Abstract

Leadership is one of the most widely researched and dis-cussed topics in all areas of organizational sciences because literally nothing gets accomplished without it. Leadership may be formal, occurring at all levels of management and not just at the top; and it may be informal and emergent, not solely bestowed by title or position. The purpose here is to selectively review, summarize, and integrate some of this past and current work on leadership and to speculate about the future of leadership research. To accomplish this goal, three very broad time periods—called the past (antiquity to about 1900), the present (1900 to 2012), and the future (2012-2025) here—are considered in the leadership research realm. “Past”: Antiquity to Circa 1900 The key defining element of the “past ” here is that, for