Transformation of Leadership Through Formation of the Sociocultural Clusters

Abstract

The search for the leader’s inherent qualities is ongoing for centuries. The problem of what it means to be a leader, or what is the implication and essence of leadership, was set by many philosophers from Plato to Hegel and Nietzsche. Mostly, the answer was that the leadership is a set of individual characteristics of a person that brings about the realization of an important agenda for the society as a whole. In the nineteenth century, many authors turned to the leadership research by juxtaposing the leader and the crowd and trying to find the relevant explanation. In the late 1940s and the early 1950s, numerous evaluations of earlier theories came to the conclusion of necessity to develop a new approach to the leadership problem. Main reasons for the revision were related to the fact that the basic qualities and behavior of leaders turned out to be a peculiar function which is difficult to spot in the reality. New theories shifted their focus from individual qualities of the leaders toward their behavior that brings about the success in occupying a leading position. Development of social relations and new communicative practices had even bigger significance for the transformation of the idea of leadership, being increasingly understood from the standpoint of the network paradigm. Substantial decentralization and self-organization of clusters as the network components is another distinctive feature of social nets. Since the culture nowadays develops within information-and-network principles, the necessity to rethink the very idea of leadership as well as the functions and goals of the leader’s behavior is a current social demand.