Leadership Studies focuses on the universal phenomenon of leadership in human groups. Leadership Studies asks what leadership means within a wide variety of social contexts—whether in a family, a team, a theatre company, a philanthropy, a university, a multinational corporation, or a nation-state waging war. It seeks to understand the dynamics of the relationships between leaders and followers. It studies authority, power, and influence. It seeks to grasp the bases of legitimacy that leaders claim, and followers grant, in all of these relationships.
Through a wide range of courses in the social sciences and the humanities, the curriculum addresses a number of questions. How do we define leadership? What are the bases of leaders’ legitimacy in different historical contexts? How should we understand the variation between leaders emerging through tradition, charisma, and legal sanction? How do different types of leaders exercise and maintain their authority? What are the distinctive habits of mind of leaders in different cultural settings? What are the moral dilemmas that leaders across all settings face? What are the typical challenges to established leadership? How does one analyze the experiences of leaders in widely disparate contexts to generate systematic comparative understandings of why history judges some leaders great and others failures? How and why do these evaluations about the efficacy of leaders shift over time? More information can be found on the Leadership Studies site.