Leadreship

aCAN LEADERSHIP BE TAUGHT?

PERSPECTIVES FROM MANAGEMENT EDUCATORS∗

Interview and Commentary

Submitted to

Essay, Dialogue, and Interview Section

Academy of Management Learning and Education

Jonathan P. Doh

Department of Management

College of Commerce and Finance

Villanova University

800 Lancaster Ave

Villanova, PA 19085

610-519-7798

jonathan.doh@villanova.edu

What makes a leader? Can management education contribute to leadership development?

More than knowledge, leaders need character. Values and ethics are vitally important. The basics of leadership can be taught. What is desperately needed is more responsible leadership -- a new ethic to confront the challenges of our day. Oscar Arias 1

Leadership is an increasingly ubiquitous subject in business school curriculum, a theme of popular business books, and a topic for academic and practitioner research.2 Leadership research has blossomed: it is now a primary focus of great bodies of scholarly and practitioner research and the domain of more than a dozen journals. Concurrently, there has been a proliferation of undergraduate, graduate, and executive management institutes, programs, and courses directed toward training future leaders and/or improving leadership skills. Historically, there has been debate over whether leadership is a skill, trait, or behavior. 3 Although most management educators now agree that leadership is both a skill and a behavior that exhibits that skill, this dual definition has generated additional disagreement over whether leadership can be taught.4 That question is the primary focus of this forum.

In order to provide initial observations regarding the question of whether leadership can be taught, and to explore the subsidiary issues of the potential effectiveness of leadership education, particularly within U.S. business schools, I interviewed leading management scholars involved in leadership research, education, and development. I chose...