The Boss Level

Time, space, attention, and money are always strictly limited, and everyone’s values, interests, and appetites can never be fully reconciled. Inequality and conflict are at the heart of social experience. In the contemporary scholarship on leadership, there is often an emphasis on the ways that the leadership relationship leads to the explicit empowerment of followers. In political contexts, empowerment is a central feature of democratic systems. Increasingly, however, the meaning of the word has broadened. It now refers as well to the ways that leaders seek to place more decision-making authority and responsibility in the hands of individuals and teams throughout the organization. These comments on empowerment make explicit an important theme about authority that has substantial implications for the exercise of leadership in institutions of higher learning. Invariably, changing circumstances or the leader’s chosen directions will stir up resistance and engender conflicting interests among some constituents, which reveals another defining characteristic of leadership. They use symbols and metaphors and tell stories of identity and aspiration to construct a shared paradigm.