The History & The System

Part 2/5 of the Power Dynamics Series

As you learn and elevate your leadership knowledge, the stages of leadership theory may seem to come very naturally and without much evolution. They may even feel extraordinarily severed from practice. However, as you may have already come to suspect, leadership theory is inextricably linked with the state of the world, even if it’s primarily discussed in artificial environments.

To level set, we can think of leadership in a typical role-based definition. Leadership is when a person becomes a leader by acquiring a role or a position. Artificial environments will accordingly be the environments in which these roles are awarded, created spaces with positioned fixtures of authority like a workplace or a school. It is in these environments and this definition of leaders that leadership knowledge feels the most divorced from practice, and in fact, it is intentional.

The Trending Polarization of The West

I doubt anyone will disagree that we live in a polarized world. Disagreements can be held over the smallest things, and misinformation and propaganda deal large blows with the aid of an ever increasing technological presence in our lives. We are seeing more convenience, less of our peers, and ultimately, less internal conflict that would allow us to fine tune our beliefs and behaviors.

Many things are to blame for this, but Lewandowsky et al. (2017) puts it rather clearly in a thrilling and demoralizing 13 pages detailing an argument that encourages the reader to move away from the traditional notion that the world is fraught with misinformation and toward the idea that individuals are developing their own alternative epistemic reality. The authors argue that societal mega-trends—including the decline of socialization, income, and trust and the rise of polarization and fractionated media—are contributing to a post-truth world in which truth is unknowable and fringe ideas are moving into the foreground of conversation, whether they have anything to back them up or not.

These individual epistemic realities are maintained through a variety of factors. For one, if you do not engage in (productive) dialogue with those you disagree with, you are unlikely to dissect your beliefs. This is highly encouraged by creating ideological bubbles, funneling everyone into an individualized algorithm, and having reasonable cause to not disbelieve your own beliefs.

After they lay out their former argument, Lewandowsky et al. proposes that these post-truth politics and the agenda underlying the perpetuation of bullshit claims will subside when it loses its effectiveness, as it may if individuals understand that there are underlying political objectives and realize that there are discrepancies between political propaganda and actual outcomes. This is very in line with what Levine (2014) discussed in his layout of the Truth Default Theory, in that communication context and motive and communication coherence are all information used to assess deceit, but this is only once a suspicion threshold is crossed.

What happens when a suspicion threshold is never crossed?

Un-truths are internalized. Beliefs go unchallenged. Trends move on unobserved.

Such is the case with the ‘Rise in Leadership’ theory since 1980. Before 1980, leadership theory, papers, and discussions were few and far between. Then, in the span between 1980 and 2000, there was sudden and astronomical interest. Why?

Christian Monö, a prominent followership theorist, argues a parallel point to Lewandowsky et al. in his book ‘Why We Follow’. He purports that there, “are three key factors that seem to have played a central role in putting the spotlight on leadership:

• The shift from an industrial economy to a service economy

• The rise of individualism

• The intense wave of privatizations” (37).

It is now when we can begin to draw even more distinct connections between the rise of leadership and the increase in fractionalization of our general populace.

A Changing Workforce - The Decline of Income

Common parlance throughout Corporate America is “doing more with less.” Each year, or perhaps more frequently, teams are asked to work with the same or reduced capital while they work toward higher and higher blue chips. Granted, while cost can be offset by efficient workarounds, trimming excess products and tools, and consolidating workflows, any team beset by this expectation understands that this can be a tall order.

Enter: the delicate act of ‘motivating’ your team. Around the same timeline established above, people began phasing out more harsh terms and phrasing. It became unpopular to general management to say things like the common worker is lazy and needs to be controlled, and became more popular to say the follower needs to be motivated.

Why might followers need motivation? One possible explanation is to do things they don’t want to do for a reward they don’t deem fair or equitable in response. Doing more than agreed upon for less than agreed upon.

