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Pelayo M. Martinez Rodriguez Miaja

Prof. Summers

EN102

21 March, 2021

Mapping the Conversation: Leadership & Time

Leadership has been a part of humanity for as far back as history goes, and like

everything else on this planet it has been modified by not only the situations it has been applied

for but it has also been altered and expounded upon by leaders to what they believed was the best

fit for their leadership. They did that to adjust it correctly according to every specific situation

that each one was going through at that point in time. In Robert Tannenbaum’s and Fred

Massarik’s article “Leadership, a Frame of reference” Tannenbaum mentions that the word leadership

has been vaguely and widely used by many great leaders with (and for) different types of jobs. This

article was written back in the 50’s meaning that their definition of leadership is almost nothing like

the definition we have in today’s world, with this article being the least recent we are guided by the

authors to realize and submerge ourselves in what it meant to be a leader during the 1950’s.

Tannenbaum later states on page three that the general definition of leadership back then was

looked at as a “process or function” instead of describing it as an exclusive quality or even a

“prescribed role.”

When placed side to side with Arthur Jago’s article (Leadership: Perspectives in Theory

and Research), which was released two decades later, we can clearly see that the “real” definition

of leadership changed drastically over the course of twenty years. Jago declared his definition of

leadership as being both a process and a property that certain people acquire naturally and some

others have to learn how be a leader later in their lives. In his article about connectivism and
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leadership published on January 2020, Frederique Corbett decides to explore further into

leadership by mentioning some of the many leadership principles that leaders are expected to

have; going back to Tannenbaum’s article, he mentions leadership traits which are somewhat

similar and just as important to a leader. Also in that same article, Fred Massarik compares his

definition of leadership to the “Ohio State paradigm for the study of leadership” stating that his

definition is a mixture of three other definitions from that text. One of those three definitions

(1B) states that a leader is clearly the one who exercises beneficial influence acts upon other

people that might be following him/her (pg#11), this definition is really close to what Jago used

as an example of a leader on page 328 of his article where he proceeds to describe a leader as the

person that everyone else looks at when something goes wrong.

At a very critical point on his text, Corbett compares leadership to connectivism by

describing them both as a “learning process” a statement that concurs with the other to articles’

way of relating leadership to other disciplines like for example when Massarik compared

leadership to interpersonal relationships and how it takes more than one leader to fully complete

a task, with this comparison being the polar opposite from Arthur Jago’s who decided to

compare it to a herd of sheep and their shepherd dog. To better understand Jago’s point of view

and how it differs from what both of the other articles state we have to go back to the whole

reason for this essay, taking into consideration that he wrote that text in 1982 (right in between

the other two), and with my thesis being the fact that leadership is and can’t ever be the same in

one time period as in a different one disregarding the amount of time in between the

situations/texts that I might have chosen to use for this assignment, just because context shapes

ideas.
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Another interesting factor to take into consideration is (as I stated earlier on this text) the

fact that we know when the authors wrote those articles but we cannot possibly know where they

were physically developed, meaning that even though it is simple to find out where it was

published, there is not a real and accurate way of telling where the authors first decided to write

the articles. The reason it is important to remark my previous statement is because even though

we can infer and interpret the reasons the authors had to write about leadership we cannot

specifically find out if there maybe were other reasons for them to write about leadership due to

the fact that global positioning is definitely a limiting factor and might as well be the real reason

that sparked them to do it. In the other hand, it is safe to say that even though they were written

in a different time period it is pretty easy to see that the actual definition of leadership changes

entirely but the intentions remain somewhat the same (excluding a couple minor details).

Corbett, who wrote the most recent one of the articles chosen, proceeds to mention and

incorporate the fact that learning to be a good leader in today’s “digital world” is both more

methodically complicated but also simpler to access, and if we analyze both of the articles we

can notice that there is very little to no mention of technological advances being applied towards

learning how to become a leader. The only “mention” of technology being used as a leadership

attribute is when Arthur Jago gets to his chapter on “New directions in Leadership Research” and

continues to vaguely mention the employment of some digital aiding that people in today’s world

have access to, making it easier to gather researching materials.

After reading, analyzing, and comparing all three articles I am able to state that even with

leadership being a discipline as well as a quality instead of just being something as simple as a

trait. After reading the articles I was also able to realize that although the authors of each article

wrote each one with a different purpose it is very easy to intertwine and compare them to each
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other by simply stripping most of the irrelevant information and shaving each article down to its

core, which is when it is very easy to tell how and why each one of the definitions of leadership

are different but also alike by comparing every single factor that need to be taken into

consideration in order to dictate whether or not the articles are actually related to each other.

In conclusion, leadership has changed a lot in the last couple of decades and it will

continue to morph as time keeps progressing but the general idea and the principle of what a

leader should be like remained the exact same through the several time periods I chose my

articles from. It is also easy to assume that even though all three authors approached the topic in

a very unique way, they wrote articles from which an aspiring leader can get a mixture of a little

bit of everything and as a result of that I believe that in the near and foreseeable future most

leaders will act effectively and use more resent texts to learn the necessary skills to be a leader.

Works Cited Page

- Corbett, Frederique, and Elio Spinello. “Connectivism and Leadership: Harnessing a

Learning Theory for the Digital Age to Redefine Leadership in the Twenty-First

Century.” Heliyon, Elsevier, 20 Jan. 2020,

www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405844020300955?via%3Dihub.

This article’s main focus inclines towards connectivism rather than leadership for the first

couple paragraphs. When they introduce leadership into the article the authors chose to

explain how to “learn leadership” right before actually making any connection, which

gives the reader a quick “background” on leadership so that the audience understands

where the argument comes from and where they want to go with that information.
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According to the research I did on Frederique Corbett, he graduated and obtained his

higher education credentials from the graduated school of education & psychology at

Pepperdine University in California just like Elio Spinello, so it is clear to assume that

most if not all of the information provided to us by them is reliable.

- Jago, Arthur G. “Leadership: Perspectives in Theory and Research.” Management Science,

vol. 28, no. 3, 1982, pp. 315–336. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2630884. Accessed 26 Mar.

2021.

Compared to the article above, this article jumps straight into what leadership actually is

and what it takes to become a leader; from leadership skills to leadership principles, it is

all covered by the author in this text (which was the original intent of this essay). When it

comes to qualifications, Arthur G. Jago has all the needed ones, he graduated from the

University of Missouri (Mizzou), where he also got his PhD, and where he also got a job

at the Department of Management after he graduated. So it is right to assume that his

work is reliable.

- Tannenbaum, Robert, and Fred Massarik. “Leadership: A Frame of

Reference.” Management Science, vol. 4, no[[. 1, 1957, pp. 1–19. JSTOR,

www.jstor.org/stable/2627261. Accessed 26 Mar. 2021

When Tannenbaum and Massarik go into the whole leadership topic in the article they

handled the subject in a very organized way, they covered all the way from historical

views to the dynamics of leadership itself. They were both pretty clear about how

leadership is one of the most important (if not the most important) skills that anyone can

have. Robert Tannenbaum’s credentials come from his degree and also his job as a

professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, as well as an organizational

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psychologist on his own time. I could not find much on Fred Massarik’s credentials but it

is simple to assume that they were somewhat the same as Tannenbaum’s because not

only did they mention studying together in college but they have several articles as well

as a book together. The thing that caught my eye while reading their text is that their

point of view on leadership leans more towards the “technical” side rather than the

applicational point of view, which paints a better picture for the audience to relate to.