves me as well to say a few words about the timing. As I write this Foreword, in summer 2020, I cannot yet know the outcome of the American presidential election in November. What I do know is that since January 2017, the United States has been saddled with what in my view certainly is the worst leader in its history. President Donald Trump has been both miserably ineffectual and grossly unethical. What I similarly know is that those who view him similarly have been stymied. We followers, we tens of millions of Americans, have been at a loss for how to depose a leader who is so bad he threatens our democracynot as was imagined over the years from without, but from within. It is an astonishing, depressing, conundrum about which the leadership industry has little that is useful to say.

I was heartened to read the essay by Professor George Goethals (Chap. 11 in this volume) that makes the critical point that follower[s] must be vigilant about both the morality and the effectiveness of the leaders initiatives. But, as Professor Goethals knows at least as well as I do, not only does the leadership industry pay nearly no attention to bad leaders, it pays nearly no attention to followers. That is, it pays nearly no attention to precisely those who have it in their power to upend a bad leader. Unless and until these things change, it is hard to see how much of a contribution the industry can possibly make to rectify the imbalance to which I refer. Teaching, researching , good leadership is important. But teaching, researching, bad leadership is equally important. For it is, alas, endemic to the human condition.

I wrote in that original essay, Hitlers Ghost cannot be nor should it be cleansed from our collective consciousness . If we insist on continuing to ignore what Bishop [Desmond] Tutu once called the depth of depravity, or for that matter the far paler shadows thereof such as thoughtlessness , stupidity, and incompetence , Leadership Studies will atrophy (Kellerman 2000). It is, in other words, up to the likes of those who contributed to this volume to save us from ourselves.