Followership

Abstract

Identifying oneself as a follower is not as popular as choosing to be a leader. The term leadership, for most people, depicts an influencing role, which is responsible for the accomplishment of the pursued goals. But how is it that leaders produce such good results, if not with the support and effort of their followers. That realization led to new researches, which focus on the concept of followership as a directly affecting and affected by leadership role.

After the definition of some basic concepts mentioned in the article, there are presented the three more influential models in the theory of followership, Kelley's,Chaleff's and Kellerman's, and styles of followers that they determine. A comparison of these models is then made to show the focus areas of each one of them and the differentiation in their approaches.

Having distinguished various types of followers, the characteristics of the effective follower are being described as they are mentioned in relevant bibliography, containing independent and critical thinking, the level of engagement, self-reliance and courage to participate in transformations.

Next, there are presented the influences of followership and its qualities on management and the significance they have in achieving high standards.

Subsequently using tools from general management that apply to project management, an attempt is made to provide managers with techniques that can develop effective followership within a project and allow them to reap the fruits of high performing groups.

Finally, a few limitations are mentioned that are related to the fairly theoretical nature of followership, the short period and changing form of a project’s implementation, as well as the unavailability, for different reasons, of the wanted workforce.

Background

Definitions

A few basic definitions are being given in this section, to introduce terms used throughout the article.

There are displayed two definitions for followership, among the various that can be found in bibliography.

• Followership is the willingness to cooperate in working toward the accomplishment of the mission, to demonstrate a high degree of teamwork and to build cohesion among the organization members. .

• Followership can be defined as “the characteristics, behaviors, and processes of individuals acting in relation to leaders [11]

Leadership is the process by which a person exerts influence over other people and inspires, motivates, and directs their activities to help achieve group or organizational goals..

Leader-Member relations is the extent to which followers like, trust, and are loyal to their leader; a determinant of how favorable a situation is for leading.