While these paths converged, those of leadership and management, leadership scholars searched for ways to differentiate these two ‘classes.’ It was important to maintain distance between them. So far, most diversifying factors come down to a skill in motivating. A leader sees the forest for the trees and is able to help everyone see the long-term vision, while a manager focuses on short-term goals and narrows in on small pieces.

This begins to explain one factor of the changing power dynamics in leadership. Although an attempt was made to diversify leaders and managers, leadership theory is now focused on how to motivate followers in workplaces.

A Cultural Spin - Individualism

Since 1980, globalization has reshaped our workplaces. But a troubling trend persists: many articles and studies on cultural differences in leadership read like manuals for managing cultures rather than understanding them. For now, let’s set that bias aside and focus on the broader implications of individualism in leadership.

A popular leadership theory, and harkened as one of the most comprehensive studies of cultural values on leadership in the workplace, is the Cultural Dimensions Framework by Geert Hofsted. It details sliding scales along 5 dimensions: Power, Identity, Gender, Uncertainty, and Time. In short, these dimensions are quantified with:

1. Power: The degree to which people accept inequality in power distribution and the types of rules that dictate the relationships individuals can have with one another.

2. Identity: The balance of attention between individual and group needs and interests.

3. Masculinity vs. femininity (Gender Norms): The distribution of roles between genders and a cultural tendency toward reinforcing masculine and feminine gender stereotypes.

4. Risk avoidance: The level of tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty.

5. Time: The focus on future, long-term rewards versus short-term gratification.

A common application of this framework is the distinction between high-context and low-context cultures:

• High-context cultures rely on implicit understanding, trust, and relationships to convey meaning.

• Low-context cultures are direct, explicit, and solution-oriented.

The U.S. often exemplifies a low-context, high-uncertainty-avoidance culture, where individualism reigns and hierarchies emphasize self-reliance.

In Western individualism, power is tightly controlled—and often misunderstood. Take laissez-faire leadership, which minimizes power inequality but is frequently dismissed as “lazy leadership.” Here’s the irony: in a society that champions free will, autonomy isn’t given—it’s taken through exertion of power over others.

Less Risk Tolerance - Privatization and Socialization

Although hierarchies are typically viewed as a pyramid and as a relatively robust structure, Monö illustrates that the way hierarchies work is actually inverted. A workplace can face enormous disruption if higher-level leadership makes significant moves. Likewise, their say-so will drastically change the direction of the company.

Despite this, workplaces are able to go through change in leadership with some amount of stability. How? Privatization. Transferring a company from public to private ownership, or deregulating a heavily regulated industry, can help support risk management of these companies. Each decision can be bankrolled by someone else, and consequently, riskier decisions can be made without fear that the whole thing will come crumbling down. It’s something of a stabilizing scaffold on an inverted pyramid.

Privatization acts as a stabilizing scaffold for the inverted pyramid:

• It shifts risk from the public to private owners, enabling riskier decisions without catastrophic consequences.

• It reduces the number of players, tightens control, and—when monopolies form—limits competition.

The result? Fragmented industries, illusory choices, and a media landscape that profits from isolation rather than connection.

The Consequence: Leadership is viewed as Fix, not a Force.

This cultural shift has redefined leadership in our daily lives:

• Leadership is now something to fix—a tool to reinforce company culture rather than guide collective action.

• Larger societal trends have divorced leadership from everyday actions and shoehorned it into artificial environments where leadership is used to motivate rather than truly lead.

• It has become the lens in which we view the world and the power dynamics in our relationships. We are viewing workplaces with leader-shaded glasses.

This is how we arrived at leadership as we know it today: a shadow of its potential, reduced to a tool for control rather than a force for collective good. But it doesn’t have to be this way. The next step isn’t to reject individualism or hierarchy—it’s to redefine them. In our next article, we’ll break down how the conflation of leadership and management has warped our systems, and what it truly takes to lead—not just manage—in an individualistic world.