A Fresh Look at Followership IBAM（重新审视追随,以及）.pdfVIP

A Fresh Look at Followership: A Model for Matching Followership and Leadership Styles Kent Bjugstad Comcast Spotlight Elizabeth C. Thach, Karen J. Thompson, and Alan Morris Sonoma State University ABSTRACT Followership has been an understudied topic in the academic literature and an underappreciated topic among practitioners. Although it has always been important, the study of followership has become even more crucial with the advent of the information age and dramatic changes in the workplace. This paper provides a fresh look at followership by providing a synthesis of the literature and presents a new model for matching followership styles to leadership styles. The model’s practical value lies in its usefulness for describing how leaders can best work with followers, and how followers can best work with leaders. Introduction Followership has been an understudied discipline. As far back as 1933, management scholar Mary Parker Follett advocated more research into a topic that she stated was “of the utmost importance, but which has been far too little considered, and that’s the part of followers…” (1949, p. 41). The lack of attention in researching followers has changed little since Follett delivered her call to arms over 70 years ago. While some scholars are beginning to look more closely at followership, this trend is less evident in the mainstream business world. A book search on the A website revealed 95,220 titles devoted to leadership (Bjugstad, 2004). Bjugstad’s search on followership found just 792 titles, and the majority of those books focused on either spiritual or political followership. Overall, the ratio of leadership to followership books was 1