From Leadership to Leading-ship: A Personal Responsibility Model for Organising Work
We find the first examples of the conceptualisation of ‘leading’ in the late 19th century. During this period of industrialisation, the ‘leader-centred’ model emerged on the workplace stage, and was referred to as ‘leadership’. The term ‘leadership’ was then adopted into common usage and incorporated into the English language. The core element in leadership was the concept of command and control between leaders and followers. The leader should lead and followers should be led. This autocratic line of force was strictly based on a downward relationship between master and servant, and was characterised by a culture of domination, obedience and subservience from top to bottom. During the post-industrial period of the 20th century, numerous subsidiary leadership theories emerged, and books on leadership became popular. One such was the enormously influential Scientific Management by Fredrik Taylor (1911). In the years that followed, the concept of leadership was further developed and interpreted.
