Toward a Conceptual Framework for Leadership Inquiry

This article offers a critical examination of academic work in the area of leadership over the past several decades, arguing that the lack of conceptual clarity in the field hinders practitioners’ efforts to discriminate among competing theoretical perspectives. In an effort to address this problem, as well as to reflect on the rich history of the field, several notable reviews and compendia of leadership literature are considered with a view towards examining the strengths and weaknesses of existing schemes for categorizing and classifying scholarly approaches to leadership. The article concludes with a brief description of an original conceptual framework for leadership inquiry, and suggests how such a framework might be used to identify, describe and possibly integrate persistent conceptual similarities and differences across distinct theoretical perspectives.