What’s new in the fourth edition? Much has happened on the world scene over the past 18 years in international relations, politics, psychology, science, and technology, which is reflected in the leadership and leadership research that have appeared during these years. Increasingly, imaginative leadership is required. Globalization, climate change, and a single superpower, the United States, have become salient issues, along with the expansion and consolidation of the European Union. China and India have joined Japan as major economic powers and contributors to science and technology. The Arab world and the Middle East are now major players in international political life. Militant Islamists have spawned terrorism, civil wars, and massacres like the World Trade Center catastrophe of September 11, 2001, as well as overreaction by governments, particularly that of the United States. In reaction, national security has been strengthened with some loss to individual freedom. But a successful war on Al-Qaeda, the largest and best-organized network of terrorism, has been fought, reducing the network to small splinter groups still pursuing a philosophy of terrorism but lacking a central base and stripped of the means to easily communicate or coordinate their efforts.
In the 18 years since the publication of the third edition, the study, application, and practice of leadership have burgeoned. Business, government, and nonprofit agencies, plus community, education, military, and health organizations have increasingly made leadership a core concept in meeting the challenges of the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the new millenium. There was a 100% increase in leadership research and applications in the United States and a 300% increase in management consultants during this period. Academic courses and curricula on leadership proliferated. In 1990, the same year that the third edition of the Handbook of Leadership appeared, the Leadership Quarterly was first published, followed over the next 10 years by almost 200 new articles. Also new during the 1990s were the Journal of Leadership Studies and other new sources on leadership research, applications, and practice. The domination in leadership research and theory by the United States and Britain has changed, spawned by a growing diversity of publications from Holland, Sweden, Spain, and Russia. Japan, China, Korea, Singapore, and India have become other rich sources, along with Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.
The subject index of the fourth edition reflects the emergence of new terms and concepts, some likely to be fads but others likely to survive as important innovations. Cognitive models of leadership have become as important as behavioral ones. Personal traits of leadership are back in vogue, bolstered by innovations in genetics. Leaders are both born and made. But situational differences remain of consequence. The “new leadership” of vision and transformation has become as important to leadership as the conception of leadership as an exchange of reward for following the leader. Also new are concentrations on strategic and virtual leadership.
In the last quarter of the twentieth century we saw a rise of interest in the charisma of those in everyday affairs and leadership positions join the interest in world-class figures, politicians, and CEOs. There was a spin-off and application to transformational, visionary, and value-based leadership. Empirical work was greatly expanded as a consequence of Robert House’s 1976 theory of charisma and James Burns’s 1978 exposition on transformational leadership.
Ralph Stogdill conceived the Handbook of Leadership and published its first edition in 1978. Soon after, he asked me to collaborate on the second edition but died before the work could begin. I carried on alone with the second edition, published in 1981 as the Stogdill’s Handbook of Leadership and the third edition in 1990, published as the Bass & Stogdill Handbook of Leadership. This fourth edition still includes some of Ralph’s work in two of its 36 chapters. In the final preparation, my wife, Ruth Bass, assisted editorially and applied her skills at research and use of the computer.
Illustrating the new developments are three new chapters added to the Handbook. Chapter 9 is dedicated to the ethics of leadership. Chapter 22 deals with transformational leadership. Chapter 24 focuses on strategic and executive leadership. In the same way, in addition to the updated chapters, many new sections address topics like heritability, accountability, authenticity, and virtual leadership. At the same time, space limitations required some reduction in pre-1990 content and details, but generally theories, conclusions, comments, and citations from the earlier literature have been maintained in the text and endnotes. Reflecting the changes in leadership research over the years, the fourth edition proportionally involves fewer short-term studies of leaders and follower relations at the micro level. More is presented at the macro level, of leaders as senior executives and heads of organizations, and the meta level of leaders of societies. Here, more effort has been made to include findings from political science, sociology, and history. As in the third edition, I have included content from prepublished and unpublished manuscripts and an increased number of paper presentations, especially from the annual meetings of the Academy of Management and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. Books used tend to be limited to those that have some research base and are not just anecdotal accounts.
Most compendiums on leadership like the Encyclopedia of Leadership (2004) are collections of essays from many authors selected by the editors. These have the advantage of having been prepared and published quickly; they present many different points of view. They are disadvantaged, however, by duplication and a lack of integration. The Handbook of Leadership has a single author, who hopefully has avoided duplication, included a sufficient number of alternative points of view, and provided a continuing integration of the literature. Unfortunately, much more time has been required for data collection, review, and writing.
The third edition, published in 1990, was handwritten, then typed and printed as galley pages and eventually page proofs. This fourth edition was written more efficiently on a personal computer. The file was sent to the publisher on CDs to provide the page proofs for publication.
The fourth edition of 36 chapters is in nine parts. In Part I, the Handbook expands the beginning chapters from the previous editions, addressing the history, definitions, and concepts of leadership. These are followed by taxonomies, theories, models, and methods of leadership research. In Part II, the Handbook takes up the personal traits of consequence to leadership, including activity level, authoritarianism, orientation to power, and Machiavellianism. Part II concludes with an examination of the values and ethics of leaders along with their feelings of self-esteem and well-being.
Part III deals with the externalities that affect the personal performance of a leader. These involve the leader’s accorded status and power. How the power is distributed, how conflicts are resolved, and the leader’s authority, accountability, and responsibility are considered. The leader’s use of reinforcement in the instrumental exchange with followers and the follower’s impact on the exchange conclude Part III.
Part IV reviews the alternative styles of leadership and their effects on individual, team, organizational, and societal performance.
Part V is about the “new leadership” of charisma and transformational leadership. Managerial work and executive and strategic leadership begin Part VI. Situational conditions that affect the manager and leader follow. They include the impact of the environment and organization, the immediate team, the task and technology, stress, physical distance and closeness, virtuality, substitutes for leadership, and the transfer of leadership and executive succession.
Part VII concentrates on women and minorities as leaders, as well as leadership across countries and cultures. Previous editions concentrated on African Americans, but the fourth edition has expanded to examine leadership among many other minorities, ranging from what has become the largest group, Hispanics, to another large group, Italian Americans, for whom less leadership literature exists.
Part VIII is concerned with development, training, and education of leaders and their assessment, appraisal, and selection.
Part IX concludes the Handbook, with extrapolation from the previous chapters of trends, likely environmental changes, and speculation about the future of leadership and leadership research.
I have used many secondary sources in my research. These include books, reviews, commentaries, technical reports, unpublished manuscripts, and theoretical papers. I also benefited from early drafts of prepublication manuscripts sent to me before a lot of the good ideas they contained were edited out in the publication process. I indicate in the references both the secondary sources and original publications from which the secondary sources are derived. Many of these references are presented in the footnotes, though they are by no means exhaustive. By 2008, there could be as many as 100 different citations of a popular research replication. I have tried to credit all the primary and secondary sources and have also included in the references some works which were not cited directly in the Handbook. The earlier seminal studies of 1950 to 1980 were not followed by numerous replication. Rather, I have tried to cover many of the meta-analyses of these replications, which continue to appear into the twentieth century.
I began collecting and reading for the fourth edition in 1989 and worked fairly steadily on the project. I never expected that it would take almost 20 years to complete. The first draft of the third edition was handwritten and took nine years to reach publication in 1990. It provided a substantial background and history of leadership research and practice, particularly from the 1940s onward; much of it is included in the fourth edition, along with additional work I found for the era. This material should help to defray the opinion that the only good leadership research is that which recently appeared. I have been privileged to contribute to the leadership literature dating back to 1946, and some of my early work is as valid and applicable today as it was then.
Bernard M. Bass