Customer Reviews

The New Psychology of Leadership: Identity, Influence and Power

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This book clarified many different concepts, using examples to help explain otherwise abstract ideas or theories about leadership. I think this book easily could have rambled on or lost the reader with much too similar chapters and ideas. However, I found that each chapter focused on an idea that was broad enough to offer several different examples, yet still narrow enough for the reader to feel as if they are gaining insight on one specific theory or idea about leadership. I thought the authors did an excellent job of presenting various points of views or arguments in regards to what makes a leader successful. They spoke about the agency of both the person is power (the leader) as well as the followers, which was interesting since most times you only hear an analysis of the leader as a person with excellent persuasive and/or manipulating skills. They touched on the importance of context when a person steps into power, which reminded me the Rhetorical Situation by Lloyd Blitzer in which he speaks of the "exigence" as being something that is requires action and has the ability to be improved or fixed. They used the example of Hitler, who we often hear about as one of the most influential and powerful leaders in history. It was different and interesting to read about the weight that social factors played in WWII regardless of who would have been in power. One of the my favorite parts of the book, however, was when they discussed how a leader can actually shape the reality of a person. I felt this was where they psychology factor became most prevalent. Psychologically we have a need to feel in control, which is obviously realistically impossible in many situations. Therefore, we trust that our leader has control of the situations surrounding us, which allows us to feel at ease. Overall, I think many people could benefit from reading this book because understanding leadership really is important for anyone regardless of location, occupation, interests, etc.

This book pretends to analyze the leadership qualities that we are seeing in business, government and otber institutions. I have to say that it's very idealistic and optimistic but not a realistic look at how "leaders" actually operate. In fact real business "leaders" break every damn rule in this book and would frankly burn it gleefully for fun. This occurred to me as I read Drucker's comment about "I" should never be used. Frankly this is astonishing as anyone who has worked in a real company in a real job knows that this is just not how it works. It's all about "me" - when they say "we" they mean "me" - there is no team except maybe the guy's golfing buddies.

What would be useful is for these psychologists to study why nepotism, despotism, abuse, intimidation, cronyism, etc all rule in the business world. I would be interested to read why "leaders" are not leaders at all but are all self obsessed, lying, cheating, ignorant fools who line their own pockets and are paid big money to wreck companies, wreck the lives of other workers, make stupid decisions and force others to agree and not say anything but "YES" all the time. I really think that we need to understand this aspect of "leadership" - what in their childhood makes them so abusive, irrational, and well paid? I have personally observed that what gets these people up the ladder is not how much they know or contribute but how abusive they are, how much can they cuss you out, make you look like a fool, how ridiculous and silly their "decisions" are, etc. No wonder why business in the US is in decline and should collapse except for government funding. Things will never change unless there is a major collapse and this time the government does not bail them out.